Peter Viney's Blog

I did this as a long reply to a Facebook discussion which was extolling the past era of the 1970s compared to what the Tories have done to the country since Thatcher (though 13 years of the post-Thatcher years was a Labour government).

I was inspired to greatly expand and discuss what the REAL 70s were like and especially what politics was like.

SPOILER: This has political opinions. They may well offend. I hope they do not lose me friends. If you don’t like criticism of Momentum, please stop here.  It rambles all over the place too. So a RANT if ever one was ranted.

I could so easily write about the late 50s / early 60s as a golden time because I was a kid then.  By Autumn 1970, I was a working adult.

The 70s were a shitty decade in many ways. The best sitcom treatment, many years later, was The Grimleys set in a car worker’s family in the 70s Midlands.

The Grimleys starred Noddy Holder (of Slade), Amanda Holden, Brian Conley and Nigel Planer of The Young Ones. Set in 1970s Midlands with Nigel Planer as a striking car worker

The 70s weren’t personally bad. On January 4th 1971 I started teaching at Anglo-Continental. I  met Karen doing the drama shows in May.  I loved my job teaching at Anglo-Continental, we did the weekly shows which were a lot of fun, we got married, we had our first child, my first books came out. But the surroundings were  crap…

Peter & Karen, Autumn 1971

Universities back in the late 60s and early 70s were great. I got a full grant. £360 a year because my dad had just died. It was enough. I paid for a self-catering hall (then new), my mum gave me 500 Recipes For Cooking For One. I looked at it on the train, wondering how likely I might be to buy 500 Recipes For Cooking For Two. I later got a larger grant for a research MA, but can’t recall the figure … but it had to last more weeks. I had my own room with a sink and central heating and THREE bookshelves. It was brand new. Luxury. It was way better than home.

Morgan Hall. University of Hull. October 1966. Marching tie and handkerchief for the warden’s sherry party. I don’t think I wore them ever again. The gonk was a recent  gift  from a Swedish girlfriend. Penguin Plays line the top shelf.  I recognize Sabine’s A History of Political Theory on the middle shelf. Also Morison & Commager’s Growth of The American Republic and ‘American Literature’ by Geoffrey Moore, head of American Studiesa.

I drew £5 from the bank every Monday in term time. Mind you, the country could afford to pay for the 5.4% who went to university or other tertiary education in 1965 (I think fewer than 4% were at “universities”). That was up from less than 2% a decade earlier. You start approaching 50%? Where does the money come from? Let alone, wouldn’t some of them benefit from better craft apprenticeships, rather than a supposedly academic course?

A few years ago, I saw an advert for a course in “Film Direction” at a university which had recently been a Polytechnic, and in the 60s, a technical college. That’s awful. Thirty places? There are not thirty openings a year, and they will probably go to Oxbridge graduates in other subjects. The thing is, as a discipline, studying film and direction can be just as academic as any other subject. Call it Film Studies. OK. Fine. I’ve taught it myself. One of my sons did it in the USA. I know students doing proper Film Studies courses now and they work far harder than students in most subjects with long weekend projects. But selling a course as Film DIRECTION? That’s a big lie. It’s fooling kids that if they burden themselves with student loans they might end up as film directors. From that college or “uni”? No chance. I have a strange aversion to the word “uni.” It doesn’t apply to the real thing for me, but I’m wrong. I heard someone with a Cambridge doctorate use it the other day in reference to Cambridge.

Building and housing There has been an appalling lack of provision of affordable housing in recent years in the UK.

Hall of Residence, Bournemouth University

Bournemouth. More new halls of residence from side to side.The biggest is two months old. The white ones, only a few years.

But there has been a great deal of building. In central Bournemouth, as in many other towns, there are multi-storey university halls of residence going up in all directions.

Go to the Lansdowne area of Bournemouth. More than half a dozen, new very large halls of residence have been built in the last few years in an area which has built very little affordable housing.  Students are great tenants. No security of tenure. They’re content with just the one room, not a flat. If you’re building 300 identical rooms, furniture and services plummet in price. Bournemouth was in the vanguard of realizing that students today require an en-suite shower and toilet. Many of the residents are foreign students, so paying much higher fees than English ones. Our theatre visits take us on to the campuses of both Southampton and Exeter. We often have an hour to kill so wander around. The majority of the students walking around seem to be foreign. My son was at Southampton twenty years ago when it was just a few per cent. When I was at Hull and East Anglia is was much less again. I taught at Private Language Schools throughout the 1970s. It’s a profitable area. The residences are mainly built by private companies, not by the universities themselves.

