Things Better in the Past

[NoisySnail]

It is common for younger people to state benefits of the past that only applied to middle class or better off working class people. Free university when hardly anyone from very poor backgrounds attended.

But they never talk about the benefits of the past that poor people like myself benefitted from - presumably because they did not know about them. So I thought it would be good to talk about those. I am thinking of the seventies and eighties.

Unemployment benefit - It used to be very easy to sign on. If you sign on now for Universal Credit because you are not working, you have to apply for loads and loads of jobs every week. Back then you only had to sign a form that you were looking for work. No one asked you for proof.
If you were unemployed for 12 months then you would be sent on a YTS placement. If you were coming up to 12 months you were sensible and applied for a decent one. There were ones that were sheer exploitation by private companies. But there were also really interesting ones with charities.

Private rents - Rents were cheaper than mortgage payments. It was buy to let that changed this. But before the laws changed so banks could offer buy to let mortgages, landlords always owned their houses outright. And during the seventies and some of the eighties you even had rent officers who would visit and if they thought the rent was too high, they could pressure the landlord to reduce the rent or ultimately go to court and get a lower rent set.

Guarantors - This did not really exist for renters. They started coming in for students in the nineties and spread to many landlords. But in the 70s and 80s the idea did not really exist.

Food Vouchers - Foodbanks did not really exist. But the equivalent of the DWP used to hand out food vouchers if they accepted you needed them.

Further Education - Local colleges used to run masses of courses that were free or heavily subsidised. Everything from qualifications to hobby classes. The hobby classes did not need to lead to a qualification. There would be lots of cake decorating, woodworking, flower arranging, and learn holiday French courses. My DH attended a basic car maintenance course that taught people simple repairs they could make themselves.

Free School Meals: Where we lived one secondary school in each area provided free school meals over the school holidays. Not all children entitled to them took advantage, but the option was there.

Nationalised Industries: Water, gas, electric, telephone and transport were all nationalised. It was not perfect, but it was cheaper.

There were things that were bad that have got better, But can you can think of others that benefitted poorer people?

But things weren't better were they? Strikes, no minimum or living wage, three day week, rolling power cuts, domestic abuse viewed as a private matter, divorce was nigh on impossible, single motherhood was stigmatised, rampant discrimination and racism, rising unemployment to a high of nearly 12% in 1984, riots etc etc.

Housing may well have been more accessible, especially council housing, but many houses also needed modernising. I had school friends whose housing had no bathrooms, just outside loos and were heated with cast iron parafin heaters, and this was in SoE, which people think of as affluent.

Had a colleague of my father's not been made redundant instead of him, my parents were going to emigrate as things were so bad. As it was, we only saw him at weekends as he left and came back from work whilst we were in bed, and Mother worked two jobs. And if you think childcare is hard now, it was non existent back then, so if you needed to work, you had to either leave your kids alone or get a neighbour to check in on them.

I know lots of things were not better and I recognise from personal experience everything you talk about. But some things were better.

I don't think anything was better in the past except I was younger

Yes some things were better like the ones you describe

I've been thinking about this in that there's a lot of harm being done by movements who are based on the idea that 'everything was better in the past' and certain things were better, as OP points out; there were more grants that helped people in the creative industries, there were more libraries and more GPs, there was more social housing and other housing was more affordable, class sizes were smaller and so on.

Unfortunately what the 'everything better in the past' people seem to think we need is for everything to be more racist, sexist and homophobic again and that will make things like the past and therefore better. They literally want to bring the worst bits back that won't help anyone except maybe helping them to feel a bit less insecure (because, let's face it, this is coming generally from privileged white people)

Little or no maternity pay/leave. Houses with no central heating. You had to put a jumper on
A family either had one car or no cars.
Teenagers never had cars, unless they saved hard for an old banger. You got the bus or walked. Rape wasn't generally taken seriously. What did you do to encourage it? You shouldn't have worn that short skirt.
People had to hide the fact they were gay for fear of being ostracised/beaten up.
It wasn't necessarily easy to claim benefits. The benefit office would inform you you benefits were suspended. Come into to the office to be interviewed.
Better things: people had more respect for others, children had boundaries, kids didn't generally risk getting stabbed at school.
So really there was lots of good stuff back then but lots of crap stuff as well 😉

The Lido. Spent all of the holidays there for free. Used to run home for lunch for a dairylea sandwich and back over again until mum got home from work.

I benefitted from university grants and no tuition fees. I was a single mum, I’d had to pay for classes and exams to scrape together enough O and A level passes to get into Uni. But after graduating I was never unemployed and therefore never claimed any benefits except Child Benefit. So I think the State probably broke even with me.
But remember the 3 day week, frequent power cuts with no warning, mortgage rate going up to 12 or 13%.

@LakeTiticaca We have one car. I think that is not unusual amongst people with less money.

@Echobelly We still had the some of the gains that had been won by the left wing such as free or subsidised community education. I agree the people who talk about wanting to turn the clock back want the worst parts back, not the left wing gains. The seventies and eighties were a tough time to be disabled, gay, or black. You had the Chief Constable of Manchester saying AIDS was a gay plague sent by God.
But I also think we should remember what was better. You see on MN for example many landlords justifying high rents as they need to pay the mortgage and other costs. We need to remember that it was the changes in the banking laws that brought this about and meant that rents became more expensive than mortgages. It is not inevitable.

