Comments by "" (@charliemoore2551) on "1974 Explained: The Year That Almost Crushed Britain" video.

In the 1970s, we had the spectre of unemployment approaching 1 million which was then unthinkably high. It nearly reached 5 million in the 1980s and that was averted by reclassifying over a million people as long term sick. I was eighteen in 1974 and had never seen a young able bodied homeless person in my life. By the mid 1980s most homeless people were both. In the 1970s every town I knew was in the process of building a swimming pool, leisure centre, library or something similar. By the beginning of the 1990s, local authorities were selling off public amenities to lower costs. In the 1970s, you could always find a police officer if you needed one. Every small town had a permanently manned police station. By the early 1990s, the local police presence was usually just an unmanned station with a phone for reaching the much more "efficient" super stations. This piece appears to be suggesting that the 1970s was a narrow escape: a decline arrested and reversed by the miracle of Thatcherism. In fact, for working people, it was the opposite. It was the last gasp of a period of improving living standards brought to an end by the restoration of the pre-war status quo ante and signalling a rise in the power of the finance class which was to culminate in the financial collapse of 2008.
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Too young to remember it and too arrogant and ignorant to research it properly. It is Thatcherite journalism, not history.
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@ronnoman61 Yup. But to these two it was a terrible time. Note the expression "held hostage by the trade unions". What they mean by that is that the likes of you and me were getting a fair shake and it had to stop!
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@BONK_2000 Yup. That's the neoliberal script. It's absolute nonsense. There were certainly a few stalwarts who held out against the sharks who wanted to financialise the economy ("reasonable change" as you put it). But it was not to be. The establishment set out to reverse 30 years of progress and they succeeded. Thatcher didn't save the UK economy. With the Big Bang, she destroyed it. She handed over the reins of the economy to the casino which we all know and love as The City. In 2008, we saw the consequence of that and we're still living with it.
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