Universities seem to be one of the most successful UK businesses around. So no shortage of building at all, but it’s all profitable building for the university market.

War 

1965

I still thank (bless, even) Harold Wilson for keeping us out of wars in Biafra and Vietnam, and used to hope his portrait at No 10 glared down upon Tony Blair and gave him sleepless nights. We were not called up. Britain stayed out of 1970s wars until 1982.

As the new Netflix series of The Crown shows, Wilson was under huge pressure from Lyndon Johnson to send troops AND he desperately needed American loans, but he still refused to send troops to Vietnam. Many to his left wanted intervention in the Biafra / Nigeria conflict. He declined to get involved again. Think about Iraq, Libya and Syria. He was right.

Vietnam Memorial War, Washington DC

I stood for a long time at the Vietnam wall in Washington DC, reading the names, tears in my eyes. My contemporaries all of them. If all Wilson ever did was resist the pressure to send troops to Biafra, Southern Rhodesia (i.e. Zimbabwe) and Vietnam, he is still a hero to me.

There were other issues of the 70s. I was in my 20s. Many of you reading (nearly all?) are  younger than me, and you don’t know the half, as they say.

Strikes …

Private Eye, March 1973. The speech bubble reads:
“Dear Madam, If you are dying of cold due to gas dispute, please remain at home due to hospital strike.” E. Heath”

The three day week – January to March 1974. It was f*cking freezing.  The government (Edward Heath) ordered that businesses could only have electricity for three days a week. There were long power cuts at home. For long periods shop windows were dark- window lights banned. TV shut down at 10.30.  Then they had to stagger BBC and ITV shut down on alternate days, because they couldn’t cope with the surges when TV shut down (kettle on for hot water bottles!) Pubs were closed.

The Miners Union had rejected a 16.5% pay offer. Karen was a union rep in the probation service, where Hampshire County Council decided to go further than the government rule and turn off electricity and heating seven days a week in probation offices instead of three. She was working in gloves with ice on the inside of windows. She organized instant action and stopped the bastards, reasoning the sooner energy hit crisis point by running out, the sooner it had to be resolved. Anglo-Continental where I worked was the Swiss Consulate as well as a school, and so we were apparently Swiss territory in law, and they turned the heating up and we worked in shirtsleeves. It was fair enough, our new markets for students were Brazil, Mexico, Iran, the Gulf,  North Africa and French West Africa. The students arrived without overcoats. We had our own generator for the power cuts and were the only lit building in the area. Luxury. I once made the mistake of coming home to Karen whose teeth were still chattering and saying it had been too hot at work.

No rubbish collection. London.

Then there were the parks filled with uncollected rubbish, large rats were running everywhere. You’d be amazed how fast they multiply and grow when the sports pitches in the park have 20 foot high piles of kitchen waste on them. I still have petrol coupons somewhere. We were issued with them.

Later in the 70s, having a new baby, and dealing with sudden long power cuts in the winter is awful. We were both union reps, but yes, unions really were totally out of control. See later. In those days refuse disposal operatives were called dustmen (there were a lot of gender-marked words then) and no wonder they wanted more money. They had to walk up the drive, lift up and shoulder a stinking metal dustbin (far bigger than today’s plastic multi-coloured wheelie bins) and carry it to the truck, empty it of fish heads and meat bones then carry it back up the drive.

The one odd thing about the strikes. I was in London during the autumn 1970 long power cuts. The weird thing is that with all the traffic lights out, and everyone agreeing silently to merge in turn, the traffic flowed far better than ever before or since.

Money We were well paid as language teachers at Anglo-Continental in the 70s. It was the golden age for ELT in the private sector in the UK, comparatively much better than today. Our pay was tertiary state scale equivalency, and we got £7 an hour for overtime lectures – really a lot of money then. The Wiki inflation calculator suggests multiplying 1975 rates by 8.2, which makes it £57 in 2019 money. I think that’s too much, but anyway, it was well-paid. We did overtime lectures and evening classes most days. The lectures might have 150 to 200 in the audience. There were 11 a.m. lectures too for which you got £3.50 extra in recognition of the audience size being more than a normal lesson. Our Wednesday shows regularly had audiences of 400.  We did stuff Saturday mornings like ARELS exams. Both of us were ELT teachers at Anglo-Continental by 1974 . Karen had been doing the Wednesday shows for three years. At a staff party, the school owner told her that in their student surveys, she was the most popular teacher in the school. ‘But I don’t teach here!’ she said. ‘When would you like to start?’ he said. That was during the three day week. She didn’t hesitate.

