Here’s the ONS report which shows the vast decrease in strikes from 1982 onwards. Page 3 has two good graphs.
I’ve only come out on strike once.
Working for British Telecom, with hundreds of thousands of employees, we were each sent a personal letter from the Chairman. He explained that times were hard and that the company could only afford a 2.5% pay offer this year.
It might have passed, except when it was revealed that he was getting 33%, plus a huge payment to his pension fund and share options.
This was in the 70s or 80s, right?
Well Quartz
At least you seem to have accepted that oil revenues were actually significant, and enabled Thatcher to do what she did, in fact one of those cites I gave you states so.
The strikes were nearly all motivated by inflation, and this was due to the oil price hikes, or will you deny this too ?
You can blame the unions, and yet, I seem to recall that German unions were and still are very much more powerful, they didn’t need to use the strike weapon, because they were kept informed by having representatives on the management boards, they actually understood the problems because they were operating on a theoretically ideal model that was intended for British industry.
It really does boil down to poor management, by keeping the workforce ignorant, by looking down on them as lower class, and being denied input into industrial matters, its not all that surprising there were plenty of strikes.
Under investment was the main key to our performance, its why bikes, steel, shipbuilding, car manufacture, railways and even the telecoms industry all performed badly.
Our glorious leaders simply refused to manage, they would not invest, they knew little about leadership.
Maggies objective was to break the unions, she did it by closing down manufacturing, but manufacturing has not performed at all well, despite the unions being so weak, now why do you think that is ?
See, - if the unions were to blame for poor industrial performance, then their neutering should mean that our industrial performance improved, right ?
Wrong, our manufacturing has performed abysmally, you say we should maybe let others make things for us, and yet we had all the infrastructure in place long before the likes of Korea, we had such a huge lead, and we were not able to exploit it, and that is down to under investment.
Do you accept we still need manufacturing or if not could you please furnish us with some other means that GB PLC is going to pay its way in th world once the oil runs out, enquiring minds wish to know.
Actually all this discussion of Thtcher does not really answer the OP.
My impression fo the pre Thatcher years.
I think that no matter what, things would have moved on a long way, but here are some of the attitudes of those days.
First, our social awareness was nothing like as liberal as nowadays, we were far more discriminatory in terms of race, sexual orientation and gender.
You did not need to be black or asian to be treated badly, the Irish as well as gypsies were pretty badly treated, in terms of housing, employment and social status.
Music wise, there were many who disliked groups such as the Four Tops and the Temptations simply because of their colour.
Education, we had far fewer going on to higher education such as university, and vocational studies were somewhat seen as rather inferior to exclusively academic studies.
Highly educated people were regarded with some suspician by industry, and it was rare to find degree level educated folk in industry at the very top levels
Nowadays we have much greater awareness of the value of education, but the actual cash value of a degree has fallen because more of us ahave studied to this level.
Health wise, well, back in the 60’s and 70’s my personal experience is that most people smoked, I’d say maybe 70%, nearly all men did, and maybe just over half women did, nowadays smokers are ina reducing but significant minority, around 30%, with women smoking as much as men.
Our understanding of industrial diseases has improved, things likes asbestosis, pneumoconiosis, and the debilitating effects of various chemicals upon us and the environment are all so much better, our air is cleaner and we do not get anything like the amount of smog we used to.
I still remember November 5th Bonfire night celebrations during those years, everyone, but everyone would attend a local bonfire, every street would have at least one and we all used to buy our own fireworks.
It would remain smog ridden for two or three days afterwards due to all the bonfire, nowadays the smogs gone, with maybe just a whiff of smke in the air on the morning afterwards.
We used to have a lot more accidents with fireworks than nowadays, as we now attend more organised displays.
Life was actually more dangerous, with less safe cars, less safe roads and highways, and less protection in the workplace from all kinds of hazards.
I do miss the fact that certain species of birds like the Skylark, and the Lapwing are nowadays rare due to intensive farming, back then they were common, and its a shame so much of our woodland and farmland has been built upon.
Roads are not the cyclists paradise they were, even if they are safer for faster moving traffic, so many winding lanes have been widened, or bypassed, our countryside has lost some of its character.
I also remember it was actually quite awkward to live as a single person, shops were never open on a weekend except for Saturday mornings, and for many of us we worked 5 and half day week, so we had to hunt around to find the few places available. We did not have anything like the variety of take away shops, nearly all were fish and chip shops, with just a few Chinese places about, and McDonalds were an exotoc American thing, we didn’t have one around here until well into the 80’s.
