In the late forties and fifties, when men and women had returned from war, babies boomed. The boomers were born in free NHS hospitals. Secondary education had been improved for them. Fees in the grammar schools had been abolished. There were jobs and apprenticeships for school-leavers. A few went to college free of tuition fees and with a healthy maintenance grant. The austerity of the post-war years slowly passed and rationing was abolished. Peace was maintained by a nuclear standoff between Soviet Russia and the Western powers. The boomers were lucky. Now they are retired, many on index linked pensions.
I was born in the thirties. I lived through the War. As a child, I vividly remember sheltering under the staircase at my home in Llangollen, listening to the rhythmic growl of German bombers passing overhead towards Liverpool. I heard bombs falling on a decoy airstrip in the mountains nearby. Britain standing alone meant dangerous isolation.
Later, there were Americans camped in the town. Free French forces were stationed near my school. Polish airmen were training on Spitfires at Borras nearby. There were detachments of Indian troops. Planes of many countries marked with the three white stripes for D Day, flew overhead. A huge combined effort of free peoples won the war.
But Europe was in ruins. Britain helped them rebuild and get back on their feet. When in 1951, France and West Germany got together to form the European Coal and Steel Community to integrate their coal and steel industries, the British initially stood off: “we beat them, why on earth should we join them?” The boomers grew up with the world map marked with red swathes of the British Empire. Brits were unstoppable.
Other countries like Italy, Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg, all scarred by war, saw the advantages of co-operation and joined up to the European Common Market. By the sixties, when Britain realised the growing power and prosperity of the new Europe and saw our dominions and colonies break away to seek their own independent destiny, there were some feelings of resentment. It turned to anger when De Gaulle in 1967 issued “Le Grand Non” and vetoed our tentative attempts to sign up ourselves. The public mood was “How dare he? We rescued them all.”
Britain was finally allowed to join the club in 1973. In the 1975 referendum, the swinging boomers were uninterested in voting – 38% of the boomers, 18 – 25, failed to vote, a higher proportion than any other age bracket. They were busy being turned on, tuned in and dropping out. The referendum was carried overwhelmingly by the age group that had fought, had endured, and had suffered post-war austerity. It was they who welcomed a prosperous Europe at peace.
But that generation has largely gone. Now, if the opinion polls are anywhere near right, the boomers, the 55+ cohort, do want to vote and a majority seem to want to vote Leave. One gave as his reason the other day “My father fought in the war”. That’s rather odd, when you think about it. Why fight for peace and abandon the very organisation which has kept us in peace and growing prosperity? Why strive to save Europe and then drift away into isolation?
Young people in today’s Britain feel European. They enjoy the excitement of travel, the chance of new horizons, the possibility of good jobs in a community of 500 million people. It is their future. Why would you stand in their way?
* Martin Thomas is a Liberal Democrat member of the House of Lords and the party's Shadow Attorney General
40 Comments
“The boomers were born in free NHS hospitals. Secondary education had been improved for them. Fees in the grammar schools had been abolished. There were jobs and apprenticeships for school-leavers. A few went to college free of tuition fees and with a healthy maintenance grant.”
The good old days.
Yes, there were good things happening despite all the problems. We had a government determined to change things for the benefit of the mass of the people and not the privileged few. The so called economic liberals were nowhere to be seen and a whole generation benefited from it.
David Raw 10th Jun ’16 – 1:55pm…
Hear, hear! A government, in a country ravaged by war, and to all intents and purposes ‘broke’, embarked on a massive house building programme that put every government since the 1960s to shame…
“Why fight for peace and abandon the very organisation which has kept us in peace”
So the peace had nothing to do with NATO or the nuclear deterrent. What about the fact that Germany – until fairly recently – was home to 100,000’s American, British and French troops, even now there are massive USAF base’s all over Europe. The EU may have been responsible for many good things, but compared to NATO their influence on keeping the peace has been tiny.