In 1974, we were paying massive rent for a second floor flat with damp on every wall, and believe me 65% tax, which we hit with overtime, is an incredible disincentive when you’re living in those conditions. We were saving desperately to get out of it. In fact our first owned flat (above a shop) was to cost less than just Karen’s annual pre-tax salary. But note pre-tax and NI. Also, by buying you were letting yourself in for interest rates which at one point hit 14%. However, we could save a decent deposit by living off my salary, and banking Karen’s for just two years.

Younger workers today would think that wonderful.

Money was different. You lined up in the bank every week, and wrote a cheque and got cash.

There was exchange control when you travelled abroad from 1947 on. After 1966, you could only take £50 in foreign currency and £15 in sterling, and travellers had their passports marked with the amount of foreign currency they had bought at the bank. Karen and I went to Paris in late 1974, and we got free travel to test out a route for the school excursions, which was coach from Victoria Station to Lydd Airport in Kent, a short flight on Dan-Air (known as Dan Dare by flyers), then coach to Paris … it was slow and awful. You couldn’t pre-pay the hotel.  We took our £50 each in francs, our legal £30 in pounds, and we might just have had another £20 or so in our socks, as one did. (I assume there is a statute of limitations for prosecution on this). We were there for seven days. We ran totally out of money by day five, walked to the travel office and they agreed to let us go home two days early. The alternative would have been begging. I recall counting every drachma on visits to Crete, Istabul and Corfu.

Exchange controls were abolished in 1979 by Margaret Thatcher. I suspect the spread of the credit card was making it impossible to control anymore.

Probably a post 1979 advert

So, credit … In 1971 my Director of Studies proudly showed me a red and green piece of plastic. An Access card. You would soon be able to buy things with it, he said, not that any bank would give you one until you’d had an account in good credit for a couple of years. There was Hire Purchase for major items. We avoided it.

We rented a black and white TV from Rediffusion in 1972. Colour TV had existed since late 1966 in the UK, but was too expensive to rent. My memory says three times as much. Mostly in the 1970s, evening entertainment was centred around records and open reel tapes for us.

Evening entertainment: 1970s style. Bought 1971. Still have it. Experts will notice I failed to set the correct ips speed for the photo.

When they saw our black & white TV friends shook their heads in dismay. See what happens if you move in with a woman? You get a TELEVISION instead of listening to LPs every night like normal people.’ Though mainly we both reserved the TV for Monty Python and for old films shown late at night after the news, which I made notes on. I was still thinking of getting out of ELT and reverting to film studies, a subject which my MA thesis qualified me for. I was doing it part time too.

Video rental appeared about 1976. We had a colour TV by then. We used to drive three miles to a shop to rent tapes for our Betamax. Yes, Betamax was better than VHS.

Another innovation was the pocket calculator. We had a monthly intake of students. We sat in awe in 1971 as our director of studies said, ‘We have 120 students at Elementary level. Maximum class size 15 … watch this’. He tapped in some numbers. ‘That means we form eight classes. See how quickly I worked that out?’ As an EFL teaching aside, yes, we had intakes of 120 just at Elementary level. We would have (say)  three classes on four week courses, four on 12 week courses and one of Arab ‘NRA’ – non Roman alphabet, so they would need to learn to read and write. That meant we could adjust micro-levels within Elementary level (low beginner, fast beginner, low elementary, fast elementary) , and adjust gender and mother tongue too. I have not seen a school able to fine tune like that since 1980, and it’s why our results were so good.

The school had a computer. It occupied a very large purpose built room with a staff of three or four to attend to it.

Try owning a 1970s British made car. Quality control was non-existent which is why the Morris Marina, Morris Ital and Austin Allegro are bad jokes. Has anyone anywhere seen a Hillman Avenger in decades? One of the most popular cars of the time but they fell apart, as did the late 70s Sunbeam / Talbot Alpine, Triumph 1300 / 2000 and Vauxhall Viva. Garages talked freely about ‘Strike cars’ and ‘Friday afternoon cars’ both shoddily built. In America they used to say Jaguars weren’t safe for women because they broke down so often on remote roads. Italian and French cars were as bad as ours or worse, for much the same reason. However, the Germans and Swedes could make decent cars many of which are still running. Our various academic directors showed their education by driving SAABs and Volkswagens. I was aware that owning a British car was already a sign of lack of automotive knowledge, if not stupidity. We had a 1966 Humber Sceptre (in 1972).  In 1972, six years old was really pretty old. Ten years? Rare. That car broke down weekly for the six months we had it. I couldn’t resist it. The dashboard was full with a long row of dials. Some of them worked too.

