Are you worried for the future of GB and indeed the world?

Worry is like a rocking chair- it gives you something to do but doesn't get you anywhere...

What is 'years of working at SE'. I do with people would not speak in capital letters.

Sorry - grumpy from Norfolk.

I try not to worry about anything. Worrying really is s pointless exercise.

No, I can't say that I do

No. As no point worrying about what you can't control. We all have our own everyday worries which is enough for me

think you might find the Right are the violent ones ,just as it was in the past .Most left leaning people in my experience want more equality ,they want the vulnerable and poor to be looked after an what the Labour party was founded on were the same principles as christianity.Labour left us when Blair was elected but there,s still a core support of those values.Money isn.t king /god to most of us unlike the tories both red and blue who punish the poor and give to the rich.I live in the most left leaning part of this DISunited kingdom and I,m happy my taxes help those less well off instead of the clowns in WM who have their noses firmly in the trough getting all they can.....and I include the royal parasites in that.A£45MILLION rise while the ordinary folk are using foodbanks to survive!! of course Charlie and CO use foodbanks too...as PR stunts.Turns my stomach

I think we will all survive as we have done for centuries. Things will be different and I think the average person will be poorer and have less ‘things’. I am as worried about the far left as I am about the far right because the far left tend to be more violent these days, sadly. It never used to be that way, this is a recent phenomenon.

NotSpaghetti

So, Are you worried for the future of GB and indeed the world?

Just wondering.

Of course I am.

Dinahmo I could have written your most recent post, but I also remember coping perfectly well with the power cuts and the 3 or was it 4 day week. It was particularly annoying when my office in Covent Garden suffered power cuts being in that “zone” and I’d get back to our flat in Richmond only for all the lights to go out. Life was far from perfect. News pictures of starving Biafran children reduced us to tears and there seemed no end to that conflict. My grandparents emerged blinking from behind the Berlin Wall. But hey, we coped. We coped with IRA bombs in the city, too. Perhaps in the same way that our parents or grandparents “coped” with the blitz .
The thing is, being of an age, your experience is not unique and my reaction on reading this last post is “So what?”
As for all the soul searching and breast beating about the state of the U.K./the world/the universe, perhaps Christmas is making you more reflective but you’re not the first and you won’t be the last.

Smileless2012

No, I'm not worried either; what's the point? I agree Norah it will be what it will be.

I could list worries about the future, but they will happen or not regardless of my worrying.
Present day worries are quite enough to be going on with.

I feel a bit like the OP. Maybe it is my age.
Not worried about Sharia law! or, acutely, immigration although we need to keep a handle on that in an increasingly volatile & mobile world.
I do feel sad about global warming & also I really distrust AI & drones & the "genie out of the box" that is the internet. I know I'm on it, but if I could wave a magic wand....
I feel UK is losing its way, very gradually, but like David said the rich have become richer & the poor have become poorer & that is bad for the country & no-one accepts that any more.

Only things with people I know get me down though.

So, Are you worried for the future of GB and indeed the world?

Just wondering.

NotSpaghetti

My original piece was primarily about my own life rather than a discourse about the state of the world since 1947. From my point of view it was relatively easy. I think that you must be older me since you were raising a family during the cold war.

Of course I can remember all those things and the strife of others. As a child I heard about the cold war and the Cuba crisis etc etc but, being a child they didn't mean a great deal to me.

I remember doing my homework at the kitchen table when the news of Kennedy's shooting was announced. I was 16 at the time.

When I was a child we did not have a tv until, briefly, in 1959 and then again in 1963 or 64. There were not the news channels that we have today. My father read the Telegraph. My interest as a young teen was in magazines like Honey, not in newspapers.

I started getting interested in politics when I was about 17 or 18 and I joined the YCs- suppsed to be good for meeting young people. Edward Gardner was the MP at that time. My opinions changed once I started working in London and reading a broadsheet on the commuter trains.

I remember footage of the riots in America against the Vietnam War and how appalling the police and the National Guard behaved. I also remember demonstrating in London in 1967 against that war.

The sister of one of our friends was injured by an IRA bomb going off in a pillar box near Piccadilly Circus. I remember being very watchful on the tube for bombs. The cleaners of the tube trains found bombs. Between 1972 and 1976 hundreds of IRA bombs were exploded throughout the country as well as in London.