The closest thing we had to burger bars were Wimpy Bars, which are not the smae thing at all.
There were more launderettes, there were fewer tvs and fewer privately owned cars.
Trying to get a mortgage was fun, you could only borrow a maximum of twice your income, then it was pushed up to 2.5 times, and if your wife worked her income was not taken into account at all. I recall that it was quite hard to get a mortgage, those who did would celebrate like they had won a major prize.
Credit cards were rare and most people were paid cash in hand rather than into bank accounts.
The reason we chose to be paid this way, was that we could not get to the banks when they were open, bank staff seemed a priveledged breed, their business hours made it impossible for most folk to get at their money as they were at work longer than the banks were open, banks certainly didn’t open on Saturdays and when Barclays started doing so it was something of a mini revolution.
When ATM machines first came in, every bank had its own network, and you could only use the machines from your bank, so many of us kept a small card in our wallets which detailed where all the machines of your bank actually were.
Nowadays I can take my bank card and use it in a garage, supermarket, in another bank or friendly society machine, they even have units in some ordinary shops now, its far easier to get hold of your cash than it was and its much easier to get a loan.
Sundays were particularly boring and quiet, absolutely nothing was open, you couldn’t go on public transport unless you were prepared to wait for hours, the only places that seemed to me to have anything happening on Sundays were holiday resorts.
Telly was confined to just two channels, BBC and ITV, and early 70’s saw us with BBC2.You didnt get tv broadcast in the weekdays mornings much before 10 o-clock either, and many people didn’t have FM radios in 1970.Commercial radio was limited to a few pirate stations, whose schedules were flexible to say the least, some nights they would broadcast, some nights they would not.
Jokes were generally pretty crude, crude in the sense of little imagination, not very sophisitcated, lots of racial stuff, mother in law jokes, spastics, queers, that kind of thing.
We were much more violent too, people look at our crime figures, and forget what it was like with our gangs of skinheads, mods, rockers, football hooligans, every street had its own gang around where I lived, and it was usual for each schoolkids to arrange mass brawls at least once a year with another rival school in the area.
We used to have much more of a problem with litter, this is something you don’t realise until you go abroad, as I did, and when you come back its suddenly disgustingly obvious.
Our country villages were pretty much run down, they were not very desirable places to live as they had few amenities nearby, I can remember some of the places around me now and how they were back then.
With the massive rise in car ownership, living in the country became an achievable reality and the prices of country houses soared and all those run down villages have beome inhabited again, only now the inhabitants don’t work nearby, they drive to the nearby towns.
This should help you get some idea, mostly back then it was a poorer place, we were less intellectually aware of things, socially backward, but somewhere among it there were positive things, I think.
Cut the snarkiness. I have made no comment about this one way or the other
I’d like to see you provide cites to back that up. The major oil price hikes were the early 70s, no?
Take your beef elsewhere.
I don’t know of any German union trying to bring down the government as Arthur Scargill did. I remember hearing (no cite) that at the time German workers were considerably more productive than we were - and American workers more productive still with the Japanese ahead of them.
I don’t know. I rather suspect that many factors were involved. Certainly, Ted Heath’s failure to stand up to the Miners set a precedent.
Got a cite for that? I don’t recall anything like the Dissolution of the Monasteries. She lessened protectionism, enhancing free trade. Some industries could not compete. As an aside, my father was in shipbuilding (ARINA), and that went elsewhere for many factors, including, but not limited to, too many strikes, restrictive practices, and too high costs.
Don’t put words in my mouth.
A friend tells the story of a Jaguar he bought: one day the top coating (it has a special name but I don’t recall it) all on one side of the car just fell off. We’ve got to build better products more cheaply. In many cases we’re not doing so.
Actually, I work in manufacturing.
So you are best placed to know what the solutions are to our balance of trade problems, do we need manufacturing or not?
You know of course, about the oil price hikes in the early 70’s, its not lcear exactly if you are from your post, you could mean it either way.
However, as you ask, here is a cite for you, there are planty others if you wish, but if you trust me enough (after all there is no currency in dishonesty when information is so readily available), this is very representative, it also points out that those oil price hikes took up to 20 years to iron out, which I think is perhaps overestimating it given we benefitted fro the oil revenue during those 20 years, but then, these are analysts so they maybe know more than me.
http://money.msn.co.uk/investing/Insight/SpecialFeatures/ActiveInvestor/anewoilcrisis/default.asp
You will note that actually just prior to the first oil price hike, Heath was in power and inflation was around 7%
It mentions specifically that unions were striking in order to gain wage rises to keep up with inflation.
