Happy Christmas 2022

With most of the public sector on strike and demanding massive pay rises, while retaining their final salary pensions .....

Beano Xmas 1970

.... and with inflation going through the roof, with a lot of people huddling at home in three jumpers and under a pile of blankets .... it may not be the happiest of Christmases we have had in the UK, but hey, its another year gone by, and surely this will all pass some time.

Britain Broken By Fuel Costs

Britain is in the middle of a crisis driven by an inflation surge, and especially by the monstrous rise in the cost of fuel.

The Ofgem Price Cap

Now although they are the bill issuers, most UK energy suppliers are middlemen, meaning that they buy the energy they control in the international wholesale market, and then sell it on to you.

Seventies Recalled

The 1970's is a decade that often gets a bad rap .....

TOTP - 1970's - Fashion Black Spot

..... sometimes described as the decade that style forgot. Harsh, but possibly true.

Vox Populi

Well the people have spoken, and once again plunged the UK into a political crisis. Thus proving again the old Churchill political adage that 'democracy is the worst of all governments except for all the others.' It also shows what divided country we are these days, Brexit, Devolution, Left and Right ... everywhere you look we are a nation divided.

Vox Populi or The Start Of A Revolution In Our System?

Our system of first past the post relies on there being a clear winner, and so to be facing a second coalition or a minority government inside 2 years from the formation of the last one, is something of a shock to our way of getting governments.

Railroaded By Unions

Under UK Employment legislation you can’t sue a trade union if they go out on strike .... a hangover from the terrible 1970's. 

Strikes Can Soon Get Of Hand

Political Colossus - Margaret Thatcher

For many in the UK there have been only two political colossus's passing in their lifetimes (the other was Winston Churchill who died in 1965), and for the vast majority only one .... Margaret Thatcher.

Margaret Thatcher - World Political Colossus - Died 08/04/2013.

All the rest have been lightweights, with only Tony Blair having the potential to almost match her, but his mistakes in blindly backing G.W Bush into Afghanistan and then compounding it by doing the same in Iraq, plus letting mass non EU immigration rip, all the while leaving Gordon Brown as Chancellor for five years too long, leave him as a politician who squandered his chances of greatness.

There is no doubting that in the mining valleys of Wales, Yorkshire and Scotland she is remembered with loathing, but its a mark of the differences between 'Right' and 'Left' in UK politics that only the visceral 'Left' would actually be cracking open champagne bottles and dancing openly in the streets (as was reported from Glasgow on Radio 5), to 'celebrate' the death of a UK politician.

Battles Between Miners and Police At
Orgreave Colliery Defined The Miners Strike.

I was a Thatcher supporter, but not blindly so ..... I wanted her to support UK manufacturing, but her expensive pound policy to fight inflation meant that what was left of manufacturing (after the trades union decade in the 1970's), left the UK, never to return. But, and this is the crucial 'But', I like many others had spent years watching the countries slow decline in the period 1965 - 1979. Most of you are probably too young to know what it was like living in the land of the "Red Robbo's", leading the trades union assaults on the UK car industry (look at it now that the unions were defeated) - according to the BBC, "between 1978 and 1979 Mr Robinson was credited with causing 523 walk-outs at Longbridge, costing an estimated £200m [in 1979 values, so think £2bn now] in lost production".

The 'Three-Day Week', which left us huddling in the dark and cold (led by the miners), and in the following years we were in such a state that we had to request a 'loan' of £2.3bn in 1976 from the International Monetary Fund to combat the rampant inflation at that time, followed after a few years of turbulent trades union attacks on a Labour government, and ending in the 'Winter of Discontent' ..... which is where we almost collapsed as a country ..... it included an unofficial strike by gravediggers working in Liverpool and Tameside, and strikes by refuse collectors leaving rats in the streets (like Naples). Additionally, NHS ancillary workers formed picket lines to blockade hospital entrances with the result that many hospitals were reduced to taking emergency patients only.

The UK in 1979 and Naples 2012

We were all trying to get out - the UK seemed doomed and a candidate for a civil war .... we were "The Sick Man Of Europe", and for all the 'Lefts' blaming of Margaret Thatcher for her policies .... it was their greed that created the conditions that ushered her in to power ... enough was enough, and we wanted change. Well we got that alright, and for good or bad, Mrs Thatcher dominated the remainder of the century.

Labour Still Isnt Working

Having had a recent brush with redundancy (only to get offered another role in the same company .... phew!), my mind had been occupied with the prospect of unemployment in a recession for the last few weeks.

Now that my destiny is back in my own hands, my thoughts turned to the famous advertising campaign that removed the last Labour Government after a deep recession, soaring unemployment and industrial disputes, and public finance problems (sound familiar?).

The much copied and admired poster, which was on billboards and hoarding across the land was by Saatchi and Saatchi ....


Its sentiment and style is much reproduced such as in this cartoon by Schrank from The Independent on Sunday

Which shows bankers and fat cats lining up for cash from Gordon Brown.

In fact so succesful was the poster, that with unemployment due to rise for at least another few quarters, there is speculation that it will reappear in the next election if this is a major issue.

We appear to be coming to the end of a political cycle and even full circle, with events uncannily playing out like they did in 1979. Except that I am thirty years older!

NB: I took the images from the net, where they are freely produced but if any copyright accidently infringed, just email me and I will remove immediately.