I was talking to a friend the other night. We're both 65 and when we were at university and just after we hit the 78-9 so-called winter of discontent.
A poster has, as have many, mis-quoted Maggie as saying society didn't exist. She did say 'there is no such thing as society' meaning that we are all individuals and we all have a responsibility to those around us. It was how she'd been brought up, as were we all. Church-going was very high (there wasn't much else to do on a Sunday) and people noticed when old Mrs Smith hadn't been seen doing her usual things.
I can remember thinking that the community charge was a good thing. Wat Tyler led the peasants' revolt with no taxation without representation and in the 80s it was the other way around. I can remember that Hestletine's rates on his Georgian town house were half of ours on a 30s house in Trafford. Next door to us lived an elderly widow, opposite a family with 3 grown up sons in their 20s all working. The amount they paid for local services was the same and the houses would have been worth around £40k. It was an attempt to address the problem of voting in expensive social policies in local elections and then sitting back and letting everyone else pay for them.
My ex-bil worked in the direct works dept of a city council. After 2 years, he became staff with a local govt final salary pension for 6% contribution. He walked out, the family's attitude being that they weren't going to give him a pay rise to compensate. He stayed out of work until he'd got back what he'd paid in his NI and tax or ran out of entitlement, doing foreigners with materials stolen from his former employers. The NHS was the same. Working at a biscuit factory one of the girls on the line used to take orders for her boyfriend's business. He was a hospital chef, and ran a mobile chicken in the basket service to local pubs using food from Walton and Fazakerley hospital kitchens.
Having lunch in a nurse's home as a guest on a Saturday there were only a few of us, meals being paid for by ticket. There was a dish piled high with potato croquettes, about 30 or so. I was warned to only have 3. The cook went off for the weekend after Saturday lunch, and fed her family for the weekend on the so-called left-overs.
Each and every government borrows dirty tricks from another whether another country or another party.
Frank Field was sacked for thinking the unthinkable. Enoch Powell was a classic's don talking about the Rivers of the Tiber foaming with so much blood, and vilified. He only ever took a pay rise when elected, and once elected did not take any rise until the next General election.
Britain was bankrupt in 1979. Heath, who was an idiot, called an election on Who governs the country? Me or the miners? He lost. The vast majority of his generation, all Oxbridge educated, came from modest backgrounds, but went to grammar schools and then to Oxford. Harold Wilson was a fraud with his Bradford origins. He went to Wirral Grammar school in Higher Bebington. Glenda Jackson, from 'Liverpool', grew up in Hoylake and lived 400yds away from Rt Hon Selwyn Lloyd MP.
Those on the gravy train do very nicely and make sure that if they've used a ladder to get to their lofty position, that they pull it up after them to stop others having the same benefits.
Martin Bell, elected to Tatton on an anti-corruption ticket won an absolute majority of over 50% of the electorate and only served 1 term leaving it wide open for the idiot Gideon who blew the lid off the pensions by allowing people to take all the cash out to fuel a spending boom.
The week that Hamilton won his case against Hislop and Private Eye, a paper shop in Knutsford just happened to have 1 copy of that week's 'Eye' in the window, surrounded by a circle of little brown envelopes. Nothing else.
A friend at Uni was spat at in the face in the Union Bar, the Barnes Wallis building, by 2 Irish blokes in their 20s. Why? She had a very strong Belfast accent. She went to UMIST to avoid the troubles, having lost 2 of her friends in the UVI, blown to bits by the Freedom Fighters of the IRA. Such big strong men in their 20s, spitting, literally, their venom into the face of an 18 year old girl.
There are some really good people, and there are some right shits.
In the 80s the top rate of income tax was 99%, to pay for the national debt. Maggie dropped it to 40%, and the government's tax take rocketed. It wasn't worth paying an accountant to reduce the bills any more.
However, when the gulf between the have's getting £2k a month to do nothing, and the have nots of the dinner ladies threatened with losing the 'high' pension next year because of a £5/week occupational pension, you have a recipe for enormous social unrest.
In France, you get GPs on an 80k€ pension working to earn another one asking where you choose to shop, divorced from the reality of 'normal people's lives, of where you can afford to, you have a petrol drum and a lighted match. My own GP has told me not to carry any heavy weights..... no shopping delivery, nearest shop 3 miles, nearest supermarket 4 miles, Lidl/Aldi 8-9 miles, she seems to think I must drive 20 miles a day on free diesel to do shopping for 1 or 2 days.
She's a good GP, but has made assumptions about my income that have over-estimated it by a factor of 10. Maybe in France I'd have a pension of 40k€, but I don't. It's a tenth of that having worked from the age of 20 and before transfer, except for govt schemes, was impossible and even after 4, nearly 5, years, the contributions are held to benefit current workers.
Still it's nearly the October 2 week half-term. Means we're due a channel port blockade, especially if Mme can't buy the clothes at 0%vat in Tesco for the kids during the holidays.
Even at the port, it depends on the individual police officer as at the airports. Some accept the paper version, some don't.
Think it depends on the way they were potty-trained as much as anything rational.