A broken country?

Interest rates did not peak at 15%, at least as far as mortgages were concerned. We were paying 17% in the early eighties.

I don't remember that. We paid 15% on our mortgage in the early 80's with a building society.

That was hard enough!

Yes, Eloethan it is disgraceful what has happened to the Chagossians.
But, because this is a small minority in a little known part of the world, few know about it.
I didn't know about the 'marine reserve.

Good post Whitewave, I agree with you completely. The only consolation we have is in the 40’s & 50’s, the country felt safe and secure and we just worked to repair war damage, and there was a general feeling of common goals and a certainty that we were progressing to a better future. I can’t imagine how the present situation will turn out. I voted to remain, but feel we should leave for democratic reasons, and I have a dread that we are being led off a cliff to save a political party, not for the good of the country.

A 17% interest rate is still very small compared with a 2% interest rate on a property which costs 10 or more times more.

I really don't agree that the country felt safe and secure. We were just entering the Cold War and people were terrified of a "Commie" attack. Right-wing groups marched with impunity and were responsible for murders. Parts of the country had very bad crime rates and were almost "no go" areas. I vaguely remember Suez and the fear that we would all be called in a nuclear attack.

I wasn't born in the 1940s but my parents and grandparents didn't have anything in common with unions or the Labour Party. I wasn't even born in an NHS hospital (although I could have been) because my mother would have preferred to have given birth in a shed rather than in the local NHS hospital. I won a scholarship to a private school, but my parents had already made plans to pay school fees, if I hadn't passed the entrance exam. As a child, I remember many of my parents' friends having the same kind of attitude. I really can't claim that they had any common goals.

Really growstuff? I wasn't born in an NHS hospital either, because such things didn't exist. I was born in a charity hospital which existed for women who were too poor to pay and who had some health risks. The ones who didn't qualify and couldn't pay could give birth anywhere (including sheds). The hospital was integrated into the NHS in 1948 and then it was available for everyone.
I never remember being terrified of a "Commie" attack in fact I knew a lot of people who were members of the communist party. I grew up in and then worked in a lot of poor areas when I qualified as a teacher and I don't remember any being 'no-go'areas. Many of the people I went to school with lived in houses which have since been demolished and were the first in their family to ever have secondary education.
The picture you paint has very little to do with the life I lived.

Fwiw, I remember a lot of what Gabriella G54 says in very much the way she says it. I was a child in the 1960's and 70's.

It feels right to me too, so I dont think its just her personal account.

I was born in a NHS hospital. Obviously in the minds of some here I must be the lowest of the low. However, when I was born the NHS was respected, it was the jewel in the crown of the welfare state and people generally felt lucky to have it. People like my father and mother ( and my grandparents) were proud of it. I was given the best of care in their eyes. It was safe.

Pity I cannot say the same now.

As for Private schools in the 1960's. Well my mum once said that the only people who went to them went there because they were ashamed to be seen with the rest of us at the local schools. Those who could went to grammar schools. Those who didn't make it to grammar school but had wealthy parents went to private schools which were generally, in my area, considered inferior to the state schools of the 1960's and 70's - just saying, that is how it was seen where I lived.

We were just entering the Cold War and people were terrified of a "Commie" attack. Right-wing groups marched with impunity and were responsible for murders. Parts of the country had very bad crime rates and were almost "no go" areas. I vaguely remember Suez and the fear that we would all be called in a nuclear attack

I think you must have grown up in an extremely rightwing environment, growstuff!

Can't say I was scared of 'commie' attack, more of the US & the USSR unleashing a futile nuclear Armageddon on the world. To innocent me, 'communism' sounded a bit like the way of life advocated by Christianity (very christian upbringing)

I was quite amazed by your post, though, such a difference between the political philosophies of yours, mine and *trisher's families. (Mine was in the middle of you two)

It is interesting to reflect on how we experienced life when we grew up and compare with others. We may well live in the same country but we are worlds apart. I guess that was always the case.

Can't say I was scared of 'commie' attack, more of the US & the USSR unleashing a futile nuclear Armageddon on the world

I cannot honestly say any of those things scared me. I do recall though in 1971 being taken by my school to a local
" conference" of school children to hear all about the forthcoming " Nuclear Armageddon" . I also remember thinking it was a load of rot and scaremongering, not dissimilar to that of Greta Thunberg and Extinction Rebellion these days.

I think most of the people I went to school with thought the same. The only ones I recall crying in the isles were the "poor little posh kids" as we tended to call them .

