My generation has ruined the world so thank goodness the kids are revolting

A recent Don McCullin exhibition brought home how shocking it is that we have failed to improve our planet

There have been many reasons to despair over recent months, far too many to count. Every week I think: “Well that’s it, we must have reached peak horrible now,” only for some new atrocity to come hurtling into our faces.

Man’s inhumanity to man – and women, dogs etc – has been well documented and the older you get, the more weary it makes you. When do we stop being so vile to each other; how many of the same lessons to we need teaching; how come we are so clever and yet so thick?

This week I went to see the genius photographer Don McCullin’s exhibition at Tate Britain.

McCullin, who is still working at a distinguished 83, is best known for being a war photographer; though it’s a label he rebuffs, insisting he doesn’t want it all to be about war. Only it is, it’s just the wars are different: some are on the battlefield, some are in our own back yards, some are simply about class.

The exhibition, which is entirely in black and white, covers McCullin’s famous photographs of conflicts around the globe, from Vietnam and Belfast to the effects of starvation and disease in Biafra and Bangladesh. These pictures are haunting and horrific but reassuringly far away.

However, it also features many photographs depicting our own country’s war against poverty, a battle it seems we continue to lose. How is it that in 2019, people with jobs are relying on food banks? How come universal credit has been allowed to fail when we surely have the brains and the technology to prevent this disaster?

Because the exhibition was in its first week, the gallery was heaving. Hundreds of people shuffled around the collection in appalled silence. I don’t think I’ve ever been in a space with so many people and felt so much collective guilt.

The photographs are brutal, a huge document of hopelessness, of normal people dragged into situations that were not of their making and suffering the consequences of religion and greed.

Much of McCullin’s work dates back to the 1970s and you can’t help feeling that surely by now things should be better.

But no, we are still being vile to each other and today’s politicians seem a particularly cruel bunch. Donald Trump continues to bang on about his wall; Theresa May is dragging us ever closer to a no-deal Brexit; Jacob Rees-Mogg seems to be suggesting concentration camps were no bad thing and accusations of antisemitism in the Labour Party refuse to go away.

A number of pictures from McCullin’s exhibition, (many of which are free to look up online) have stuck with me, not least a stark image of what I imagine could be titled “stripping in the pub”. In the photograph, a woman – naked, apart from a pair of knee-high platform boots and a G-string – bends over in front of a small group of ogling men, pint glasses in hand. Judging by the boots and the men’s shirt collars this photograph was probably taken some time in the mid-1970s.

In the bottom left hand corner of the photograph, a young woman, possibly of a similar age to the stripper, sits with her hand over her mouth, evidently disturbed and upset by the scene. She may as well be here with us now, summing up this entire extraordinary exhibition.

I don’t know why this picture resonated with me so much – possibly because pub stripping was part of my youth. When I was a drama student in Manchester in 1978-81, you’d quite often pop into a city centre pub, even at lunchtime, only to be confronted by a small podium surrounded by a throng of gimlet-eyed men. On the podium, in a blue haze of cigarette smoke, a pasty-skinned girl would be going through her paces; sometimes you could even see the tell-tale track marks of syringe use in the crooks of her arms. Meat with tits.

You don’t see much pub stripping any more, unless of course I’m looking in the wrong places. In well-heeled London, all the pubs that aren’t gastro have been converted into luxury accommodation.

But whilst on the surface we may have got rid of one peculiar social norm (and of course smoking has been banned in public places too), atrocity is like bind weed: it crops up everywhere and it comes in many guises. Poverty, violence and environmental carelessness are rampant.

Homelessness has reached epidemic proportions; a man got stabbed to death half a mile away from where I live; and we are slowly and systematically poisoning the planet. No wonder the kids are revolting.

So thank goodness for them, thank goodness for the marching kids who bunked off school and gathered in central London to demonstrate against climate change.

Good for the kids who are getting switched on to politics.

My generation have made such a pig's ear of everything, the only hope we have is that the next lot will take control and sort out some of the mess. Let’s hope so, because we can’t keep living in a world of Don McCullin pictures forever.