Nostalgia is a dangerous disease & the main driver for Brexit. A balanced assesment of the past would be a lot more complex than the 3 comments before me. Lots of Housing was built but lots was demolished, the net gains were not that great. It might well have been better to spend the same money on repairing the stock we had. The past is unchangeable & we can waste the present continually trying to reinterpret whats gone. Lets look forward instead.
aul barker 10th Jun ’16 – 2:38pm……………Lots of Housing was built but lots was demolished, the net gains were not that great. It might well have been better to spend the same money on repairing the stock we had………
Really? I’d like to see your basis of that fact… Roughly 2 million houses were destroyed in WW2 and many, many left were ‘two up; two down’ terraces with outside toilets and no bathrooms… Between 1945-1970 new house building averaged about 250,000 pa with almost half ‘council homes’…
@ Paul Barker
I suspect I may have an advantage over you in that I lived through that era and remember the mood my Mum & Dad had after six years of Dad risking his life and Mum living on her nerves hoping he was OK. I remember going in an air raid shelter during a raid.
They wanted a better world than the one before the war when there were hunger marches from Jarrow and Mum lost two little brothers because there was no NHS.
Attlee took the Liberal Beveridge’s plans and the Liberal Keynes’ economics and built a better world where I, and many others, became the first member of my family to get a free university education and where my life was saved five years ago by the NHS. There was no sign of any economic liberal anywhere near at the time I went to University thank goodness.
Malc wrote:
“The EU may have been responsible for many good things, but compared to NATO their influence on keeping the peace has been tiny.”
I disagree. The two world wars of the last century were caused by protectionism. They were disputes between those nations that had access to world markets (Britain, France, the USA) and the ones that did not (Germany and Japan). The EU, by eliminating protectionism within Europe, has removed the risk of war far more effectively than the presence of American troops.
Older people being more in favour of “leave” than younger people is a bit more complicated than the media like to present. In 1975, two-thirds of those who voted chose to remain. Most of them will now be in the upper age bracket, and a majority will probably vote to leave in a fortnight’s time.
What has changed?
Well, firstly, the relentless drip, drip drip of propaganda from the Murdoch and Rothermere press.
But there is more.
In 1975, the Tories were overwhelmingly pro-EEC (as it then was), and that did not change until the Single European Act and Maastricht. The Labour Party, by contrast, and in particular the Labour left, was overwhelmingly anti-EEC because EEC rules did not permit the establishment of a socialist economic system.
Today, the Labour Party has recognised, perhaps reluctantly, that socialism will never come. They are happy, therefore, to accept the employment rights that Europe has imposed on successive UK governments, from the Single European Act onwards, and which the Tories would desperately love to extinguish.
The Tories, as we know, are split.
The Leave campaign is run by a bunch of reckless right-wing headbangers who are determined, whatever the cost, to dismantle the employment, consumer and environmental rights that Europe has given us and force the people of this country into the kind of market servitude that we see in the so-called emerging economies.
Sane Tories (like Cameron) realise that leaving would wreak a level of destruction far outweighing any benefits to unscrupulous employers. But who ever said the Tory rank-and-file was sane?
Martin, what you say has much weight, but there is an untold story here – one of infrastructure and investment.
Unfortunately, throughout the period you refer to, what rebuilding there was of infrastructure in the UK after the war was often short-termist and in some cases blighted by corruption.
In addition, as the first industrial nation, some key parts of our infrastructure were already older than that of our European counterparts in many countries.
Meanwhile many European nations of the original EC invested in, rebuilt and – crucially – maintained their housing, public sector institutions, road and railway networks (which we had in some cases bombed to a much higher extent that the Axis powers did to us) to a level beyond the UK’s wildest dreams.
On Common Market entry we were considerably behind Germany and France in particular in this regard, and Thatcherism (the dominant political ideology of the second and third decades of our membership of what became the EU) was not interested in catching up by government spending whilst Miterrand and Kohl went even further on ahead.
Blair briefly tried, but was held back by the bizarre structures, subsidies and constraints of PFI.
Unlike our European partners, Britain consistently sought post-war restructuring on the cheap.
So we have joined the EU but never invested in our infrastructure at European levels. Now we have people blaming the state of public services that we have never completely adequately resourced, on the EU and on EU immigration, as if underfunded infrasstructure and a significant demographic shift were irrelevant.
As someone who has in his working career attempted to support elderly dementia patients on hospital wards designed for a Victorian workhouse, and who lived as a student in a crumbling temporary 1960s concrete structure that had not lasted 30 years, I blame both the main parties of the past forty years and politicians on both sides of the referendum debate for their complicity in this.
