People around Liz Truss's age

[mintywinter]

Who also went to a Comprehensive school, did you travel on a plane as a kid? I didn't and I was thinking about the bit in her speech where she says she got an air hostess badge, and thinking that anyone in my school who'd been on a plane would have been thought of as posh? In my school people holidayed in the UK if at all.

No holidays abroad for us. She's led a very privileged life just like all Tory's.

FWIW just to add to data points I first went on an aircraft at the age of 6, well over fifty years ago, on holiday, an internal UK flight....( For the spotters: Vickers Viscount, Cambrian Airways).

Council house family, Dad worked as a clerk in a local store, Mum stayed at home so I have no idea of the whys, wherefores, or economics...but the idea that holiday flying was restricted to the rich/loaded, is a bit flawed....

I do remember though that whilst by the mid 70's short haul flights for holidays weren't that rare a fellow school pupil (this was at Grammar School) going to New York on holiday was regarded as incredibly exotic...

I thought LT was in her late 50s

This was the first thing that struck me, just showed how tone deaf they are .

also surely she Is splitting hairs about being the first PM that is comprehensive school educated , what about Gordon Brown didn’t he go to a comprehensive, John Major went to a secondary modern school , as did Jim Callaghan and there are plenty of PMs who went to post war Grammars ; Harold Wilson, Ted Heath and Margaret Thatcher. I know neither Michael Howard or William Hague were PM but the former was at Llanelli Boys Grammar and the latter went to Wath Comprehensive school .

in fact it’s interesting that Tony Blair was the first privately educated PM since Anthony Douglas Home in the 1960s . All through the seventies , eighties and nineties , until 1997, we were led by people educated in ordinary state schools, albeit Grammars , when grammar schools were everywhere rather than the rarified institutions they are now.

interesting reflection on social mobility .

I'm slightly older than LT and also grew up in Leeds. Roundhay has always been 'the posh end'. We used to go to the park regularly, so know the area quite well.

I'd say 80% of my peers at school didn't holiday abroad, and even those who did, drove to France, or went on coach trips to northern Spain. Most people generally went to Butlins, a caravan park, or stayed with relatives. My friend went abroad but that was because her grandparents lived overseas and they visited them every few years.

I was in my 30s before I went on a plane, and the first few times were actually work trips. Apart from a school trip to France and when we drove to Spain in my early 20s, I was in my late 30s before I was regulary going on overseas holidays.

I’m her age and went to failing comp. And lived in low income estate. I only knew one family who went abroad and they holidayed abroad every year. Neither of the parents worked. I have no idea how they afforded it. They had carpets throughout their house, got a vcr early, had a car. Looking back, I wonder if the Dad was involved in criminal activity!

Yes, kids used to be invited into the cockpit which was amazing.

I remember with British Airways you used to get a unaccompanied Junior Flyer pack which you'd wear round your neck at all times. A few activities in it. Think there was also a badge similar to what Truss mentioned too.

IIRC, that sort of thing wasn't available in the mid 1990s onwards as airlines became risk averse with unaccompanied Junior Flyers.

In the 1980s, I remember getting the British Airways badge which was chunky seen in my attachment.

Various airlines DID do both Junior Pilot and Junior Air Hostess badges. Air France had a Future Hostess badge for kids.

This kind of thing wasn't only for posh kids. I certainly wasn't - primary and high school in Belfast for me!

IIRC, that sort of thing wasn't available in the mid 1990s onwards as airlines became risk averse with unaccompanied Junior Flyers.

For info and as I recall it BA was certainly offering visits and suitable stickers ("I've visited the Flight Deck") for kids, including groups of Unaccompanied Minors, right up to 9/11....

I agree. I'm not a fan of Liz Truss but for goodness sake OP let it lie.

I am a similar age to LT and also went to a comp up north (in a not very wealthy area btw). I can promise you it was not unusual for my contemporaries to go on holiday abroad on a plane, or to France on a boat. Some of us even had an inside loo 🙄

Ah well, given your last sentence I guess we were always going to end up here:

Well having been a holiday rep overseas during the 80s and 90s, I can assure you that there were millions (yes millions) of working class families flying on holiday. Liz Truss would have been a teen in the 80s. This was a boom time for package holidays, nowt fancy, just the good old sun, sea and sangria type which was affordable for many, many families.