The author, with British made Humber Sceptre, 1972. Shirts were tighter due to poor washing machines perhaps. Or maybe just poor taste.

If anyone had a Japanese car, it would be a novelty until later in the 1970s when Datsuns started appearing. No one trusted such foreign machines. We bought a second-hand Datsun Cherry in 1982. That was utter crap too.

Try using a late 70s washing machine, Hotpoint perhaps, and hoping it might just manage to last two years. We had a British made Hoover, after the Hotpoint died, and that caught fire and wrecked the kitchen. They did that. Badly made, No quality control. Just this year, I was talking to a man in South Wales about his work in steel mills (where my grandad worked) and factories. He was my age. He said in the 1970s, the whole line would stop for 45 minutes while an electrician came to change a light bulb. Demarcation disputes stopped factory lines again and again, then by the 90s, everyone did everything and it all worked better. He added that recent ‘Elf and Safe Tea rules were bringing it all back. We’re returning to only a qualified sparks can change a bulb.

The power of unions was not a golden age. The musicians among our readers may remember the stranglehold the Musicians Union had on air time, or “needle time” meaning that until 1967, much of what we heard was lame cover versions live in the studio by the likes of Ross McManus (Elvis Costello’s dad) and the Joe Loss (akas Dead Loss) Orchestra. Visiting American singers couldn’t bring their own musicians with them.

Then there was sexism. As Karen says trades union committee meetings started with, ‘You take the notes, luv.’ Women’s work. They’ve got neater writing, you know. Also they can type them up afterwards. A tea break was signalled by ‘Milk and two sugars for me, sweetheart.’ Bosses at any level thought of themselves as mini Harvey Weinsteins. ‘You sit on my knee to take dictation, darling.’ At our school, female teachers had no dress rules, but women in admin were expected wear skirts and heels.

The unions held the whip hand for some of the 60s, and all of the 70s. Back in 1973, the National Miners Union were asking for 35% rises. They felt empowered by the oil crisis. Three of my uncles were coal miners. I saw them come back covered in coal dust when we visiting my grandparents in Wales. While I had every sympathy with their cause, in retrospect the agenda of leaders like Arthur Scargill was long term politics rather than preserving their jobs and homes. After the Aberfan disaster in 1966 (overseen by a nationalised industry) when a dangerous hill of slurry, five times the allowed height slid onto a school, killing 116 children and 38 adults,   the “price of coal” was a major thought. The TRUE price of coal.

Strikes were political, and Heath, Wilson and Callaghan were being run by them, culminating in the 1978-79 “Winter of Discontent.”  They had a lorry driver’s strike, a waste collectors strike and even a gravediggers strike. In January 1979 the whole public sector had a strike.  The army were answering 999 calls. That’s when we had a new baby and halfway through moved into a house with a few creaky night storage heaters. No, central heating was not universal then. Margaret Thatcher won the May 1979 election with a pledge to break union power. She did.

In mining areas she will never be forgiven or forgotten.

However, Thatcher did usher in decades of prosperity, but mostly that was because of North Sea Oil and Gas. When we were in Corfu in 1975, we hung out with another couple at the same taverna. He was working on the rigs already, and we were talking about miners’ strikes, and he said back then, ‘Mining’s fucked. No future. This is way better and way cheaper, and it might be rough in a gale on the rigs, but believe me, going down a mine is a lot worse. I’ve done it.’

I was a school rep for the ELT branch of MATSA.  1978? Around then. That’s around the time I lost it with the Trades Unions as they then existed. We had a Saturday training day at the GMWU (MATSA was a division). The whole day was on how to rig meetings. The meeting starts at 7.30. You challenge every item in the minutes of the previous meeting. Then you bring in points of order on every item on that day’s agenda. It gets to 9 pm and nothing of any interest has happened. So the “moderates” start to drift off. They have families and children (for some reason this was a very negative thing to have for the hardliners, who were 95% male, plus 5% women to make the tea). By 9.30, only the hardliners are left. But the meeting was quorate because it had started as such. That’s when you put in the emergency motions from the floor and pass them. I know that Messrs McDonnell and Corbyn know exactly what I’m talking about. At the next meeting at the school, I spoke before the minutes and described how the meeting was going to be rigged – and I was well known to largely favour the more extreme views of the riggers at that time. I said if they favoured democracy, they’d better stay to the end, and shout down any quibbles over minor words in the minutes. They did.