And the list could go on but I won't bore you with it.

There was never really "peace" in my opinion - and whilst some of these impinged on my life much more than others you can't help but be aware of them and the strife of others.

There have been few periods of peace in our lifetimes.
The Middle East has often been the area with conflicts, as now.

Some of us have not forgotten the Lebanese civil war and the Beirut hostages. Hundreds of foreign nationals were killed there too.

Dinahmo lots of us are concerned about the rise of the far right, about fake stories purporting to be "news" and so on but my reply was just in response to your OP where you seemed to be saying that you thought things were better "in our day" as the negatives you outline were fairly minor - flats being rather grim and you not being able to buy a property until you were 32 for example.

I was saying that I remember times being scary and dangerous. I wasn't aware of global warming (which i think is todays biggest long term threat) but as others have said, globally there were a lot of terrible things happening.
I tried to explain that the fear during cold war was a constant hum as I raised my family. That I was very aware of the danger of allowing a hawkish USA to put weapons on our land. I was trying to say that some people have always seen danger not far away.

Biafra (where starvation was used as a weapon), Vietnam, the Cambodian Civil War (and Khmer Rouge famine),
Darfur, the Korean War, Anglo Egyptian War, the Suez crisis... let alone the "Troubles" and the Falklands - all these are relatively recent issues/wars/disasters.
There wete a fair share of "natural" disasters at home and abroad. Aberfan springs to mind and disasters caused by industry such as the Santa Barbara Disaster, the Stern factory fire (which I think was in Glasgow).

There was never really "peace" in my opinion - and whilst some of these impinged on my life much more than others you can't help but be aware of them and the strife of others.
If I've misunderstood what you were saying, please could you explain.

I think there is always something dreadful going on somewhere.
Thank you.

Pantglas2

“Not everyone was affected by the strikes. I was working in the West End during the power cuts. we worked by candle light - no laptops or desktops then, just ledgers. we used to buy bottles of whisky using our petty cash and had a camping stove to boil water. It wasn't so bad.”

That can’t be right Dinahmo! I was working my first secretarial job with electric typewriters and we had to make sure all letters were typed before the power went off each day.

This was in north Wales…they must have been used in most offices in London long before that!

It was an antiquarian book dealers. We didn't have such things as electric typewriters. I had an Olivetti add listing machine and that was it.

It was the 3 day week but, like many other businesses we continued to work through the power cuts.

I think Russia and China present a huge threat to world peace, particularly the latter spreading its tentacles far and wide by stealth. They're omnipresent in everything we buy, they're all over social media,with spies everywhere. I believe The US is banning Tik Tok, possibly there are worth while things on its platform, but it does seem to have a pernicious effect on the young, I believe what they put out to their young people is entirely different, far less dumbing down, more educational. Every damn thing we buy seems to have been manufactured in China, even John Lewis for heaven's sake umpteen Chinese manufactured goods. Soon they'll be flooding us even more with their cheap EVs. Having almost certainly given the world Covid, the general consensus now seems to be it escaped from one of their labs, we then found ourselves boosting their economy even more by buying their sub standard PPE. WHO are more or less in their pockets so expecting any impartiality from them is unlikely. Now we have Shein and Temu pushing their products here evading paying their fair share of Corporation Tax, yes they're not the first, Amazon and the rest of the big tech organisations set those standards or lack of them, they have a massive unfair advantage over small business Never mind also that Shein are completely unethical as far as how they treat their indentured slave like workforce drawn from the oppressed Uigers and other political dissidents, but then China's businesses are all state owned so the state can impose whatever they like. RR nevertheless seems to think its worth forging ahead in allowing them to trade here with impunity her Campaign Adviser helping the Shein Chief set up treasury access, and the possibility of them listing on the London Stock Exchange, something the US has rejected. Meanwhile with an eye to Taiwan they're building warships at a rate of knots. Whilst Ed Milliband is blindly forging ahead with what many consider unachievable green energy initiatives that will levy unaffordable costs on the consumer to reach net zero by 2030, simultaneously China the world's largest consumer of coal and has the most coal fired plants in the world responsible for 35% of the world's emissions, kind of negate's all of Ed's efforts, but ah yes but we have to set an example!

