To be shocked that in 1970 a woman with 2 kids got in benefits the equivalent in purchasing power of £58.20 a week?

[crunchymint]

That was it. With some contribution towards rent, bills, food and clothes to pay for. No wonder lots of women stayed in awful marriages rather than being on benefits. I can't imagine how those single mothers managed.

The quality of life has nothing to do with money and was better in the 70s. I'm so thankful I was young then, not now.

Just comparing benefits - no qualifying period for the dole, fortnightly sign on, no compulsion to find a job, no need to prove you were looking, no sanctions. Single parents were allowed to claim benefits until their youngest child was 15, no questions asked, no pressure to work.

My dad retired in 1978 when he was 62. During the three tears until he got his state pension, he signed on and got the dole in addition to his occasional pensions.

When I was a mature student in the early 80s, everyone who didn't fancy working in the vacation signed on and got the dole and housing benefit.

So, no we don't feel and aren't richer than we were in the 70s, society is nastier and crueler than it was 40 years ago.

@Bluelady
Those abuses you state are the very reason we don't have those benefits anymore. Your dad decided to retire early and claimed the dole? What are you expecting here? A round of applause? Why didn't he continue to work? Why should students sign on in the summer holidays? Ridiculous.

No, you misunderstand me. I'm not defending the over generous benefits of the past, far from it. They illustrate that we don't all feel richer now as a pp has pointed out and the OP is mistaken in thinking the 70s were such a terrible time, they weren't.

I don't know a great deal about the 70's, but I know it wasn't too great back in the early 90's either.
My DM was a single parent to me and benefits Back then were only based completely on her income, not at all on her outgoings, so because it worked out that she earned just slightly above the threshold (I think around £100-£150 over the whole year) she got no help at all and had to pay all her rent, poll tax (I think that's what it was called then?) and my childcare in full.
It actually worked out that she was almost £30 p/m worse off working than if she didn't work at all, as she'd have had no childcare costs and she would have had her rent and poll tax paid in full for her.

What’s the point in comparing life to the 1970s?

It stops us from really looking at the issues we face now.

Housing costs are extortionate. Wages at the lower end of the scale are not high enough.

Yet the rich keep getting richer and they’re laughing all the while. Why? Because most of us are too busy fighting amongst ourselves or harking back to the past or begrudging free schools meals for underfed children.

Because that's the subject of the thread and it's mildly interesting?

I should also have pointed out that none of the benefits examples I gave were abuses of the system, they were all completely legitimate.

I think dividing the generations is a bit shit really.

Do people really want to live on less than £60 a week for everything? Or do they simply not believe the OP that that is how much they would have received. For everything.

Looking at the relative price of food and clothing is eyeopening too.

I really donmt get why it is so difficult for people to understand recent history, which is of course current events for some, and that it really has been shitty at whichever decade you find yourself at the bottom of the pile.

I think cash in hand was more of a ‘thing’ ore internet banking.

I was a single parent in the late 90s and early 2000s and worked for cash in most places.

Pre not ore sorry

My mum was a seperated single mum in the 70s she certainly wasn't ostracised by her family she was judged by everybody outside it though she did have jobs usually cash in hand cleaning jobs she did get benefits but a benefits "inspector" used to come to make sure she had no men staying

Pat Barker has written a couple of good books set in this era, I think.

I think a benefits inspector goes to one of the women’s houses. And she has to work in a chicken factory (UGH)

So £100 a month coming in and £42 on rent? So just over 40% on rent...it's not much different in percentage terms nowadays.

This may be true, but the relative cost of everything else (other than cars) is so much less nowadays.

How much does a set of cutlery cost? How much can you buy a set of child’s vests for? How much can you buy a sofa for?

My mum and I were talking about this a while ago. She bought a coat for my five year old sister for my christening. It wasn’t anything particularly expensive or high fashion, but cost the equivalent of £200 in today’s money. Who, in their right minds, would spend that much on a child’s coat today?

My parents still have a list of all their wedding presents and their relative costs from 1966.

A teaspoon cost £8. We’re not talking sterling silver here - just bog standard Sheffield steel.

That’s why people felt relatively poor.

Clothes and household goods are cheaper than in the seventies in real terms now, thanks to cheap imports.