In retrospect, I think we were too successfully persuasive as a union. We persuaded our bosses that if Private Language Schools had comparable pay and holidays to the state system, we would get better teachers and see off the opposition. It didn’t happen. What happened was lots of schools at cut prices sprang up around us. We still had facilities, quality, trained teachers, but there was always some oik handing out leaflets for schools at a third of the price outside the gates. In 1980, they realized that. I think over 100  teachers were made redundant … something like that in the group. I’d already become a full-time author and was living on a bank loan – if I’d waited another few months, I’d have had redundancy pay.

A few years later all the private language schools changed to start later in the morning and end earlier in the afternoon. This was hailed as a great boon for women  teachers with kids. As the men and women who saw it as a their full-time profession said, the schools really wanted it to become a “second income in the family job” so they got less hassle over pay and conditions. Largely, that happened.

Bill Rodgers, Shirley Williams, Roy Jenkins, David Owen

Politics … By March 1981, four of our best political brains: Shirley Williams, Roy Jenkins, David Owen and Bill Rodgers came to the same conclusion about Labour’s problems with Militant,  and left and formed the SDP (Social Democratic Party). Labour had been infiltrated by the Militant Tendency, whose Trotskyist views the SDP rightly considered at odds with Labour Party policy. In 1983 Militant was at last expelled from the Labour Party. Jeremy Corbyn was one of the leading opponents of their expulsion. I had ceased to be a “party joiner” but my neighbour and friend stood as SDP candidate and I drove elderly and disabled people to the polls for him in 1983. My ex-colleagues from Labour were able to laugh and joke and share a coffee and Polo mints while we hung around and waited as tellers. In those days, being mates over-rode politics. That was a very good thing. It may be disappearing this year.  They may have used the C word to my face in describing my role, but we went to the pub together at lunchtime. I commiserated with them.

Their candidate was a South Wales mining union official. His idea of campaigning was to tour the poorest areas of Poole (believe me there are a lot) and telling people “No, no, you’re not REAL working class. No one is down here, see.” The local Labour guys had asked about him. Apparently he was such a total dickhead and boring fart that his local party had got rid of him for the election by telling him that standing in one of the safest Conservative seats in the country would be a nice little holiday for him. That was around the point when Labour moved from second to third place in much of the South. And that’s a major reason why. I haven’t seen a Labour flier come through my door in the last thirty years at election time.

Not that it did the SDP much good in our first past the post system. In 1983 the SDP-Liberal Alliance got 25.4% of the vote. Labour got 27.9%. That translated as 23 Alliance MPs, 209 Labour MPs. The Alliance were very good at coming second, in both Tory and Labour seats.

Back to the 70s …

Nationalised industry? Was it any better? At the time, nobody liked the monopoly.

The Royal Mail was way better in the 70s, with deliveries twice a day, the first one early morning. You could rely on next day delivery too without paying vast extra fees.  The decline there is mainly due to e-mail and e-commerce undermining the base industry, and then by the time online retailers started destroying the high street, the competition from couriers was already well established. It’ll be an impossible climb back because the base business is now too small to sustain the size of the network. The reaction is to hike prices. We had a small knitted Christmas Tree star to send to a friend. It weighs almost nothing. Unfortunately, unsquashed the envelope is just too thick to count as a letter, or large letter. So the price rocketed from 70p First Class to £3.55. We want to send small books and toys to our grandson in California. The postage is always more than the cost of the contents. On post, the 1970s wins easily.

electric trucks – made from 1947 to 1967. Nothing new under the sun

Rail? Yes and no. We all moaned continually about how awful British Rail was.

When I went to university, you phoned BRS (British Road Services – nationalized) who collected a full sized trunk from your house by electric ‘Scammell Scarab”  truck like a larger milk float, and a week later delivered it to your hall of residence. It was very cheap, and slow but efficient. The trunk travelled by goods train, I think. We were in Bath and Exeter in Fresher’s Week this year. Streets were full of parental cars with computers and duvets visible in the back windows. I don’t know anyone whose parents “took them” to university back then. We didn’t have computers, and books and clothes could survive transport by trunk.

A lot of goods went by train. I worked at a motor warehouse in mid 60s holidays and many deliveries were by British Rail or BRS trucks. Manufacturers were beginning to work out that a truck door to door was more efficient than rail, with trucks still needed at each end and a train needed in the middle. There was also a significant pilfering rate in the middle.