Great to hear from someone who lived through the war. I reckon we are heading for brexit, but I hope not. Our fellow Europeans love us and we can solve our problems together.
Regards
I think the baby boomer premise is flawed. The UK’s most significant birth rate increase occurred in the 1960s **, so those born as “boomers” grew up (as young adults) with Thatcher, mass unemployment and the embers of the Cold War. They grew up knowing that social housing developers had built slums in the air, that most teenagers left school without any useful qualifications and they’d live a different life from Terry and June (BBC sit com).
Some of those born in the 1940s/early 1950s boom — now mostly retired, some with a bit of equity — had a rough time too. Few had the opportunity to attend university so a few more achieved success via adult education and professional development programmes. Inflation and job insecurity made it difficult for them to buy homes. About a third of them are poor; approaching the end of life, they don’t have the savings to pay for their own funerals.
It’s probably better to regard 55+ year olds as people rather than as a voting unit. And let’s just give up with this baby boomer nonsense about “privileged” generations.
** When UK citizens born in the late 1950s to late 1960s started to establish families, there was another baby boom.
The EU is only 22 years old. It began on November 1st 1993. It is not the Common Market. Free movement within the EU didn’t even start until the 2000s. Thus Peace in Europe has nothing to do with the EU which was formed after the Berlin Wall was taken down. Also both world wars were started by Germany and Germany alone. They were not a generalised conflict between random Europeans with all sides equally to blame. Personally, I think after 2 very destructive wars the chances of Germany trying to start another one were absolutely zero EU or frankly even NATO or not.
@Glenn
“Also both world wars were started by Germany and Germany alone.”
I don’t really think that is a totally fair comment regarding WW1, Austria has a lot to answer for on that issue.
Glenn,
I think you need to check some facts. Firstly, the moves towards the EU were set out quite clearly in the original Treaty of Rome which set up the EEC. Part of that was the free movement of labour and goods, the mechanisms of which were put in place by the Single European Act signed by Margaret Thatcher in 1986. The name change came about because of the closer union between the countries – nothing else changed.
The First World War was not specifically started by Germany – as any student of GCSE or National 5 History will tell you, Germany was ordered to take the blame as a result of the Treaty of Versailles when in fact it was much more complicated than that and could in fact be seen as the last of the wars which broke out across Europe throughout the 19th Century.
The EEC/EU did much more than “stop Germany” – remember, France and Britain were equally as likely to go to war as the Germans. Instead, it bound them together in a common interest. That’s why, after hundreds of years of consecutive wars in Europe, we haven’t had a major international conflict within the EU area since 1945.
PS
Also having read this article twice. Underlying it is a very cynical attempt to cast an entire generation as frivolous hippies, too busy, tuning in and dropping out (ie taking drugs ) to vote for the common market. By the way some of the people who fought in world war 2 also voted against the common market so claiming your dad or granddad fought in the war as being a reason to vote out is no odder than claiming it as a reason to vote in.
Is this what remain is reduced to? Invoking intergenerational suspicion to falsely claim an organisation that was formed in the 1990s was somehow more responsible for keeping peace than the military defeat of the aggressive actors in WWII. Japan isn’t in the EU.
There is a lot to what Paul Barker says about nostalgia being a dangerous disease. There is a generation that remembers fondly the days of Empire still, and some like Farage who don’t really understand what Empire was like but whose parents and grandparents told them how wonderful it was. Listen to Farage now, wanting to substitute the Commonwealth for the EU.
The Commonwealth is really not interested in us, other than maybe the trade access that a friendly ally inside the EU might bring, and priority access to our aid donations. Many of the members fought us for their independence. Many of them resent our past exploitation of their people and resources. The Empire was only ever a concept that worked in our interests, not for any other member, and the idea that we can somehow resurrect it as a trading bloc to replace the EU is ludicrous in the extreme. Those who took us into the EEC in the 70’s knew we had to replace what we were already losing. The Empire had gone 40 years ago, it isn’t out there patiently waiting for us to see sense and resume our role of motherland. Yet Farage and Col Blimps in the Tory and UKIP parties can still sell that lie to the naïve. There’s no queue of new trading partners waiting for us the leave so they can strike new deals with us. In fact they’re all telling us to stay.
Okay.
I admit I over simplified WWII
But these are the events.
June 28th 1914 Princip Asssinates Ferdinand
July 28th Austria-Hungary declares war on Hungry.