“Not everyone was affected by the strikes. I was working in the West End during the power cuts. we worked by candle light - no laptops or desktops then, just ledgers. we used to buy bottles of whisky using our petty cash and had a camping stove to boil water. It wasn't so bad.”

That can’t be right Dinahmo! I was working my first secretarial job with electric typewriters and we had to make sure all letters were typed before the power went off each day.

This was in north Wales…they must have been used in most offices in London long before that!

NotSpaghetti

Dinahmo I think you are maybe forgetting the conflicts - I can't even describe the anxiety I felt for my children during the cold war.
That cast an enormous shadow over my life and my continued respect for the women of Greenham Common (remember ^Women for Life on Earth) - who led the protest against having American Cruise missiles here on our soil in the UK is real and sincere.

Don't you remember the apartheid struggles in South Africa and the thousands of us that protested/boycotted/wrote letters/saw our MPs to campaign for change?
And then the wars in Afghanistan...

As I said above, I'm not forgetting those conflicts. Many of them were caused by invaders. Today, I'm more concerned with the rise of the populist right in Europe and the US.

joannapiano

I grew up in the 50’s, in a three bedroom rented house, with two families and my Nan, no bathroom and an outside toilet. Heating was one coal fire. Bullying father.
Life is so much better for my grandchildren, the girls in particular have many more opportunities.
I think the world has always had various conflicts, dating back to the Stone Age probably.

Not sure exactly when the Stone Age was but archaeologists have been unearthing structures from civilisations which existed thousands of years ago. One good example is Gobekli Tepe in Turkey which was founded 11,500 years ago. And there are many other sites in Turkey and other countries in that region and in south America. They have all disappeared.

TerriT

I can’t believe anyone can state life here was ok until 1990? They must have been in a deep sleep! We left for the USA in 1977 and couldn’t wait to go. There was endless strikes, you name the industry and it was striking. And then the miners strikes continued with all the violence. And the bombs and misery on Northern Ireland. I could go on and on. We could only stay in the USA for three years as it was a job transfer and we returned to a country that still seemed to be heading for the rocks! So no I don’t worry about my children and my grandchildren’s future here, worrying never changed anything.

Not everyone was affected by the strikes. I was working in the West End during the power cuts. we worked by candle light - no laptops or desktops then, just ledgers. we used to buy bottles of whisky using our petty cash and had a camping stove to boil water. It wasn't so bad.

Iam64 I agree with you about grammar schools.

I had the sort of brain that could work through the 11 plus papers quickly and correctly so I was lucky. My brain was also good in completing the psychometric tests when applying for a job in my early 30s. Faced with the similar tests in my early 50s I could not complete them. Brain too slow in some aspects.

However, I knew many children who should have been able to get to grammar school but couldn't deal with the tests and that is why I think that system of selection was bad.

So many things forgotten
Have we all forgotten the ‘fear of AIDS’ years, even adverts on tv about knowing who you had in your bed some people wouldn’t drink out of others cups or shake hands and people thought it would end the world ! Those theories went on for some years

I think Cariadagain has many conspiracies going on in her head I remember all her threads about lots of people stealing off her

I remember all those things but wasn't around for either of the 2 world wars, obviously. However, with modern technology, weaponry, transport methods and the internet things are very different now.

There is so much information available, much of it fake, for people to read and believe.

Cossy

As someone who WFH before, during and after lockdown, I find your “shirk” remark really patronising, offensive and inaccurate, imo, those few (not many) who did “shirk” are those who same people that when in their offices etc. “shirk” there just as much!

It's odd isn't it!

Successive governments - business and industry - have historically been demanding a more 'flexible' labour force. Where they can impose zero-hour contracts, employing multiple people because it's cheaper than employing 1 or 2 full time - even fire-and-hire at will.

And yet, when that flexibility extends in favour of WFH for employees - people are up in arms against it.

It's an inevitable progression of modern technology in the world of work.

And with jam-packed roads and motorways, diminishing public transport - expensive to boot - why would anyone logically be against WFH if it suits the employer?