We had central heating from late 60s onwards

@suburburban most people did not, only 5% of the UK population had central heating in 1960. Remember the new build housing estate Brookside soap was based around? None of the houses had central heating and they were built in the early eighties.

Me.

By 1970 31% of UK population lived in houses with central heating.

I just went to London & Paris when I was young, and tried my luck. No job, no place to live. Eventually landed in my feet, both times. Sheer optimism! And a good bit of blagging. I don’t think young people can do that now (it was 90s / early 00s) as everything is online now & nobody is just “a person” now. You must have a profile, your exact credentials are known.
Dating is the same. Nothing is left to chance, to luck or fate… I was thinking of this when a friend talked about how her mum & dad met at her mother’s funeral. There is so much pressure to conform now, I’m definitely glad I was so free. To make my own mistakes, too!

Dunno. I was brought up on benefits in the 90s. I remember my mum signing in at the post office in a queue every Tuesday with a booklet and getting 4 £20 notes. We didn’t get food banks. We frequently went without electric, I would be sent running to a neighbour for a pink token for the meter, and we never heated upstairs. As a result, upstairs was black rotten.

Just about everyone I knew on our estate was same boat. Physical, sexual abuse and people living in squalor was normal.

support was non existent or if it did exist, only made life worse.

Definitely not better, at all.

I was only a child but I remember it being freezing indoors in winter due to having no central heating. We had an open fire in the front room and would get a sack of coke delivered each week for it. There were vents in the chimney wall that could be opened to let the heating circulate upstairs but they were fairly useless and we'd have ice on the insides of windows on winter mornings.

Children weren't particularly supervised and would sometimes get into situations they had no business being in, coupled with lower health and safety standards and it wasn't great really. In my cohort at school there was a boy who died after being hit by a car while out playing, he was 8. Another boy died after falling through a roof he was playing on, he was 10. A girl died after taking too much paracetamol, she was off school poorly and home alone (also quite common) and knew her mum took that medicine when she wasn't feeling well so she took some too except she had most of the bottle. A boy in my class used to wear a burns vest because he got scalded trying to run a bath. A girl lost the end half of one of her fingers in the folding mechanism of a pushchair because they were bloody lethal at that time. Such things are rare now.

My dad was verbally and emotionally abusive. Now there'd be a safeguarding report raised and some sort of parenting intervention, back then he was just considered to be "strict".

Lots of children with SEMH difficulties and/or neurodivergence were considered to be naughty or thick and there was little in the way of support.

There was a lot of responsibility placed on older children. The memes about first born daughters exist because they're true. I was a babysitter by age 11 including being responsible for a six month old baby. Lots of my friends were their family babysitter too.

We didn't have central heating or mains water until about 1980. Water came from a well in the garden! The old man who lived down the lane had dirt floors until he died in the early 80s.

Houses and cars and car insurance were all much cheaper.

There wasn't much childcare available because most mothers were 'housewives' so didn't need it.

I’m going to add: good quality council flats and houses; bus networks; allotments; local markets that sold fresh food and material and wool so you could make your own clothes cheaply; still possible to run a family on a single income so one parent could choose to stay at home and focus on household economies (well, at least in my family although in the 80s that we starting to change and by the late 80s sadly a lot of my mum’s friends looked down on her).

We really didn’t expect a lot from life, so most of our expectations were exceeded. I know my mum was just glad she didn’t have to live through another war, that she didn’t have to send her husband off and tell us kids he had been killed like her mum had to do.

The thing that bugs me is when I here people talk about women working as if it's new thing and that a mans wage would have been enough to buy a house and live on . It wasn't women went to work because they had to and if they needed a cousin or a neighbour to watch the kids , they did . Childcare why did it take so long ..

There wasn't much childcare available because most mothers were 'housewives' so didn't need it.

In 1989, the employment rate for women aged 16-64 was 61%. Where I lived most mothers worked, usually in a supermarket or a school or a pub - basically part time jobs that could fit round home and family. There'd usually be overlap though so lots of kids I knew either had the oldest sibling babysitting them all or would have a door key to let themselves in after school. Leaving kids home alone was a definite norm.

There was no central heating in our council house until the late 80s the house was so cold except for the living room . I can't believe we used to as children wake up to ice inside the windows . Why did the powers that be think this was a fine way for children to live ??

The anti vaccine crowd were tiny as a lot of people still had living memories of illnesses like polio and how deadly they could be.

@bluetopazlove I remember the thick ice at times on the inside of the windows. DH woke up one morning to find his bed covered in snow that had come in through a hole in the wall.
The reality is that the focus was on getting people out of slums. My family lived in a slum before moving to a council house with ice on the inside of the windows during the winter. The slum had families living in one or two rooms, one tap with cold running water, and an outside toilet shared between at least 4 families.
The housing stats being measured were focused on overcrowding, running hot water and inside bathrooms. And central heating was a secondary measure. Most younger adults have no idea that in the sixties you still had families living in Dickensian conditions. Although sadly we are heading back there.

It was so different that IMO you can never really compare.

@Saz12 True. I guess I just get frustrated at younger adults who just parrot that we all had it so easy, with zero understanding of what life was like. It was incredibly different.