August 2 Germany and the Ottoman Empire sign a secret treaty
August 3 Germany declares war on France
Stevan Rose recons that :
“The Commonwealth is really not interested in us, other than maybe the trade access…”
So what’s wrong with,… just trade access?
If we want lamb, and New Zealand has lamb to offer us at a good price,.. and we want beef and Argentina has beef to ship at a competitive price,… etc, etc,… why not do those mutually beneficial trades.?
Why do liberals have this obsession,.. that we must buy a kind of EU ‘Costco Card’, for a (Net) fee of about £134 million per week,.. plus handing over our legal sovereignty to a group of unelected EU nonentities,… and why?,… just for laughs.? Trading,.. doesn’t include having to hand over the keys of your house to the EU. Can anyone explain,..what’s the downside to just mutually trading, with a world that has stuff to sell, and is eager to sell.?
After the second world war, the main things people had was hope and a believe that times would get better. During the 40’s, 50’s, 60’s and even the 70’s on the whole times did get better for the vast majority of the UK. In the 80’s some areas where devastated by the loss of heavy industry, but still for the majority of the UK times got better, up until the turn of the millennium this remained true, but since then the number of people who are looking at a declining future has increased and is now I fear in a majority. Politicians trump equality this, equal rights that, but when all that means is you all have an equal right to be treated badly it doesn’t help at all. Unless hope can be nurtured again for the majority in the UK and the Western world expect to see the rise of the Demagogue; they will offer easy solutions and blame peoples ills on someone else and they will flourish.
Kieth,
Don’t know what happened with my post. Mixture of typos and poor eyesight.
Any it should have read WWI.
July 28th 1914 Austria-Hungry declares war o Serbia
August 3 Germany declares war on France. This is swiftly followed by the German invasion of neutral Belgium and Luxemburg which brings Britain into the war.
I’ve never heard anyone seriously suggest that Britain or France would as likely have stated it than anyone else.
As for the EU stuff. I stand by it. The EU starts on November 1 1993 and it is not until 1999 that Britain starts electing MEPs. As we know it today it’s a recent development, barely over 20 years old, and a fairly unsuccessful one at that.
I found this OP deeply depressing. It is so worrying to see someone trying to set one community against another – especially when they are a member of a third community – and when those communities are ‘generations’.
This line of intercommunity strife agitation seems a replacement for class based agitation. It happens too much these days but Liberals, who have long abhored class thinking, might be expected to be the last people to resort to it.
Then when I woke this morning and saw the age breakdown in the latest ORP poll by age and realise that at 60% leave among 35 to 45 year olds it must mean that ‘boomers’ kept on miraculously being born until 1980. 😉
How is it though that the British Liberal Party, and especially its leading ‘warhorses’, have got themselves on the side of ‘the EU against the people of Europe’? Is it a case of “The people don’t agree with me, the bastards” ? http://www.pewglobal.org/2016/06/07/euroskepticism-beyond-brexit/
Not expecting this old warhorse to come out of his stable to respond to any of our comments above, favourable or otherwise, though.
Sorry, Glenn, on MEPs, we started electing them in 1979 (we sat out the elections of 1974 for some unaccountable reason, and sort of coopted them – I have heard that voices in the Civil Service said “the British wouldn’t like electing these people” or some such). The system changed to a PR based system (closed lists) in 1999, previously it had worked on groups of 7 or 8 Parliamentary constituencies electing on a first-past-the post-basis. Both Graham Watson and Robin Teverson as Lib Dems were elected on that basis in 1994.
“The swinging boomers were uninterested in voting – 38% of the boomers, 18 – 25, failed to vote, a higher proportion than any other age bracket”
But that means that 62% *did* vote. Given that the overall turnout in the 1975 referendum was 64% that is essentially average turnout and doesn’t suggest a bunch of dippy hippies uninterested in the world.
The 1975 referendum was on membership of the EEC: a tariff-free trading bloc in a world of high tariffs, and composed of countries that in aggregate were significantly more economically successful than the UK.
The 2016 referendum is on a completely different basis: The EU is a political and (mostly) monetary union of 28 disparate nations that in aggregate is considerably less economically successful than the UK.
Large parts of it are in permanent depression due to the consequences of politically-motivated adoption of the Euro.