This was a bad strategy, given that everyone else was suffering exactly the same thing and worldwide export markets collapsed, but to put the blame solely on the unions is to ignore what actually happened, the unions reacted to conditions that the government could not handle, because we had not invested in efficient productive plant, we were far more labour intensive per unit porduced than our competitors, and anything that affected the price of labour would hit us hardest.
Those countries that replaced labour intensive work with modern plant handled the situation best.
It all really comes down to the fact that we as a nation have traditionally not invested, rather we seek our returns in the short term.
What we used to do was to devalue our currency on a regular basis, and this gave UK companies no incentive to cut labour costs, as rises could be passed on in prices.
Instead of using expensive machines to replace labour, our industrial leaders preferred to look to the immediate future and not the longer run, those machines would have generated the wealth that would in turn have made themselves and the nation more prosperous.
Why do you think German workers were more prodcutive than us ? maybe we were lazy, or maybe the production capacity was old and creaking, which is certainly was, when we had that large Japanese investement in the UK, our production figures rose to the same as all our competitor, Nissan UK was the most productive plant they had, and thats is only because it had a new factory.
Not all of my post was directed at you Quatrz, if you look at Usrams efforts you will see that much of it applies to that poster, and as yet there has been no response, but then it is the weekend and mabe there will be some rebuttal tommorow.
I think this sums up the Thatcher years perfectly.
In 1984 Band Aid, organised by Bob Geldorf, eventually raised over £100 million for famine relief in Ethiopia.
All the leading UK pop stars of the time performed for free on the single ‘Do they know it’s Christmas?’. The record company took no money, the shops selling the record took no money. The Irish Government waived taxes on the record sales. All the money raised was going to save lives.
The video of the single appeared simultaneously on BBC1, BBC2, ITV and MTV etc.
Thatcher demanded that tax be paid on the record.
Eventually public opinion forced her Government to make a donation to starving children.
Sorry, but you’re trying to bait me and I’m not going to rise.
“I know what you expect me to say,” he said. “You expect me to say as I’d sooner be young again. Most people’d say they’d sooner be young, if you arst’ 'em. You got your 'ealth and strength when you’re young. When you get to my time of life you ain’t never well. I suffer something wicked from my feet, and my bladder’s jest terrible. Six and seven times a night it 'as me out of bed. On the other 'and, there’s great advantages in being a old man. You ain’t got the same worries. No truck with women, and that’s a great thing. I ain’t 'ad a woman for near on thirty year, if you’d credit it. Nor wanted to, what’s more.”
To follow on from casdaves “what was life like” post, here are my recollections.
Race/Society/attitudes: Britain was a much more polarised society. Class was a much bigger issue than it is now. The thing about workers eating in different canteens was entirely true. This wasn’t entirely the fault of the big bad bosses either. Most workers were happy to be a part of a stratified workforce (or at least accept it). A reflection of this was in the union system where each part of a trade would have it’s own union – eg on the railways the drivers were in one union, the footplate men another and station staff a different one again, with admin and white-collar staff in a fourth. This was far from unusual.
Racially we were very divided. It was rare to meet a black professional of any sort (although Asians were beginning to break through in accountancy and health). Black friends of mine tell me that they would actually comment whenever they saw a black face on telly. There was a sit com called (I think) “love thy neighbour” which had as it’s sole premise the fact that a black family had moved next door to a white family. The racial epithets used in this, prime time, programme would get you locked up today.
There was also a lot of anti-Irish prejudice. This was partly a result of the IRA and also partly down to the “Irish joke” phenomenon.
Attitudes towards women were pretty raw as well; if a woman stood up for herself she would get called, to her face, a bra-burner or women’s libber (this was NOT a compliment!). Domestic violence was considered a part of life in some areas, and the police would never prosecute, even in the worst cases.
As for gays – forget it. It would be professional ruin to be outed, and queer-bashing was very common. Even people like Elton John and Freddie Mercury kept themselves in the closet.
Entertainment/telly/music: The telly was only on in the evening (and it was far from rare for a family not to have a telly, and black and white was common (the licence was cheaper). There was some good stuff, and an awful lot of dross. For every Fawlty Towers there was a Mind Your Language, for every Poldark a Crossroads.
Music: Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, Roxy Music, The Rolling Stones, Sex Pistols etc. Those were the days.
