to think we are entering a new age of feudalism

[shjjhs12]

Only a few generations ago home ownership was an absolute rite of passage, even the most average job could support an entire family, living standards were good, the retirement age was 65, a 9-5 really was just a 9-5, ect. Today things look completely different. Young people are forced to live at home until their mid 20s as it’s too expensive to move out, home ownership is becoming more and more unrealistic, both parents working far more hours still struggles to maintain a good standard of living, driving is becoming very expensive, holidays are becoming unattainable, fewer people are getting married and having children because of how expensive it is. Today the lives of many people have become far more meaningless with very little to show for, many of us are now just cogs in the machine making money for someone we will never meet. Living standards are materially getting far worse for the majority of people yet the wealth of the super rich keeps growing to the point where now 0.1% of people control massive corporations more powerful than some countries. Anyone else feel like we are entering a new age of feudalism where effectively everyone apart from the super rich is being reduced to a peasant class.

It's a tough one! I think we want more. We all want a house with two toilets, foreign holidays. Take outs, phone contracts etc. These were all unheard of.

Yeah, mobile phones and internet have not been invented. Now let's say you're unemployed today. How are you supposed to even look for work without a phone?

Absolutely.
child I’d the 1970s here and my parents were the first generation of home owners. In their families. My Nan “ owned “ her last house thry moved into when he retired but only , as I discovered after mum died , because mum and her sister really bought it between them .

so assuming my kids don’t buy ( eldest part owns a flat with me - a bit of pay it forward with my mums inheritance money ) then it’s only my parents and my generation that have owned

Growing up in Scotland (north coast) in the 50s and in the Midlands in the 50s my DPs and friends etc were POOR. DM's lunch was a CUP OF COCOA. For lunch. Occasionally it sould be soup. All consumed standing up in the hall ways. DM's DPs' were tennant farmers, so at least had decent food at home and our fishing industry was still providing seafood straight to this country, not all the mucking zbout you have today, but there were kids even poorer than DM, didn't have SHOES.
DF had a grindingly poor upbringing in the midlands. His DF dies young and He and his brothers had to graft as kids and also go to school.
When i realised what poverty meant back then, for my DP, now in their 70s, it hurt my fucking soul. If still does, to think of them as starvi g, cold children and the many like them.
Yes, life might be tough right now and the shit thing is the wealth divide and constantly having our noses rubbed in ie. The billions spent on the Queen's funeral etc. Money being squandered left right and centre, no body accountable, corruption, greed, it is endless and with no end in sight (though Kier is starting to show vague signs of life, though will be largely unelectable until he stops his gender ID bullshit, so we'll end up with more of the criminally corrupt Tories come GE time). But bloody hell, it's not anywhere NEAR as bad as it was in my DPs' generation's lifetime. Not even close.

This happens a lot on Mumsnet.
It also makes me laugh when posters write 'I expressed/communicated to my DP' instead of 'I said' and other such over complicated shite.
Unless a poster is writing up a law, the more complicated the sentence-the dimmer they usually are.

We're entering a new age of such poor education, people don't even know their own history.

Home ownership was never a rite of passage in UK, and whatever shit we're in now is NOT feudalism, "peasantry" or anything remotely resembling either.

Absolutely right. Feudalism yes. In feudal times the lords of the manor and the barons forced their serfs to fight for their causes.No one in their right mind would lay down their lives to protect what this country stands for. The people who fought in the Second World War from the UK believed they were fighting a war for a righteous cause and that afterwards they’d live in a fair and just society. What a joke. Everything that was achieved then - social housing, good health care, free education - all dismantled and destroyed by the Tories.

A secure home still being something that is precarious and out of reach for many, in a supposedly highly developed country seems to sum up everything that is wrong with how society has and is being run. It really is as simple as that, I think.

Living like that was miserable was it? Only with the exception of central heating, it sounds pretty normal now. Except that you don’t get the family asset of an owned house at the end. People work all hours now to get this standard with private rentals, and we don’t know what happens at the end when this generation rent gets to retirement age.

My parents had their own home in the 70s but like a PP has said we didn't have/do anywhere near as much as people today do. We did Brownies, we had chocolate once a week, we had more or less the same meals every week, roast, egg and chips, faggots, stew , chops , corned beef mash and beans. Sausage and chips.

Fruit that was in season. If we wanted a snack it was bread and jam. Cinema was a very rare treat. We always had to wait until Xmas day to watch the years big blockbuster movie. Didn't need to worry about screen time because kids programs ended at 5 for crossroads.