When I remember the shops of the 1970s there simply wasn’t as much choice. You could buy good quality but moderately priced from M and S and if you were poor you went to BHS or Woolworths (though they sold children’s Ladybird clothes, which were good).
No way could you buy school trousers so cheaply back then.

That's true...I even remember being a teenager/uni student in the late nineties/early noughties and clothes costing so much more compared to nowadays. I can go to primark now and buy a t shirt for less than £3.

That's very true, Sweet. We also had to deal with record price inflation rates and wages didn't keep up.

Well yes. I was born in the 70s and we were poor. No two ways about it. This is one thing that always makes me roll my eyes when people bark on about how easy baby boomers had it. They really didn’t.
Each generation has its own challenges and things that were better/worse than the current time. Back then it was absolute rather than relative poverty. Women couldnt get mortgages in many places without a man to sign. Very few went to university, educational expectations much lower, opportunities especially for women much lower. Consumer goods very pricey, four days weeks etc etc. It really was not all roses and hippy fluff.
Today’s young people face different challenges and have some things that are better and some that are worse. House prices are an issue in the south, student debt is higher and they need to compete in a global pool. That benefits those that can do it abthey have access to a global workplace. It’s hard on those who don’t have the skills or abilities as they are competing against an awful lot of people.

It’s madness to pit generations against each other. It’s wrong to cast baby boomers as he idle rich and it’s wrong to cast millenials as whining snowflakes. The real villains are the people in charge making huge profits and squirrelling it away so money doesn’t flow through he economy. Those vastly rich avoiding tax. Huge corporations asset stripping public amenities. Huge corporations paying such low wages the taxpayer needs to tip them up.

Putting generations against each other seems to be working though - much easier to have a go at baby boomers than look upwards and tackle the real causes of inequality

My mum was a single mum in the late 80s when minimum wage didn’t exist. She worked FT as a hairdresser and was paid £2 an hour. She told me aside from child benefit, benefits didn’t really exist as they do today so without the tips she was given she has no idea how she’d have got through. We often lived off beans on toast for weeks.

Asylum seekers have to live on similarly low funds: £37 per week per person. Not easy when you might live in a hostel with minimal kitchen facilities and don't have an existing supply of weather-appropriate clothing.

123bananas

You do know that some single mothers these days have to go without meals so their kids can eat too. Poverty is still around.

The cost of living was very low in the 70’s. We paid £15 per month rent for a 2 bed flat, heated it with a paraffin stove, and lived on £1 a day each for food. Two of us were students and two were unemployed.
There was no bathroom, just a toilet and one cold tap. We took our washing to the laundrette and had showers at the university bath house. Happy days!
We then graduated and bought a 3 bed detached house for £29K.
I don’t think you can make any direct comparison with nowadays.

My mum took my dad back because she couldn’t survive on one wage with two kids. She felt there was a lot of stigma too and we were teased at school for having no dad. This was in the early 90s.

Hypermice well said. My parents married in 1966. They have many of the benefits of their generation - final salary pensions, a mortgage paid off by their early 50s and plenty of disposable income. However, life was far harder for them when they were at my life-stage (working and with young kids) than it is for us.

I wouldn’t swap.

The cost of living wasn't low in the 70s. Inflation was 24% in 1975.

bluelady I am totally against the cuts. But the reality is no single parent with two kids and no job gets as small amount in benefits as they would have in 1970. I don't know how it would have been possible to survive.

Yes many single parents with two or quite possibly more than two kids are surviving on less than £58 a week. The benefit cap and bedroom tax has made that a reality.
People just look at the published rates so approx £215 a week tax credits , CB and JSA for a Mum and two dc.
If your rent is high the majority of that £215 is swallowed up.

Cash in hand jobs were rife, having a little cleaning job, pub work or shop job that would pay cash and they really breached the gap. Fiddling the leccy meter when you were truly brasic and hiding from the milkman were complete norms. Social housing was good and somewhat available, if you weren't playing out on the streets your mum could pay someone a few quid to look after you.

It was different i don't think things are better or worse now equally i dont think things were better or worse then. A lot of the ways around things have gone (rightly or wrongly!) though