Trains were screwed a decade earlier by Dr Beeching. We never invested like Japan and France when we should have done, destroying the system instead (which was all done while it was still nationalized) and there’s never been catch up on that. Japan’s privatisation worked. I don’t know whether ours did or not.

If you took a time machine back to Waterloo or Kings Cross stations in 1970, you would be shocked at the filth, litter, and the disgusting food consisting of “Lyons Individual Fruit Pies” which were sold nowhere but railway stations, served with Nescafé. Compare the concourse now with decent restaurants and food outlets. On the other hand, women could wait modestly in a “Ladies Waiting Room” back then. That’s because there were so many tramps (as we used to call the homeless) hanging around the station. It’s not that homelessness was worse then, it was just that British Transport Police turned a blind eye to them sleeping on station benches.

Waterloo Station 1979

Waterloo station now

By 1980 when I was travelling Bournemouth to Oxford by train, my co-author Bernie Hartley and I would go straight to the dining car with our 2^nd class tickets, order a cooked Full English breakfast at a table with a clean white tablecloth (well, clean when we arrived) and real cutlery and make it last two and a half hours with constant free refills of coffee from the waiter. The meal price was much less than the difference between 1st and 2nd class. We never used the dining car coming back, what with publishing lunches in those days lasting from 12.30 to 3, with sherry before, wine with, and brandy afterwards. We were replete. That’s why we didn’t drive there. The contracts and pen had appeared with the brandy, but fortunately publishing then was vastly less rapacious than today, and they were fair. By 2019 standards, generous. Those lunches went when business entertaining stopped being tax deductible.

“Nationalisation” is easy to say and the railways are so awful that of course it’s popular.  There’s also virtually none of the alleged “competition” except for very long distance trips. There is just your local de facto monopoly. Trouble is, you can’t “confiscate” the rail companies (this is not Venezuela or Cuba) because you’d instantly destroy any confidence in the pound and economy. So we’d have to buy them back at full valuation. Ditto energy. They were sold, so they’ll have to be bought back. That is going to cost billions, and I’m old enough to recall that nationalised British Rail was utterly dire too.

Utilities? I’ve never managed to work out why we have one water pipe, one electric line, one phone line and one gas pipe going into our house, but we can use different “suppliers.” It remains a mystery to me BUT when you get pissed off with incompetence … they are all incompetent … you can threaten to change supplier. Just choose the option (Often PRESS 3) “I am thinking of leaving” and you get through to a higher level of call centre operator who will resolve things. With nationalization, you certainly won’t be able to do that. “I am thinking of leaving” also works for a wide range of companies. You don’t have to leave, but it accesses you to better problem solving.

Phones – In the 70s you had coin phone boxes. You waited at least six months for nationalized Post Office telephones to connect a new line. It wasn’t totally national either. I lived in Hull for three years which had an independent system which was superior. Cream and green phone boxes.

Labour in 2019 promises free Broadband for all. Will they be providing the devices on which to use it for all?

Who pays for the computer or tablet?
Who pays for the router?
Who pays for the extenders?
Say I’m nervous about wi-fi and want ethernet in the house instead?
Will they be providing a phone line connection for all?

After all, so many now seem to prefer using a Smart Phone and getting rid of their landlines (if they have one).

You don’t need hi-speed fibre optic to access government services or your doctor’s prescription service. Any connection will do. I don’t see subsidising downloading Netflix Ultra High Definition widescreen or accessing online video gaming as a priority.

Water Was water nationalised? We get our water from Bournemouth Water which dates back to 1863. It extends about a mile across the border with Poole. We have an odd situation in that sewerage and waste is a different company, Wessex Water. That was created in 1973 when water was removed from local authority control and nationalized in ten regional bodies which were privatised in 1989. It was bought by Enron in 1998 and is now Malaysian owned. I agree that foreign ownership sounds totally daft for one of the absolute basics. But I think water supply in our area was always privatized.

Environment. Generally the streets were filthy, the air was heavily coal fire polluted. Inadvertently, Margaret Thatcher’s vicious destruction of the coal industry may have made her our greenest prime minister.

Cars belched out leaded petrol (until 1986) and Big Oil told us that cars could never possibly run on unleaded petrol. The pistons would leap through the bonnet. We sent off money to CLEAR, headed by Des Wilson to get rid of leaded petrol. He also led Shelter and the Campaign for Freedom of Information. He was a Liberal.

