Handed in my Notice Today…

Mungecrundle wrote:

Mungecrundle wrote:

Legs, I’ve re-read my comment and see no mention of any “Winter of discontent”. In fact I deliberately avoided using the term as it has become a rather touchy point for the socialists as you so eloquently went on to demonstrate. I’m also as sure of my memories of that era as you appear to be. As stated I also accept that other people are going to have different experiences and I recognise that I have a privileged background compared to many. I have also struggled at times wondering where the money for the next electric bill is coming from and existed on potatoes for weeks on end. Certainly not real poverty, I always had a roof over my head, but enough to appreciate that money doesn’t grow on trees and work alone is not it’s own reward. I have no issue with people creating wealth and benefiting from doing so. I have no issues with paying reasonable taxes (around 65% for me after income tax, NI, Council tax, VAT etc) to ensure we have good public services such as the NHS and to ensure that there is a basic social safety net where real poverty and need exists. For the most part I think we get the balance right in the UK and for every person who is failed by the system, I’ll find you 10 who have got the treatment they need, help with housing, enough benefits to tide them over a rough patch and entitlement to some kind of pension in old age.

You know, normally when people trot out the old line about how the seventies were so shit, it’s usually a reference to ‘the winter of discontent’.  So whilst you certainly didn’t cite that exact phrase, you did mention the old myths of ‘rubbish in the streets’ (yes – it happened.  No – it was nowhere near as prevalent as the rightards claim(ed)) and – my personal favourite – the ‘fat cat union bosses’.   That last one always makes me smile, because despite the weak-minded attacks heaped on the unions, if they didn’t exist, you’d be working 364 days a year for £1 an hour.

Or do you think your boss gives you holidays because he likes you? 

Anyway, my interest in the fascist kleptocracy that is the UK, is waning as I mentally accustom myself to the departure in 3 months plus a bit.   At least when I no longer live here, I’ll stop bitching and will leave you all to wallow in your paid slavery.

Isn’t that something to look forward to? 

srchar wrote:

Legs_Eleven_Worcester wrote:

Maybe I need to write that book.  

I think you should read one first.

I set ’em up…

hawkinspeter wrote:

hawkinspeter wrote:

When I see programmes from the 70s it seems to me that people were uglier back then and muscle definition didn’t seem to have been invented. However, I’ve recently been finding old rare groove/funk tracks on YouTube and damn, the music was so much better.

I think that iPhones and the Internet aside, most things were better.  It was unquestionably a more ‘caring’ society than the one that we have known since 1979.  

I often hope that reincarnation is a thing, and that when I die, I can come back for another bite at the cherry, but not now.  Not a year after I die, or five years, or ten years or whatever.  But back in the sixties and seventies, like I was as ‘me’.  

That would be rather nice.   

Mungecrundle wrote:

Mungecrundle wrote:

Funny, I look back to the 70’s at least as a decade of power cuts, rubbish in the streets, my Father digging up the garden to grow vegetables due to the 3 day week and intransigent fat cat union bosses systematically dismantling this country’s ability to compete against technologically superior foreign manufacturing in numerous industries with their refusals to modernise. Industrial action, secondary picketing and disruption all the way through to the miners strike and the Wapping disputes of the 80s. I look back on the popular TV and film genres of the time and cringe with embarrassement at the casual racism, misogyny and homophobia. Also the carefree days of youth. Summer of 76 and other hilights. Bit like today, a mixed bag certainly not utopia. I do however respect that other people grew up in very different circumstances to my white middle class privilege in a ‘nice’ Essex village and I also rail against the current corporate culture of utterly indefensible greed at the top levels based on exploitation of workers and paying customers, though I have the luxury of doing so as a shareholder rather than burning other people’s possessions in the street as some sort of protest.

Well, this is laughable, and is really nothing but parroting the right-wing mantra about ‘the winter of discontent’ – a myth which has been firmly cemented in the public’s mind by incessant repetition of this lie by the right-wing media and politicians.   The ‘winter of discontent’ one is as false as ‘Labour overspent before 2008’ and ‘Hitler was a socialist’, but they have been repeated so often and with such fervour, that they have passed into the public’s minds almost as ‘facts’. 

For one thing, high inflation in the 1970s was not caused by Labour or by the trade unions, but principally by the decision by OPEC to double the price of a barrel of oil as retaliation for US support of Israel during the Yom Kippour war.  This led to an increase in prices across the board, which led to the workers demanding wage increases in order to be able to eat.  Hardly ‘greedy’ or ‘fat cat’.   And as for those unions, it’s curious that trade union support of Labour is portrayed as somehow ‘bad’ or as ‘undemocratic’, whereas massive (and in many cases, undocumented and unregistered) contributions from billionaires into the coffers of the Conservative Party are almost completely ignored.  Why is that, do you think? 

Your memories are flawed – if they are indeed memories and not tales passed down by your father – as the misery you cite didn’t really exist.  UK quality of life reached a peak in 1976 (source: New Economic Foundation ‘Measure of Domestic Progress’) and has yet to reach the same high.   The strikes were in reaction to attacks on the right to withhold labour – such as the Industrial Relations Act 1972 – and after the election of the Labour government in 1972, the unions did not demand the wage increases that they have always been accused of demanding.  Labour adhered to a form of ‘social contract’ whereby rent was controlled, as were utilities bills.   But all of this is little use as capital fled the country that year, just as it always does when Labour is in power.  

If you’d like an idea of the extent to which the right has ‘mythologised’ the so-called ‘winter of discontent’, I can recommend The Establishment and How They Get Away With it, by Owen Jones. 

Sniffer wrote:

When was this wonderful time that we look back on with rose tinted nostalgia?

Well, I certainly look back to the late sixties and early seventies as a time before neoliberalism.   That particular ideology has all but destroyed society.