To ask whether we could ever go back to what it was like in the 50s-70s?

[myblueheav3n]

I mean in a financial sense more than anything, although I know it wasn’t perfect. I only have a very superficial understanding of it all, but as far as I can tell:

• Affordable housing, and a lot of social housing for those who couldn’t buy.

• Liveable wages for unskilled jobs and good opportunity to work your way up in whatever your profession was. Plenty of work available for young people.

• Education was worth a lot more, e.g. now a university degree is minimum for a ‘decent’ job, and not even that is really guaranteed either.

I had more but after thinking about it for a while they’ve slipped my mind In general it seems like it was better, and people who grew up during these periods generally did well for themselves.

@woodhill you’re giving known direct examples of working class pupils who were the minority going to grammar school. As uplifting as that is it is the exception not the norm. Grammar school has always been a middle class pursuit

I am surprised you were bombarded with information about higher education I think this was probably down to your teachers

I was born in 72, went to an all girls school in a very mc area (I am wc) we were not encouraged to consider higher education unless we knew what profession we wanted to go into and exceptionally clever. I don’t know anyone who was going to university to gain a degree without knowing what profession they wanted to go into

I think that it is your experience that is exceptional.

Nobody I studied with or later worked with - and that’s a lot of people! - knew at the age of 17 or 18 what profession they wanted to go into. I studied physics but not because I wanted to be a physicist! Most of the ‘pure’ subjects are not vocational, and nor are they intended to be.

I find it hard to believe that many schools said to bright sixth formers, “don’t even think about university unless you know EXACTLY what profession you want to go into”. If that were the case, who would study history or English or geography or French or maths? Universities would have been full of people studying medicine, law, dentistry etc. They were not.

In fact, the significant investment required to go to university now means that today’s school leavers are far more likely to think about where their £50k of debt is going to get them. Our generation born in the sixties and early seventies had the luxury of studying what we liked.

I think also attitudes were changing

Many from a working class background would have been conditioned to think university just wasn’t for them unless exceptionally clever (so special). When I told my nanny I was going to university she was baffled but she was immensely proud and told everyone I was going to be a doctor (I studied councelling and psychotherapy and no plans to be a doctor) Sadly she died before I graduated

The day I graduated I thought of my granddad and how he would have loved to go to university. He was such an intelligent man, would have loved university life (the political side) and would have made an excellent teacher but it would never have been considered for him when he could be earning a wage

I think that people in the 1950s knew that on the whole it was much much better than the 1930s - with the NHS for a starter meaning that no one needed to worry about Doctor's bills.

Otherwise...hmm well, now we seem to be going backwards as far as social rights are concerned.

Liverpool 1959, women at the wash houses.

Not sure how much this would appeal now.

I’m old and can’t believe some of the nonsense being posted on this thread. There’s a really excellent book called The Nanny State Made Me - A Story of Britain. It brings together everything we’ve lost and although I lived through all those changes, it took reading about it to make me realise how much they impoverished society. I recommend it @myblueheav3n.

The answer to your question is that there’s no going back. Governments that knew the price of everything and the value of nothing destroyed many of the things we values and impoverished the lives of a lot of people.

Here you go. It’s well worth a tenner, even though it’s depressing reading.

www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B07V26RN6M/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_d_asin_title_o02?psc=1&tag=mumsnetforu03-21&ie=UTF8

I have just sent a request for that to my local independent bookshop.

Even The Guardian thought that ‘The Nanny State Made Me’ was rose tinted and relied on some slightly dodgy statistics. Stuart Maconie writes well, though.

It’s a really good read @Peregrina, if depressing. I don’t really care what the Guardian thought of it. I lived through the time it describes as an adult and it resonates with me.

Maybe it would depend on your background and where you lived

What was considered slightly poor in the 60/70’s would be considered poverty now (rightly so)

When I think back how little we had, how little food I know my mum and family had (dad isn’t from the UK poverty to him is on a different level) and her parents had, the culture this created.