Education: If you got into the right school you got a very good education – much better than today, but the worst schools really were awful. University attendance was not that common (a good thing IMHO, as in those days a degree was worth more than the paper it was written on) I disagree with Casdave about senior managers not being university educated – I think most of the non-technical ones were.
Health: Everyone smoked – I was considered a bit “suspect” for not smoking. Not only did everyone smoke – they did it absolutely everywhere; theatre, cinema, shops, and even on the last two carriages on the tube (this was stygian in the extreme). Heavy drinking (in men) was more common too.
Diet: All the clichés about shitty British food stem from this time. It was hard to eat well. Restaurant going was mainly the preserve of the wealthy – who tended to be ex public school and as such have no idea what food should taste like (this has taken me personally a long time to learn). Most towns would have one top end (French or Italian) restaurant which couples would go to once or twice a year.
Finances; To get a mortgage you had to join a building society and save with them for a couple of years before they would even let you join the QUEUE for a mortgage (this is because there were restrictions on how much they could lend). To get you own money out of the bank you had to go in and write a cheque for cash. ATMs were just coming in, and they had very low maximum withdrawals. Credit cards were mainly for the rich, or those on expenses. Most people were paid weekly in cash (and robbing the securicor vans was a common crime).
Shopping: There were more independent shops – but they all sold the same stuff, and only opened when you were at work – the rise of the Asian corner shop is one of the best things to happen.
It was illegal for lots of things to happen on Sundays – sporting events and shopping were forbidden, as were theatrical performances.
Having said all that some people were quite happy – The Likely Lads shows this rather well, with the aspirant couple buying their new home, going abroad, trying out new things like wine (Blue Nun probably – but it was a start) and with ambitions for the future. It also shows the flipside with the unskilled working class chap struggling to make ends meet and having a pretty rough time of it.
I thank CasDave for his very informative post.
Separate canteens are increasingly hard to find, but not impossible. I worked at an arts materials manufacturer for a few days in, I think, 2001 or 2002, and that company still had separate ‘workers’ and ‘management’ canteens.
On a couple of the political points (there’s too many going off at too many tangents to do them all):
The oil thing goes both ways. Firstly without the OPEC price hike there simply wouldn’t have have been any North Sea oil, as it wouldn’t have been worth extracting at pre '73 levels. There’s still a fair bit down there that won’t be coming out anytime soon unless the oil price stays at it’s current level or higher.
Also Britain was hardly alone in facing up to the problems of the higher price of oil - it’s just that we handled it very badly. An industrial base with no regard for commercial realities is always going to become sclerotic.
Additionally: if you’re comparing British industry in the 60s etc with germany - don’t forget the Marshall Plan. It did give them a huge kick-start. They don’t look quite as healthy now do they?
And finally I think that the biggest change between then and now is in attitude. Can you imagine Harold Wilson saying (as Blair did) “We have no problem with people getting seriouisly rich”?
The UK received far more aid than Germany from the Marshall Plan. Between 1948 and 1952 the UK received $3.1 billion and Germany received $1.3 billion.
Well, not if your name was Joe Kagan…um…Lord Kagan of Gannex to you.
Couple of other memories about money. Because of the awful banking system, people trusted cheques much more, with no ID. If they didn’t trust you, they’d get you to write your address down on the back of the cheque. As if this would stop a con-man.
My dad got a credit card. This was amazing to many people. It was a near plain brown piece of plastic with the raised numbers, and the strip to sign, but no magnetic strip. It said “Barclaycard” and had a logo that now resembles the Visa symbol. It was accepted in very few places.
You sure about that? I didn’t know that. I am aware that we only stopped paying our “greatest allies” for the suff we were suplied with in WWII only relatively recently.
I would point out the low quality of British food in the Old Days. Although much of it was the result of poor customer-service (fast food chains did a lot to change that), I have always suspected that wartime rationing somehow had a long-lived effect on British food culture.
Odd, really. London is a great town to go eating out in now.
The cheque thing was even more trusting than that. If you made a cheque out to “cash” and gave it to someone, they could take it to your branch and cash it - they could also pass it on. It was your own promissary note. Most cheques weren’t supplied crossed in those days.
I remember my first credit cards - I had an amex (yes I know it’s not a credit card - but it got used in the same way) and shopkeepers would look at you in funny ways when you tried to use it before getting that machine out that rolled over it and took an impression of the numbers.
Without getting all “jumpers for goalposts” what ever happened to Green Shield stamps and Luncheon vouchers?