It has over-reached itself in interfering in the sovereignty of its members – see Ambrose Evans-Pritchard’s superb critique here http://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2016/06/08/britains-defiant-judges-fight-back-against-europes-imperial-cour/.
And the self-serving actions of its ruling elites have driven its despairing citizens into voting for populist, extremist parties that offer “solutions” based on division and strife.
Would the voters of 1975 who voted for membership of the EEC be prepared to vote for the EU of today? I don’t know and neither do you. But they would certainly have recognized that the two votes were on fundamentally different bases and would have considered the choice accordingly.
Glenn
Your time-line for the start of the First World War omits the part played by Tsarist Russia, which regarded itself as the protector of Orthodox Christians everywhere. This meant that when Austria-Hungary threatened the Serbs, Russia felt bound to threaten the Austrians. Russia had ongoing tension with the Ottoman Empire, which pulled the Ottomans into the Central Powers.
The more modern European Powers, especially Germany and France, but also Austria-Hungary and Russia, had a well-established system of national service and reservists and could mobilise enormous armies in the space of a few weeks. Germany and Russia also had full plans ready to invade their major neighbours which they put into effect at the start of the war.
Europe today has governments which are much more democratic and open and less class based. Statesmen all meet each other several times a year (thanks to the EU). Aggressive nationialism and imperial pretentions are very much less evident.
‘Would the voters of 1975 who voted for membership of the EEC be prepared to vote for the EU of today? ‘
This one has already.
Paul Murray, brilliant as ever.
‘Sorry, Glenn, on MEPs, we started electing them in 1979 (we sat out the elections of 1974 for some unaccountable reason, and sort of coopted them –’
The UK’s earliest participation in the European parliament was by MEPs selected from among Westminster MPs and Peers. Ted Castle, husband of Barbara Castle, was one of them. (Barbara Castle was elected to the EP in 1979.)
paul barker
Nostalgia is a dangerous disease & the main driver for Brexit.
Indeed. Most voters who say they support Brexit seem to suppose it will return them to some 1960s golden age. It did not help at all when our then leader debating with Nigel Farage supported this misassumption, and thus helped boost Brexit and its utterly false claims.
If you wanted to return to the 1960s, you’d have to reverse Thatcherite privatisation and support of globalisation (i.e. selling off British business to foreign ownership). Given that those actually funding and leading the Brexit campaign are mostly extreme Thatcherites, that isn’t going to happen, is it? No, what these people really want is to be able to push their extremist policies even further and faster without the control of what they call EU “red tape” (i.e. some protection of human rights, environment etc which needs international agreement).
That is, people voting for Brexit are being conned into voting for what will result in the opposite of what they think they are voting for.
And the uselessness of those leading the Remain campaign is shown by its failure to get this message across.
“That is, people voting for Brexit are being conned…”
No Matthew,.. It is liberals who refuse to face up to the huge 40 year EU con trick. These are the facts, and the truth about Brexit.
No doubt I’ll get another comment flood warning.
I thought British voters only started directing MEP in 1999. Obviously I must be wron for which I apologise. I will point out that 1979 is still not at the end of WW II and nor is 1/11/94.
I missed out a lot of things in the WWI time line. It was a brief response not a history essay.
Matthew,
It depends which Leave supporters you talk to. Most of the ones I talk to don’t think you can go back the 1960s or any other era. What they do have in common is a belief that a they are not in a golden era now and it shows no sign of turning into one. In a few cases it’s actually driven more by desperation and not feeling represented. In my case it’s because I’m a small islander with no real interests in internationalism. I don’t like big political projects and I am a bit of an isolationist.
@J Dunn
Johnson and Gove will likely be in charge after Brexit. They are libertarian, free-market, turbo-capitalists who believe in having high immigration in order to serve the interests of business. People who are voting Brexit fondly imagining that there will be a large fall in immigration are just useful idiots as far as the leadership of Leave are concerned.
So AndrewR, in the first instance a Brexit under Gove/Johnson will be the EEA, which includes the four freedoms of the single market Plus the dismantling of all tarrifs by the UK ie unilateral free trade (see Tim Congdon on this here: https://thefaintofheart.wordpress.com/2016/06/07/the-brexit-consensus-bug-by-patrick-minford/
Along with the ability to make its own decisions on EU rules and legislation so making the UK Westminster Parliament sovereign again and free to maximise subsidiarity (plus consultation before EU decisions on these).