It was also difficult for a woman to get a mortgage. If a woman wanted finance of any kind: mortgage, car loan, HP, she had to be vouched for by a man, usually a father or husband. Mortgages were particularly hard to come by. This right up until the 1970s.

Council houses were the most prevalent forms of housing but there was other public housing too. My DF was a headmaster in a state school and we lived in a school house. There were police houses and sometimes housing for district nurses or GPs, especially in rural areas. New towns offered council housing as an incentive for certain jobs like teaching or public sector employment. My GPs rented (and later bought) a house from the Church Commissioners. The C of E were big landlords, but they've sold off much of their housing stock. We thought of ourselves as MC, but my parents never owned a house until they retired, and only a few the people we mixed with were homeowners. So not a rite of passage.

Council houses were secure houses though. Private rents were too, until the very end of the 1980s. And the rent was regulated. Imagine that now!

This isn't the WT is it?

We need a Labour government who will share assets out fairer than it’s been happened MH for the last 12 years.

Not if the Tories stay in

How many people do you know to be able to confidently say that?

people I’m friends with do a lot but that’s because I mix with people on higher incomes. Those on lower incomes most certainly do not.

In historical terms, home ownership became the norm after WW2. Before that most people had occupational accommodation and there was a private welfare arrangement that went with that but was adhoc. For example, most people before WW1 were in service. They lived in cottages owned by large estates, often from cradle to grave. School teachers lived onsite, the local bank manager lived in a house that belonged to the bank etc. Property wasn't as expensive as it is now and it wasn't an investment opportunity, so people quite literally didn't feel the need to own their own home. The first social housing was built in the 19th century in urban areas because the migration from rural areas to cities created a huge need for housing. The first council housing as we know it today was created after WW2 and was not means-tested. It was for returning soldiers. It was also meant to be a home for life and the right to live there could be inherited by the next generation, but not indefinitely. The most dramatic changes started in the 1990s when the amount people could borrow changed and this was linked to changed in the banking arrangements between high street banks and the Bank of London. Once banks could lend multiple times the annual salaries of two people, house prices inevitably rose to the maximum a working couple could cope with borrowing. Right now, the main driver is foreign investment in British domestic housing. There are vast swathes of new homes being bought by foreign pension schemes. With the weak pound this will only get worse. Unless the government puts some sort of restriction on this, we are looking at a future in which we all have foreign landlords who don't pay tax here. It is not a pretty sight.

Bank of England. Not London. It is has been a long day.

Thats exactly the problem

Home ownership became a necessity once the private market for rrents outnumbered social housing. Private rentals provide no stability, expensive, poor standards.

There needs to be a huge huge social housing building programme, probably about 3 million to be built I think.

You are literally proving my point about extrapolating from your own very limited experience. Everyone you might have known might have had lovely gardens and pets, and social housing or mortgages, that doesn't mean the whole country was the same! If you look at the stats I linked to, it shows that the proportion of people in private rents have always exceeded council housing.

Perhaps they might not always have been so expensive (but they often were similar in terms of percentage of income) but they would also have been in horrendous condition. There are some private rentals (and some council ones!0 in bad condition today but nowhere like the millions living in slum housing in victorian/early to even mid 20th century.

home ownership was an absolute rite of passage, even the most average job could support an entire family, living standards were good, the retirement age was 65, a 9-5 really was just a 9-5, ect

But this was only a very brief time, roughly from about 1960 to early 2000s.

Before World War 2 none of the above was true. Poverty was serious and common (some people starved to death), many people died of what we'd now think of as Third World diseases. My oldest aunts and uncles all grew up malformed by rickets, through simple lack of food.

The welfare state, especially the NHS, started improving people's lives in the late 1940s. But food was still rationed until well into the 1950s.

And by th the few decades of widespread prosperity, the insane rise in house prices started bleeding everyone. So mad, and so unnecessary.

londonist.com/2015/02/worlds-oldest-council-estate-at-125-then-and-now

Hi OP it looks like you are not coming back, but I just wanted to say I thought your post was very interesting and I've really enjoyed the debate you have prompted. It may have been a typo, but just in case it wasn't, it's actually etc and not ect as I see so often on here. Genuinely not trying to be goady, but just wanted to flag in case you were not aware.

And by the end of the 1980s, during those few decades of widespread prosperity, ...

Even people who have managed to buy have to ensure the horrors of feudal leaseholds

@verdantverdure
I think the difference is that unaffordable private rent is the norm now.

Ah, I see you have not heard of the midnight flit then? Rents have always been unaffordable for many hence the slums, squatting and midnight flits.