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.

Loving this thread as as I born mid sixties so grew up in this era.

Call the Midwife is an excellent view of this era - moving from seriously poor, to those gradually lifting their way out of poverty. Imagine being a stevedore in the docks queuing up every single day for a job, or being his wife, wondering how much of his wages survived the pub.

Funnily enough, I was just chatting to DD today about the 3-day week. Apparently with men having more leisure time, they started to become more hands-on at home. Silver lining with every cloud.

Grants rather than student loans

I would love more social housing, I live in Scotland where we have halted the sell off of council properties so we have more than the rest of the UK but in some areas it is really limited and poor quality.

I like the fact that there seemed to be a lot more job security for the working classes in the 80s. The men in my area all seemed to work in the dockyard or another one or two big employers and could support a family on one wage.

I love punk music and Abba too!

Apart from that I don't want to go back to that period of time. It was legal for a man to rape his wife until 1992 so it shows how far we have come in women's rights that now it would be both legally and societally wrong.

@woodhill

Grants rather than student loans

Working class paying for the education of the 3% (many Hooray Henry’s)

No not true, where did you dream that one up?

No point in looking back.

Think it's very disingenuous that people are replying to a question about the postwar consensus/welfare state with "ah but sexism existed in the past" or "not a lot of people went to university" when OP's point was they didn't need to! "We can't have stable jobs and housing because back when we did women couldn't have bank accounts" is the absolute worst kind of liberal crap.

@VestaTilley

No, we couldn’t go back.

And I don’t mean to be rude, OP- but you’re talking from a place of total ignorance. The 1950s-1970s were an absolutely shit time in which to be poor, old or female.

Until the 1990s rape within marriage was not illegal in this country.

Degrees counted for a lot because barely anyone except upper middle class and upper class people got to study for them. When I saw upper middle class I mean children of doctors, barristers and bankers - it was out of the reach of millions, even if you were brainy.

Sexual harassment of girls and women was rife, as was paedophilia as we now know. Most women got forced out of the labour market as soon as they got pregnant.

House prices may have been low, but interest rates were eye wateringly high, as was (at times) inflation and unemployment.

They were not better times to live in than we live in now, and if you think they were then you’re a bit of a fool. Learn your own history.

Still, we’ve No Deal Brexit around the corner, so you’re probably about to get a taste for it.

I don't agree with your education point, @VestaTilley. It's complicated. Lots of on the one hand, on the other hand points to be made.

• After WW2 the school leaving age was put up from 14 to 15 and all children were guaranteed free secondary education from 11-15 after 6 years in a primary school, rather than 9 years in an elementary school.

• However, most of those kids ended up in secondary modern schools which were often housed in former elementary schools and staffed by poorly qualified teachers with very limited facilities for science, technology etc. Not many took school leaving qualifications or stayed on after the minimum leaving age. Not much chance to transfer to grammar school.

• Grammar schools were free to all who passed the 11+, but the test was a lot easier to pass if you came from a middle class background. Working class children who did get into grammar school often felt like a fish out of water and were pressured to leave their working class roots behind. Lots left at 15 and didn't fulfil their potential.

• More affluent parents whose children failed the 11+ didn't settle for the secondary modern schools so some private schools found a useful niche in mopping up the less academic children.

• Comprehensive schools came in as a result of pressure from middle class families who didn't want their children to fail the 11+. Also a feeling that the grammar schools were often stuck in the past and cut price versions of the public schools. Unfortunately funding didn't match the ideals of having schools that would cater for every ability and background.

However, even having said all that, social mobility was far better from the 40s through to the 80s than it is now. If you were bright and could cope in the grammar school environment, or had the luck to go to a good comprehensive school or to be in the top stream in a decent secondary modern, on leaving school you could get into a profession or a vocational training scheme or go to university, training college or polytechnic without incurring any debt.

The sad thing is that many members of the generation that benefited from all of this pulled up the ladder behind them. They moved to the immediate vicinity of good comprehensives or into grammar school areas and made it harder for working class children to get into decent state schools than it was in the 50s. Or they sent their children to private schools. They happily accepted tax cuts, generous pension schemes with early retirement options, and cashed in on massive house price inflation, but the generation below is left with insecure jobs, poor pension provision, and far less chance of buying a home.

I'm at the tail end of the baby boomer generation and am guilty of some of the above. All I can say is I didn't vote for this.

We'd have to vote in more socialist policies of the type which had a great effect in the 40s, but people are morons and still susceptible to cold war propaganda conflating social democracy with marxism.

This is the problem with some people in this country is this constant looking back instead of forward.

Working class paying for the education of the 3% (many Hooray Henry’s)

So what?
People with degrees, esp back then, paid a hell of alot more tax, plus we need degree educated people to do the things we rely on.

Now we have a graduate nurse owing 50k, so they can look after the very people who haven't got large debt but benefited from many of the positives in the 50s and 60s.

There were definitely more opportunities for financial support in education

If you did a nursing course at 16 there was nurses accommodation provided and feee training

I understand your nostalgia, but we have to fight for these things, they weren't just given to us. Communities must organise. And not virtually, in real life. We have to stop demonizing scapegoats and realise what working pp have in common.

Divide and rule has been a ( very effective) common tactic for eons. Thatcher was famous for saying, there's no such thing as society. Well this pandemic has shown that to be total bullshit. What are pp prepared to do to effect real change?