Plus the likely following of most the the EU membership outside of the core (and including France) into the same EEA option, increasing its powers of negotiation with the EU and the benefitto these countries’ economies that they can at last escape from the depressive tyranny of the Euro and the ECB and thus enjoy the kinds of economic recovery enjoyed by the UK when it came out of the ERM, thus returning the growth in their economies and that of the UK to their former trend rates of +5% in Nominal Gross Domestic Product.
And you still think that this is not a more Liberal position, a more Liberal organisation of the affairs of Europe, than the one we are presently in?
I am appalled that our Shadow Attorney General is seeking to blame post war baby boomers if the country votes leave. I am sorry that you were born during the War when life must have been truly terrible but I don’t understand why you choose to pick on my generation. I was born in 1946 as was my husband we were not born in NHS hospitals because they weren’t set up by then. My husband was born on the kitchen table after a two day labour if you really want to trade stupid comments. The people who turned down the opportunity to join France and Germany were your generation not mine but we paid the price in the 70s in spite of voting to join the Common Market. Many graduates failed to get jobs in the sixties and in the 70s economic life was pretty grim. You could say that your generation held back mine but as a Lib Dem I would hope not to make that sort of crass comment.
This article is an example of the sort of ridiculous arguments that I see being put on both sides of the in out debate but I’d hope for better from a Lib Dem. I’m an instinctive supporter of the EU because I welcome interaction between cultures and believe that no person is an island. I thought that was true of most Lib Dems but obviously it isn’t, even of someone in a position of responsibility. Some people want to dig a deeper Channel and isolate us from the rest of Europe. Others are happy to dig an even deeper channel between themselves and the next generation. I agree with neither of these isolationist attitudes.
I’m an instinctive supporter of the EU because I welcome interaction between cultures and believe that no person is an island.
A very good point, particularly given what has become increasingly important in the last few decades in business, hasn’t been your ability to lord over all that you control, but your ability to cooperate with and influence others.
Glenn
What they do have in common is a belief that a they are not in a golden era now and it shows no sign of turning into one.
Yes, and the Brexit campaign is being led by the extreme end of those who have pushed us to where we are now. They want Brexit so they can push us even further without restraint down that path. Do you honestly think the Daily Mail, THE Sun, The Times, Daily Telegraph are pushing for Brexit in order to reverse Thatcherism and the misery that it has brought on our country? No, they are controlled by the shadier end of the international extreme rich set, and they want this country to be a bolt-hole for their sort. If you read what those leading Brexit say among themselves rather than what they pump out to fool the plebs into supporting them, that is absolutely clear.
Matthew.
There is no restraint now. The point to me is that the EU does nothing to stop the march rightwards and is actually in full accord on austerity. Do you honestly think David Cameron, George Osborne and co would be fighting for remain if they thought it was in any shape or form the progressive institution some of you guys make it out to be? It’s a business club with political pretentions.
The other thing is in or out of the EU leaders still have to be elected and fight on the policies they present to the public which sets limits on what they can attempt anyway.
Glenn
In my case it’s because I’m a small islander with no real interests in internationalism. I don’t like big political projects and I am a bit of an isolationist.
Yes, and if I believed exit from the EU really would lead to that sort of little England self-control, I might be inclined to support it myself. But it won’t. Brexit is led by people who want the opposite of that.
@ Glen,
I don’t have much enthusiasm for the EU, but I do know from the sort of people who are trying to persuade the electorate to vote for ‘Leave’, that leaving the EU would be a case of, ‘out of the frying pan into the fire’.
In my opinion, Matthew is absolutely correct about that.
@ Keith Legg “The First World War was not specifically started by Germany – as any student of GCSE or National 5 History will tell you”.
If any student of GCSE or National History 5 peddled that line at University they would get short shrift from eminent First War scholars such as Fritz Fischer or Gary Sheffield.
Jayne,
It’s true some of the leave campaigners are unpleasant, But if you the history of Britain’s involvement in the EU , every major step from joining the Common Market to Maastricht at further integration has been driven by the Conservative Party and has been accompanied by deregulation, de industrialisation and the erosion of the status of paid employment. Johnson and Cameron are just two cheeks of the same backside, really.