I think had a false sense of class consciousness back then because I went to school with a large number of working class children from local council estates. Such places were where the respectable working class grew up in the 1960's. In fact I came from a "Private house" and my dad was a HEO in the Civil Service but I had little understanding of that at the time.

I never did figure out why we were taken to that conference.

Born in 1943 I can remember such things as food and clothing rationing following the Second World War and vaguely the worst days of the cold war during the Berlin airlift.

However, the only time I felt we were really going to be caught up in a nuclear war was during the thirteen days of the Cuba crisis in 1962. There was a very large reserve army depot on the Gloucester Road in Bristol and as I travelled up that road on my motorbike going to work on the second Monday of that crisis, all the armoured personnel carriers, trucks and even some tanks were parked out on the road with the army reservists everywhere.

I really did feel that "this is going to be it."

Maizie I grew up in a not unusual Conservative family. By the standards of any Labour supporter, I have no doubt it would have been considered right-wing, but to my parents and I guess most of the other people who lived in the same area, it was the norm. My parents weren't racist, sexist or homophobic, which many people in the country were. They just lived in a different world from people who relied on the state, lived in a council house, were in a union, voted Labour, etc. My father had been a WW2 bomber pilot and was fiercely patriotic, but despised populist nationalism. They were amongst the many who embraced Thatcherism because they thought left-wing ideas had gone too far. I started to rebel when I was in my late teens.

We didn't have social media, so people couldn't hurl insults at each other anonymously, but I really don't agree with the idea that the country had common goals.

Grandad You are 12 years older than I am and I certainly remember being frightened of a nuclear war. When that had fizzled out a bit after the 1970s thawing in relations with Russia, I was scared of IRA bombs.

Older people tend to view the days of their youth as happy and carefree times. It's just an illusion, though. There were never 'common goals' and the divide was just as great. The only difference is that now we are more exposed to (and aware of) situations due to the media and internet availability. We lived in blissful ignorance before!

We had rigid class distinction until the sixties. My mother was a cleaning lady and when she proudly told her employer that my sister had passed the scholarship for the High School she was told those schools weren't meant for working class children!! Said sister ended up Headmistress of a large school.

The 1960's swept all that nonsense away in a decade.

Your father would despise Johnson and his followers then grow stuff

I am 3 years younger than grandad.

I was never frightened of communists, or bombs, (tbh it sounds like your parents may have been guilty of hyperbole) but very aware of the Cuban crises.

As far as I am aware the biggest issue of 50&60s was Vietnam.

The thaw didn’t really happen with the USSR until the 1980s.

Remember Greenham Common?

I remember Greenham Common - 1981. I also remember thinking that the women were mostly a bunch of middle class wealthy layabouts with nothing else to do but cause trouble whilst the rest of us had real troubles by then. Any young person coming into the workplace around that time found themselves unemployed or on a YTS ( or YOP is predecessor). No real jobs.

That was the early Thatcher Year’s.

Unemployment rose to 3 million.

You can always rely on the Tories to hit the working classes one way or the other

Older people tend to view the days of their youth as happy and carefree times.

For most, although not all, children our younger years are free of adult responsibility so to that extent they are "carefree". Happy is something only each person can judge; some people are not inclined to be happy some inclined to be so in the most difficult circumstances.

Did you really live in blissful ignorance as you grew into your teens, Hetty58? I don't think I did. I certainly remember long political discussions with my father - about Kenedy and the Bay of Pigs and Kenedy's death. Then discussions about why people were shooting at my friends and dropping the odd bomb. I had long discussions about the war in Vietnam and our own politics with friends and amenable adults when I came back to England. I think parts of my generation was very aware of what the world could do just as parts of that same generation make themselves knowledgeable now. I don't think it's an age thing.

It was during the Thatcher era that the Royal Statistical Society criticised the government for the first time in its hundred and fifty year history because of the government's numerous redefinitions of unemployment

Internment camps for those opposing the government being given consideration

Jo Maugham QC
@JolyonMaugham
·
4h
Looks like Government may well be considering "administrative detention" after No Deal. Distinctly worrying for those who have the temerity to oppose Government policy.
Quote Tweet

Tom Wills
@TomWills
·
Britain's Home Office neither confirms nor denies it has identified sites to use as internment camps in the event of a no-deal Brexit, saying it needs a "safe space to develop ideas".

Hetty58 good post ??

I think that in the 1950’s there was an idea of ‘going forward’ and becoming a more modern country and recovering from the dreary after war days.Obviously though, coming from different backgrounds we all remember different things.

a bunch of middle class wealthy layabouts with nothing else to do but cause trouble whilst the rest of us had real troubles by then

What does a middle class layabout look like? Do you have any facts to back up your assertion?