I think that working classes didn’t expect much (still a culture of know your place) made people immensely grateful for what they should have been able to take for granted

I was a young child in the 1970s and it was good and bad really. We were poor, but my mum always cooked a hot meal from scratch every day and we were brought up with morals and values of a sense right and wrong.
Any takeaways was fish and chips only ( and that was a real treat) and snacks chocolates and fizzy drinks were only at Christmas time .
A few tv channels only : we got a colour tv in 1973 I think.
It was hard but nowhere as hard as my parents had it on the 20s and 30s. They were in their forties when they had me.

I grew up in 1970s Liverpool. Who on earth would want to go back to that? Although I know my mum looks back with rosetinted glasses. We were dirt poor, my dad was in and out of work, the food we ate was foul often 'meat' I wouldn't feed to a dog. My mum had this washing machine thing that she had to use big wooden tongs to pull the wet stuff out to put into a seperate spinner. The toilet was outside and was the only source of hot water (no bathroom) so we had to carry buckets of hot water into the kitchen to do the dishes, or bring in the hose to fill the bath tub, once dad installed one.

I remember going on a school trip to the seaside when I was around 6. The rain was bad so I was sent along with a bin bag over my coat to keep me dry, like a poncho. I was mortified, but when I got to school the other kids all had bags on too.

It was real poverty not the soft focus with heartwarming music poverty that you get on Call The Midwife.

I just had to post because this thread is so full of misinformation and bullshit, a lot of it posted by people who weren't alive then.

I was born in 1962 and recall the 60's and 70's with great fondness. It was a fab time to be alive. Some of the best music ever, real comedy programmes on TV, freedom to play.

We had none of the PC culture which has poisoned society now. Living in the 21st century is like living in a mixture of Month Python and '1984'. We had free speech and didn't have to worry about the perpetually offended. If anyone had told me that song lyrics would be censored or women called, 'people who menstruate' I would have thought it a joke.

People are generally far more disrespectful, selfish and vindictive now and the Internet has really allowed that side of human nature to flourish.

My parents were working class and we lived in the South Wales valleys. We were far from wealthy but they bought their house as both worked before I was born. My father worked in a factory, a coal mine and as a council gardener amongst other jobs. My mother went back to work when I was about 9.
I went to a Comprehensive school. All my peers were working class. 90% of us in the sixth form 'A' stream went to University, the rest went to teacher training or jobs.
We weren't told we couldn't go because we were poor; in fact, anyone intelligent was positively encouraged to go to uni. The poor weren't 'kept in their place' neither were girls. Those who weren't academically gifted often succeeded in other ways - self employment, going into a music career, etc.
Anyway, what is wrong with only 10% of kids going to uni? Yes 50% go now but that is because it is far easier to get into uni now than in the 70's. Standards were higher then. Now we have massive grade inflation and coursework instead of exams. To accommodate the huge rise in students, we have created pointless degrees like media studies, gender studies, sports science etc. We have graduates burdened with debt emerging from uni having wasted three years when they could have been training for something useful. There is a chronic lack of skilled tradespeople in the UK.

Remember, I lived in a relatively deprived part of Britain yet I didn't witness the grinding poverty so many posters are determined to attribute to the 70's. My best friend lived in a council house and her dad was a market trader. He was loaded! She always had the latest clothes and records.

Yes, there was less variety of food but I dispute it was boring or of poorer quality. How many types of yoghurt do you need? Do we really need 40 varieties? We had fresh meat, fish, fruit and veg from the butcher, fishmonger and grocer. Milk delivered. Mushrooms and blackberries picked wild. I ate no frozen food and little junk food apart from crisps, biscuits and angel delight.
No McDonald's. There is more variety of junk food available now. We ate seasonally and didn't have tasteless tomatoes or strawberries grown under plastic.
Rant over.

I’d absolutely hate it. The whole idea of having to be a housewife and rely on a man for money is awful. Imagine spending your whole life cooking and cleaning and then if you were lucky you got to go to that shops or take the kids to the dentist, while your husband controlled the purse strings and you waited on him hand and foot like they were some sort of royalty. My mum did that and I swore I never would.

I think it would be more productive to consider the period 1980s to 2020s.

This period clearly shows the relationship between average income and average house cost.

Also the expansion of higher education and introduction of student loans.

Also the reduction of unionisation and loss of worker rights.

By what mechanism do you think these economic policy changes that increased inequality led to a reduction of structurally based inequalities?