I think if you think it was easy in the 50s to 70s you need to do some research and get a reality check. I grew up in this period and can tell you it was not easy at all. Do you realise that in the early 60's you needed to put down around a third of the value of the house to get a mortgage? My parents bought their first house in 1961. My mother did 3 part-time jobs for many years to help save for their deposit. She worked in a factory part-time , a pub and did outsourced work until the early hours. She worked her fingers to the bone to save for their deposit. My father was a civil servant but at the lower end of the scale. We lived on next to nothing so they could save for the deposit. There were not the luxuries we have half today.

If you had a career or were a teacher for example, as a women you had to leave your job when you married. Many jobs for women were lowly paid and they were paid lower than men for doing the same work. Mothers who worked were looked down upon. The post war views on child rearing were dominated by the work of John Bowlby's attachment theory with its centrality of the role of the mother in child rearing. It was never an easy time financially. There was no childcare. If you were lucky you had family near by to help out. However many people had to move for work or were displaced because of bomb damage and wholesale slum clearance.

Many people lived in substandard rented accommodation with outside toilets. Times were hard. It may have been easy for the top echelons of society or upper middle classes but not for the average family. There was a huge housing crisis in the early 1960s because the standard of housing. This led to the building of high rise flats using new building techniques that within 2 decades were found to be substandard. Many of these high rises have since been demolished. A seminal film at the the time was Cathy Come Home which shocked the nation because it was based upon many people's realities.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cathy_Come_Home

A small anecdote, having gained 3 A levels my first job was in the Civel Service, I earned the grand sum of £7.50 a week. My husband and I bought our first home in the 1970s at a time when there was rampant inflation, the oil crisis, the 3 day week. Our mortgage rate was at 10%. House ownership rose in the 1980s with the availability of 100% mortgages when high earning single people were suddenly able to buy their own homes. This was unknown for most people in previous generations. Reality hit again when the mortgage rate went up to 15% for a while in the early 1990s. Lots of people lost their homes and many ended up with negative equity in this period.

My point is that there has never really been an easy time. If you think there was you have rose tinted glasses. The minority may have sailed through but most have found it hard at times during their lives.

Civil not Civel!!

*Would you also want to go back to:

• Married women forced out of work?
• Women openly treated as sex objects in the workplace and legally paid less than men?
• Girls not allowed to study the same subjects as boys in school?
• Abortion against the law?
• A boring range of food choices (eg no olive oil)? Although we might well come back to that with a no deal Brexit*

Pregnant women are still forced out of jobs
Women are still treated as sex objects at work and are still paid less than men
Girls are still bullied for taking ‘boys’ subjects
Abortion still isn’t available on demand
Butter is nicer than olive oil

OP - You do realise that in the 1950/60s, most adults didn't have their own teeth. Gay people were imprisoned. Illegitimate children - as young as five - were sent by the tens of thousands (Child Migrant Scheme) to work as (effectively) slave labour, in Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and Zimbabwe.

That's what happens with progression.

MIL left school at 15, as did most of her peers. I went to university, as did most of my peers. Our standards have raised.

People earn more, so things are worth more because people are willing and ABLE to pay more.

More people get higher education, your employability has always been comparative to your peers, your peers have better education now, so you need even better education.

Honestly don’t understand why people post stuff like this. Are they just trying to wind others up. Of course you know what is was like, unless you have never met anyone who lived through those decades. You can recreate it...turn out your lights and sit in the dark

+Child Migrant Scheme. More than 100,00 children were exported from the UK between the 1930's and 1970s.

Women didn't routinely leave jobs when they got married in the 70s. I'm going by my teachers at school, who usually changed their names but carried on until they were heavily pregnant with their first child. Very unusual to come back to the job back then. We had one teacher who was Miss Smith at the end of the summer term. When we came back for the autumn term she had suddenly become (a) Mrs Brown and (b) heavily pregnant. She was one of the first teachers in the school to take advantage of statutory maternity leave and return to her job. That was late 70s.

Different story in the 50s, of course. My MIL had to leave the Civil Service after 20 years' service when she got married. She got another job, though, in an office in the City. By the 70s the Civil Service was contacting all its ex-employees to find out if they'd like to come back part-time or full-time, so she did.

Oh god no!!!!! Born early 70,s my mum was a single parent .., good on her tbf

But it was absolutely shit..... my sisters look back on it with fondness but also shudder do our kids had to go through that 🥶🥶🥶😳

@Sarahandduck18

*Would you also want to go back to:

• Married women forced out of work?
• Women openly treated as sex objects in the workplace and legally paid less than men?
• Girls not allowed to study the same subjects as boys in school?
• Abortion against the law?
• A boring range of food choices (eg no olive oil)? Although we might well come back to that with a no deal Brexit*

Pregnant women are still forced out of jobs
Women are still treated as sex objects at work and are still paid less than men
Girls are still bullied for taking ‘boys’ subjects
Abortion still isn’t available on demand
Butter is nicer than olive oil

ALL OF THIS!!! No way would I want any of that fit my daughters it was bloody shit

'people who grew up during these periods generally did well for themselves.'

Er....the children who were shipped off to Australia, forced to work on farms, and hideously sexually and physically abused in Catholic orphanages might disagree with you.

I don't want to go back to the 70's but I think the 90's were pretty epic. I had free uni education, and a grant. I left uni owing under £4K. Free to travel and travel was cheap. Housing was expensive but affordable and mortgages were easy to obtain in the main. Clothes and food were affordable. Comparatively wages were much higher than now.