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.

Be nice to go back to a time when you could quit your job at lunchtime & have another by teatime. I can remember my dad having an argument with a manager at work, going round the corner on his lunchbreak & handing his notice in when he went back. He started his new job the following Monday with the council works department, had a works van & as long as he got the work done was his own boss.

The living conditions for a lot of people were not good . No heating except a coal fire or stove in one room( which had to be lit before you had hot water ) , bath once a week in front of the fire , outdoor toilet if you were lucky , leaving school at 14/15 to go to a job your parents found for you . Money for food and basic clothes , one pair of shoes at a time . No luxuries , no eating out , no holidays . And fecking twin tub washing machines. It was hell .

And teachers who could cane you because you cried on your first day of school or because your joint ‘p ‘ wasn’t quite perfect !

Go lightly - you’ll probably find that your doctor and lawyer friends who don’t have a good lifestyle are living or have bought a house far above their means . If a doctor or lawyer today can’t have a good life then the rest of us are buggered .
People are very good at hiding what life was like . They mostly want to forget .

I didn't miss the point. The point you were making was that you want to continue to use language which has been deemed offensive for quite some time now. Because in the good old days you could be as offensive as you liked, apart from the taboo things which nobody was supposed to talk about.

What offensive language did she use? She was objecting to the terms 'cis women' and 'people who menstruate' in place of 'women'.

Given that the word 'women' has been used all over this thread to refer to biological women only, I hardly think she is using outdated and offensive language. Unless you were referring to something else I didn't pick up on.

Anyway, I don't have much to contribute to this thread as I didn't live through the 60s and 70s. I would say I agree with a PP that our idea of poverty has been skewed. Most people today have inside toilets, access to a washing machine (at a launderette at the very least) and free basic healthcare.

My dad in the 40s and 50s had an outside toilet and had to rip up newspaper to use as toilet paper. My mother came from a more middle class background but she went to school in the 50s with some kids who were barefoot in the summer because their parents couldn't afford to buy them shoes.

My paternal grandparents had their teeth pulled out and replaced with dentures once the NHS came along so they didn't have to deal with the problems their teeth caused them.

Today we have inequality. However, standards of living as a whole have risen. The vast, vast majority of people in this country have basic sanitation, healthcare and clothing. Not everyone did in the 50s and early 60s.

Family in America were shocked at how bad things were at the time in Britain when they watched Call the Midwife.

I agree with the PP. Back in the 50's my nana was in an abusive marriage. For example my Granddad would threaten her with a gun and force her to stand outside all night in the rain in the middle of winter. The police would just take away his gun then return it to him once he had calmed down/sobered up. There was no womens aid.

When she finally managed to get divorced. She had next to nothing. She ended up living in the "affordable housing" mentioned in the op with her children. It was a slum that the council knew was not fit for habitation. She ended up taking the council to court. She won and was responsible for a housing law.

Do I want to go back to this, no !

Food was rationed until 1954

Make do & mend

No contraceptive pill

No mortgage or pension available to women

Little spare money for holidays or luxuries

Little independence or opportunities for women

Boy there are some rose tinted specs on here. Born 1959, working class, grammar school, uni and then Chartered Accountant.
I remember my dad dropping a bottle of sherry. It was a major thing as it was a special treat to cheer up mum after grandad died. He died abroad and she couldn't afford to go to his funeral.
The grammar school was entirely white until the area changed to comprehensive when I was in the 4th form.
My mum went to college to train as a teacher but got a reduced grant as a married woman.
As a poor kid at grammar my uniform was bought a size too big and worn until I was virtually bursting out of it. I was mocked mercilessly , had my head flushed down the loos and the Head refused to believe me and I got detention for having wet hair in class.
One of my class mates was consistently late for school as she was expected to look after her 5 younger siblings and get them to school. There was zero pastoral support, she regularly got detention for lateness.
Sexism and racism were the norm in the workplace. Look back at 70s comedies. That language was every day.

@GarlicMonkey

All that was good in the 50s - 70s was built on the back of women's subservience & free labour. It was only 'good' for men. I blooming well hope that we don't go back to it.

My mother gave my father a dog's life in the 1960s. He stood by her and stayed married to her because Society told him that was the right thing to do. Many men were prisoners of the system too. Like you, Garlic Monkey, I have no desire to go back.

I was born mid 60s, my father was a lorry driver and my mother did part time cleaning work as there were no nurseries and that was one of the only jobs which fitted around school hours. They owned their own home but they only got by being very thrifty. A word I don't think many understand now. Everything was home cooked, my mother mended anything she could, darning socks, putting a stitch in a hole in her tights so they lasted longer. My mother also took in washing (lots of households without laundry facilities at the time). Holidays were non existent and days out rare with a thermos flask and a picnic. I don't remember money being short, we were able to go on school trips and always had uniform etc but not a penny was wasted.

My father worked a lot of hours and my mother looked after my brother and I, our home and various other older aunts, grannies etc. It may not have been ideal but there was a lot to be said for clearly defined roles, particularly when I read about bickering on MN about whose 'turn' it is to get up to a baby.