Attend a Freedom Programme. You will soon learn that rape in marriage is still common, despite being illegal, women (especially mothers) don't earn enough to take over a mortgage that needs 2 salaries to service it and pay for childcare etc. Do you really think that women experiencing DV are less trapped?

Rose tinted specs I think OP.

My Dad was a fully trained mechanic and we were on free school meals and heaven only knows what else.

There may have been a lot of social housing in some areas but not from where I grew up on the Kentish coast - poor quality private rented around then. Don't know where you get the idea there was lots of work for young people. School leaving age was 15 / 16 so no qualifications to speak of for most. The dreaded YTS or Youth Training Scheme was in place in the 70s/ 80s - and youngsters were pushed on to that and then made jobless at the end of the scheme - still with no qualifications.

No minimum wage, different advertised pay rates for men and women doing the same or similar roles - you only have to watch the "Made in Dagenham" film to pick that up.

Women couldn't even open a bank account without a man's (eg father / husband) permission let alone take out a mortgage.

I went to a grammar school which prided itself on the number of girls going on to university BUT the head (female) wouldn't sign your UCCA form if you wanted to do law, medicine or dentistry. I know girls in my year who took a year out (definitely NOT a things back in the 1970s) and then applied to uni to get around this.

Someone saying it was better in the 80s - yes that would be when I was told to my face I wouldn't be getting the job as at 26 I would be having babies any minute - more than once

If you ever get the chance to use a time machine don't go back to the period 1950-70s and expect financial stability ( unless you accept absolute rock bottom as stable) and the workplace in your favour. I certainly don't want to go back.

And as for being a single mother in the 1950s and 60s... Just think of how many young women were forced to give up their babies for adoption.

Mention was made to the 3 day working week. This was between 1 January and 8 March 1974, so just over two months rather than years or the whole decade.

YTS was not introduced until the 80s. Before then apprenticeships were the norm and unemployed school leavers could sign on. Hence counted in the stats. YTS was never about providing employment. It was designed to reduce unemployment figures.

It was successful in this regard.

It also meant that employers no longer had to recruit apprentices or 'juniors' or pay them (with benefits like sick and holiday) but could dispose of them after 6 months with no questions asked and recruit a fresh one. There was a social impact. You could be treated like shit.

My own experience was awful. My first YTS in a small local accountancy firm I was sexually assaulted by a graduate trainee. My second went bankrupt but I was recruited to a third where I was disposed of for not showing my gratitude with sexual favours to the boss - his youngest son had been in my class at school. Grim. This was all within 9 months of leaving school.
I was still only 16.

Luckily, education grants still existed and I could afford to backtrack out of this and go to college, get qualifications, work, get a degree, masters.
Yes the 'perps' were free to abuse someone else but, personally, I don't think I would have been able to backtrack if all I had available was a 30k loan and me too/court.

So no rose coloured glasses here. Just an understanding that what allowed me to escape is no longer there.

I don’t think the financial side of stuff was great, though I was only a kid in the 70s so didn’t take on board finance stuff much. But I remember things being tough for a lot of people, a lot of poverty. My parents were both teachers (though mum was part time) and we did not have much disposable income.

So clothes were second hand, only had one car, dad used to make yoghurts to save money. Stuff was more expensive though I guess. Certainly wouldn’t have had spare money for take aways, etc. A new book was a rare treat.

There was a 3 day week due to electricity shortages and that really impacted on wages. I remember being cold a lot because my parents couldn’t afford heating. When my parents married in the early 70s they had no furniture and sat on deck chairs in the house for the first year while they saved for a sofa.

If anyone had told me that song lyrics would be censored or women called, 'people who menstruate' I would have thought it a joke.

Because menstruation was so shameful it couldn't be discussed in polite society. It was all whispers and secrets. So shameful that sanitary products weren't even allowed to be advertised and girls were brought up to be ashamed of their bodily functions.

@FatCatThinCat

If anyone had told me that song lyrics would be censored or women called, 'people who menstruate' I would have thought it a joke.

Because menstruation was so shameful it couldn't be discussed in polite society. It was all whispers and secrets. So shameful that sanitary products weren't even allowed to be advertised and girls were brought up to be ashamed of their bodily functions.

I was born in 1953 and there were Tampax ads when I was a child.