The streets were covered with litter. We had an office in Bournemouth town centre from 1981, and on a Monday morning, the street was an unbroken ankle-deep sea of KFC and McDonalds garbage. Fines for litter were a new idea.

Taking a pram for a walk in 1978 meant cleaning dog shit off the wheels before carrying the pram back upstairs to the flat. There was zero consciousness about toxicara canis. No one picked up after dogs.

I remember the 60s (but NOT the 70s) as far “greener.” Milk came in bottles delivered by electric milk float. You washed them and they collected them. You took soft drink glass bottles back for 3d deposit. Fast food … i.e. Fish and chips came in a greaseproof bag, wrapped in newspaper, which is why journalists endured taunts that their work was ‘tomorrow’s fish and chip wrapper.”  No polystyrene containers.  In the early 60s, many people still had no freezers. We used to buy a block of ice cream from the corner shop (there were a lot. They got converted into houses), and it was in a thin cardboard container, wrapped thickly in old newspaper as insulation. Misguided Health & Safety did away with newspaper wrapping. Apparently newsprint is toxic with heavy metals so too poisonous to wrap your fish and chips in.

Mind you, as you ate them out in the street, inhaling alternately leaded car exhaust and a high tar untipped Capstan Full Strength cigarette, I doubt you’d know the difference. It would be nice to claim my generation was greener, but not so. We were kids then, and it was our generation that was the switch to plastics in everything. By the 1970s, plastic was taking over.

Climate change? 

Has the climate changed? Our red Fiat in 1977

Yes, it’s climate.

However, some events were weather rather than climate. e.g. The late 80s hurricanes.

Winter 1977 saw us snowed in with three foot drifts blocking roads in the New Forest. The summer of 1976 was an extraordinary drought. We’d just bought our first flat at West Moors on the edge of the New Forest. There were forest fires all the time. We drove home from work and found police blockades on all the roads leading to West Moors. We could see huge columns of smoke in three directions. I knew a farm track they hadn’t blockaded, and we drove along it to the village. There were ambulances from three counties lined up in the street, and a row of buses. I had a gun pointed at me by an armed soldier. We were ordered to get the car off the road and prepare for imminent evacuation by coach. We got our passports and documents and went to the pub. The landlord explained. We had not known that the largest strategic military petrol store in the UK was half a mile up the road. Fires were burning towards it from three sides. They estimated an explosion would wipe out the village. The army believed it was the IRA, hence the armed troops in the street from the same base. There were two guys sitting at the bar. I sat next to them and started to make conversation. They just shook their heads. After five minutes they decided to trust me and started whispering. They were Irish, had strong accents and were terrified of being shot.

Anyway, the fires were put out, just yards from the petrol tanks. It transpired they had been started deliberately … by three local schoolboys. Which leads me to …

Terrorism was becoming a threat by the early 70s and grew through the 1980s, and then it was the IRA. Guildford, Birmingham, Millbank, Caterham, Olympia, Chelsea Barracks,  Hyde Park, Deal. Then Airey Neave in 1979, Mountbatten, Brighton Grand Hotel in 1984. I’d spoken at the Grand Hotel twice by 1984 and had stayed there (ELT events NOT a Conservative conference, I hasten to add … but it makes you think.)

The Grand Hotel, Brighton 1984

Early 80s. We were recording in a studio off Oxford Street, in a studio built inside the crypt of a bombed out church with a new 1950s building above. We emerged at lunchtime to find a bomb had gone off on the corner of Oxford Street, and we were standing inside the cordoned off area with police staring at us in shock as the area had been evacuated. The studio engineer said, ‘I told you our sound insulation was brilliant.’

Public places were becoming genuinely worrying. Totally innocent public places too, like shopping centres and pubs.

Ah, but we’re all friends now and we are supposed to sit down and have tea with men with blood on their hands.

Embassy American (top right) became the choice circa 1976 / 77. Then it disappeared in a … puff of smoke?

Cigarettes. In the staff room, well over half the teachers had a cigarette between lessons. At my secondary school in the 60s, teachers opened staff room doors a crack and thick blue and yellow smoke billowed out. My writing partner, Bernie Hartley, aimed to smoke two if possible in the ten minutes break between lessons we had in the 70s. In the theatre and cinema, smoking was permitted. Then they introduced no smoking zones, initially about 25% right at one extreme side. The smoke just drifted over. Then slowly non-smokers added the middle, then finally the lot. Smoking on planes was around half the area. In Asia, it was the whole area as male smokers would not be told what to do by female flight attendants. We were on an internal flight in Japan on All Nippon Airways, in non-smoking. Four or five men were smoking right by us. We asked the flight attendant (still called an air hostess). She said, ‘I can’t tell them to stop. They are men!’ All public areas and streets stank of cigarette smoke. Our clothes must have permanently reeked of it – and we were non-smokers. When our first child was born, new mothers were smoking in hospital. In bed.