44 years old. Council estate. Comp school. We went mainly to Spanish islands but went to Florida once on my dads single wages and he was only a line manager 😮

@Zingy123 I am not a Tory, never have been and never will be but have holidays abroad. I'm sure many of the labour MPs have been on an aeroplane too!

Thankfully so did my daughter when I was pissed off she was younger than me 🤣. She does not look 47!!!!

@maddiemookins16mum

I can assure you that there were millions (yes millions) of working class families flying on holiday.

Seconded.

Can't speak for the class breakdown (probably not monitored back then) but when I was nostalgically reading around this topic last night I think saw that in one typical year in the 70's or 80's Britannia Airways alone carried 5.5 million passengers between the UK and parts of Europe various.

Britannia were just one out of several airlines that served the UK charter market in the 70's and 80s.

The idea that mass holiday travel didn't start until perhaps the 90's, and therefore PMLT claim to have flown off on holiday and even visited the flight deck means she is automatically somewhat upper class or even Alan Bennett Class 😉is a bit wide of the mark.

Similar age to LT my secondary was split between middle class kids who went abroad, the average got a UK holiday, and the really deprived. Fastest thing on two legs x kid with a dinner ticket. 😳

5.5m people out of a population of 55m isn't really a lot of people. Even allowing for other flight companies that's maybe 10m, 20% of the population.

A high percentage of them would be older couples or young people without kids. And some potentially counted multiple times if they did multiple holidays.

There were lots of other flight companies, and lots of people going on holiday abroad with their children. Many of them were working class, like my family. It wasn't frowned upon as much to go in term time in my area. Not all working class people are too poor to go on holiday, and a week in Tenerife hardly qualifies you as a member of the super rich. Many people lived slightly above their means in the 80s, it was a decade where lots of people were aspirational. I don't know many people who never went abroad.

I have to say that I suspect some of us oldies who have what is now called a "lived experience" of the era, and perhaps even worked in the holiday/travel industry at the time or shortly thereafter are finding the almost contrariness and denial of the scale of travel during the era a bit tough to swallow.

That recalled figure for Britannia is for just that one charter airline (albeit one of the biggest) that served the UK market...

I did chuck a few other airline brand names in during a pp last night...for example Orion, Air Europe, Dan Air, there were others Brt based plus there were foreign operator such as Aviogenex that served quite a lively UK - Yugoslavia market.

So yes can multiply the Britannia amount up by possibly even more than you have done.

I'll be honest and say don't care for PMLT and I don't give a stuff about her claimed background but objectively it is wrong to try and paint a picture that the Costas and the rest of Med etc were only visited by Brits who were upper middle class plus, and/or those retired and that it wrong to say it was rare for quite a few fairly ordinary (define?) families to travel by air in the 70s and 80s.

Exactly, well said. Monarch and Air 2000 were also huge.

EvilRingahBitch · Yesterday 19:16
Yes the occasional overseas package holiday was not a luxury reserved for the wealthy in the late 70s and 1980s. The growth of Benidorm and the Costa del Sol, of Intasun and Lunn Poly. You and your friends may not have been on foreign holidays, but did you not watch the adverts? A cheap week in the Med was completely normal for families in the top half of the income range“

we went in the early 70s, I think, thanks to Freddie Laker and his pink and green aeroplanes 😁
council terrace in south east London, unemployed dad on sick pay.

I think Liz Truss and her cabinet is a disaster, fwiw. Politicians always exaggerate how humble their backgrounds 🤷‍♀️

I'm the same age as her. Went to local comp. Went on a foreign holiday every year.
Dad was a painter & decorator, mum was stay at home mum. We weren't posh or particularly rich, lived in a roughish part of SE London

I'm 43, went to a comp and went on a plane and not thought of as posh. Only the kids who went to Disney were considered posh.

She boasts/lied she is the first PM to go to a Comp but didn't Brown and May also go to one? or at least a state school in the case of Brown. Brown went to a selective school and May went to a grammar. They didn't have a 'comprehensive 'education. All Scottish children had to do the Quali exams to determine where they went to school. I went to a Scottish 'comprehensive' in the 1970s. However we all had to sit an IQ test in primary. This determined your set in school. I was in the top set and that meant doing Latin from first year onwards.