So yes, people on very modest incomes could afford to buy their own properties but not without sacrifices that I don't think people would be happy to make nowadays.

I don’t think we could “go back”, as lives have changed irreversibly.
But I think I see what you are getting at, and I think the only way to ensure that people are able to return to a living wage (i.e. to be able to spend a maximum of one-third of their take-home pay on rent/mortgage) is to introduce a rent cap, by area, of a maximum amount that can be charged per square metre, at a lower rate than currently, and with MASSIVE fines for people found charging or subletting at more than that.
This would have the effect of releasing BTL properties where the renter is paying the rentier’s mortgage and then some, and would unfortunately have an adverse effect on those who buy to let as a career, as well as newer home owners.
The problem is, as always, some people would lose out, whether it’s rentiers, or home owners who discover that their house price has fallen because there are surplus homes on the market.
It’s a tough one, definitely, but if anyone has a better idea it would be good to hear...

I've had younger people say to me that as a generation we were lucky because housing was cheaper and Uni was free, without taking account of any of the differences between the 70s and now.

The council housing in particular grinds my gears because of the MN insistence that it was for people who "couldn't afford to buy". There was a huge house building programme between the wars, when most of the housing stock in this country was refreshed, both private and council. The wealthy have always bought housing but my parents generation (born during the war) was the first to aspire to mass home ownership; my grandparents generation all rented.

One set of grandparents lived their entire lives in one street of 2 up/2 down terraced houses. They rented but didn't qualify for council housing, so I've no idea who they rented from. The other set got a council house in 1936. They had to go to the council and prove that grandad had a steady job and could afford the rent, and that they were of good standing in the community.

At primary school in the early 70s my friends thought we were rich because we had a phone, a colour TV and a car, and we went abroad on holiday. The phone was provided by football because my DF was a referee and needed to be contacted, TV rented from Radio Rentals, and the car only came out of the garage at weekends for a trip to town for the weekly shop then off to a cricket/football match in the afternoons.

My parents did house swaps through an agency where we went abroad by car & ferry and the people whose house we went to stayed at ours. There were many years when they rented out the house in the summer and we went camping in the UK! I hated the preparation of getting the house ready and hated even more the thought of someone in my room touching my things and sleeping in my bed.

I left school in 1979 and went into the Civil Service. I'd only been there a few weeks when there was a complete ban on recruitment for a year or so, so I was the youngest for a very long time. Friends who left school after me were offered YTS and although it was clearly slave labour, got the chance to try things that hadn't been an option for me. Careers options for "bright" girls at my school were banking, civil service, teaching.

Our school had an intake of 360 per year yet there were only about 40 in the 6th form spread across Upper and Lower Sixth. Only 4 in our year went to actual university (to become doctors) but each one of those kids had "professional" parents and lived in the big houses in the nice area. The others either went to work after A levels or to polytechnic/college.

Got married in 1983 and bought a house based on a 10% deposit and a mortgage calculated on 2.5 times DH earnings and 1 x mine, even though I was the higher earner. The Bank said we didn't earn enough to borrow the £18k we needed but luckily we'd signed up for a scheme with them and saved enough money that they had to lend it to us under their own T&Cs. Had we not done that then we wouldn't have been able to afford a house - it wasn't easy even then. On that formula we could have borrowed only £11k.

Left work to have a baby in 1985. They had just started offering the option to come back to work and our maternity leave was good for the time; 18 weeks paid leave taken 11 weeks before the birth to 6 weeks after. What on earth you were supposed to do with a 6 week old baby I don't know as there wasn't the childcare provision there is now. I left, and eventually went out to work again in 1990 when DH and I could work shifts around the children. I had 4 months off with DC4 in 1991 because the car broke down and we couldn't afford to fix it so I had to go back to work.

All 4 went to playgroup which was mornings only and we had to pay for. DC4 was offered a term of funded pre-school the summer term before he started school for 5 afternoons a week. That was all the childcare we got.

@Bewilderedkitten

I agree with the PP. Back in the 50's my nana was in an abusive marriage. For example my Granddad would threaten her with a gun and force her to stand outside all night in the rain in the middle of winter. The police would just take away his gun then return it to him once he had calmed down/sobered up. There was no womens aid.

When she finally managed to get divorced. She had next to nothing. She ended up living in the "affordable housing" mentioned in the op with her children. It was a slum that the council knew was not fit for habitation. She ended up taking the council to court. She won and was responsible for a housing law.

Well Done your Nana, Bewildered Kitten! She was a brave, resilient woman. It is tempting to say young people have no idea what life was like within living memory but unfortunately it is not true now. It is horrible to think how much silent suffering is going on in small flats and houses were there is unemployment or low wages and children are not getting education and not enough to eat with no access to outside space or warm enough clothes in this cold weather. And Probably the one escape they do have in watching TV or looking at the Internet is just going to rub their faces in their circumstances.

Seems so much like the 70s to me except we could go out much more easily, there were libraries and parks open, and we knew so much less about those so much better off there was not so much to be envious of.