I remember the 1970’s, I remember the political turmoil, the year of two general elections, the industrial strife, the dreadful economic situation, the feeling that the country was done for was quite widespread and the country was in such a bad way that it led to the decision of the British people in 1979 to elect the Tories under Margaret Thatcher to lead the country. But were the 1970’s really that bad for ordinary people? I can certainly recall older working class people angry at being denied work and therefore earnings because of strikes, some official union backed strikes and some unofficial ones and this leading to them wanting something different in government even if that difference was Margaret Thatcher with all that she represented. But, as the author and commentator Paul Embery points out, despite everything that was bad at that time there was also a lot of good. People could, as Mr Embery said know that they would be able to get public housing or know that hard work both in education and employment would bring rewards and that public services such as the health service and communal goods such as parks etc would be run reasonably well.
We can’t in all honesty say that we as Britons would be able to access public housing in a fair and just manner nor expect decent service from health services or that the other public services and public and communal goods would be well run. We cannot even tell our children, as parents in the 1970’s could do that if they work hard do the right thing then they would benefit.
Mr Embery said in a piece on his Substack:
"*
I am just about old enough to remember the tail end of the decade. I grew up in a well-built and affordable home on a sprawling council estate (once the largest public housing project in the world) in the borderlands of east London and Essex. My parents experienced no problems securing the tenancy. In fact, when they had reached the top of the housing list – in pretty short order, so I’m told – they literally drove around the estate, made a note of any properties that looked vacant, and then contacted the council and put in a bid for their preferred choice. We moved in shortly thereafter.
Purchasing a home privately was also a comfortably affordable exercise in those days, with the house-price-to-income ratio a little over a third of what it is today.
What today’s families struggling to get on the first rung of the housing ladder would give for such luxuries.
My dad had a steady blue-collar job in the 1970s. We enjoyed a perfectly decent standard of living – including owning a car and taking an annual holiday – on his wages alone. Mum kept the home and raised the kids. The fridge was always stocked.
If we were sick, we would just rock up to the GP surgery and wait to be seen. There was no lengthy wait for an appointment. GPs would even make house calls during the night.*"
Read the rest of Mr Embery’s excellent piece via the link below:
https://www.paulembery.com/p/is-britain-heading-back-to-the-1970s
Mr Embery is correct in his assessment of the differences between then and now. Britons had services that worked for them and which they could rely on and sometimes be proud of. Sadly that’s not the case today. Decades of bad political decisions have all but destroyed that world that Mr Embery speaks about. Our parks are now often places of dread filled with miscreants both home grown and imported, we cannot rely on being able to see a GP quickly even in an emergency, the NHS is such a mess that it could reasonably be called a failed organisation and we did not have a situation like today where 48% of public housing in London is occupied by foreign born occupiers.
Without a doubt there were some aspects of the 1970’s that were unbelievably shit. There were National Front nutcases running around the streets, gay pubs regularly got raided by the police, women were in theory equal but not always in practice and in some industries, such as printing, you could not get a job without a union card and you couldn’t get a union card without either a job or a relative or a friend who could get you into both the union and the job. But outside of these things British society did at least seem to function for the benefit of the British people and it would be difficult if not impossible to honestly say that society functions in that manner today.