Photos I just went to look for our 70s photos. Trip to Paris. 1972. About a dozen photos. We took a camera and one 12 shot B&W film. We bought another film there, but most shots were crap. Then by the 80s we have a large new album for our kids two or three times a year. So their memories, jogged by photos, will be totally different from ours of the 1950s, 1960s and the 1970s with so few prompts. Then just look at the number of photos everyone carries around on a Smart Phone now.

Shops Charity shops were starting to appear in the 1970s, rapidly killing the church Jumble Sale. Little did we know that Oxfam would deliberately target places with independent secondhand bookshops, open up nearby and drive them out of business within weeks.

Charity shops: Three in a row. Chichester, Sussex, 2019

You could buy LPs or cassettes easily … Woolworths, W.H. Smith, Boots and department stores all sold records, plus there were several specialist record shops too, three or four in central Bournemouth. On the whole, High Streets were real shops selling real stuff. There were no charity shops in main streets, and there were no coffee shops. No Starbucks, Costa, Nero or Coffee 1. No Pret a Manger. Very few Pizza Express restaurants. We knew two guys who ran a bookshop, early 80s. A new mall opened and they enquired about rate and rents. More per week  than they could take in a week. As they said, shops in malls could only run with two or three pimply “trainee managers” on minimum wages with every decision on buying and stock being made nationally many miles away, somewhere like Milton Keynes. Two adults (they were a couple) couldn’t make a living out of a new shop.

No one had worked out that shops selling 10p worth of coffee for £2.90 were so profitable that they could pay the rates and rent demanded. A muffin was an English item, toasted and served hot with butter, not a chocolate cake. A brownie was a junior Girl Guide. No one knew WTF a croissant was.

These are muffins. They’re not chocolate chip. They’re not in Starbucks.

Another friend had a toy shop, circa 1984. Toys R Us opened 25 miles away. She immediately lost most of her pre-Christmas trade which she relied on. Then Toys R Us were selling a major boxed  Lego set for £40. She was paying £45 for it wholesale. For Toys R Us, read Currys, Homebase, B&Q, much later PC World. Warehouses were taking over. My friend? Six months later, her rent renewal came up after ten years. Barclays Bank owned the building and tripled the rent. It is now a Costa. There are no toy shops in the town. This is why increasingly the High Street shop was in deep trouble even before amazon arrived.

Shopping … the 1970s were better. Except on Sundays when they were all resolutely closed. Retail workers got to have a day with their families.

Jobs  There were jobs that have gone. Miners, car workers, steel workers obviously. But also simple things like railway porters and petrol station attendants. We were shocked in the early 70s when we had to start filling cars ourselves. Actually, if we switch to hydrogen cars (way greener than electric) the attendants will come back. The dangers of self-service hydrogen mean they will use attendants again.

The more recent forced move to self-service supermarkets (and W.H. Smith) really annoys me. If they’re making people redundant, then making me do their jobs instead, fine. I will if you give me 5% or 10% discount for doing so. Otherwise, I’m angry.

Regions. Both parties in the run up to the 2019 Election are falling over themselves to re-dress the North-South balance, which is naked and flagrant vote buying. Will they manage to reverse the drift to the South-East? When I was doing Geography A-level in the mid-1960s we had a section on the drift South in most countries. As a kid in Bournemouth, every small shop was run by people with Northern accents. The dream was retiring to the South Coast and buying a small shop or guest house. Thousands did. Lots of kids in my school had Northern accents. I was a rarity in that my dad was born in Bournemouth too. People move to nicer places. Similarly, the North Wales coast is full of people with Liverpool and Manchester accents running the shops and small hotels.

Traditional industry was based first on water power, then coal. South Wales, Lancashire and Yorkshire had them both. Lancashire added a damp climate (a third more rainfall than East Dorset, nearly twice the rainfall of Norfolk) which greatly assisted cotton production. Then you get a national electricity grid. There is no longer any reason for other industries to sit on the coal fields. They can go anywhere. A few years later, North Sea Gas added piped gas to anywhere too. It happened in the USA. It happened in Italy. The owners (or in nationalised industry, the bosses) think, ‘Would I rather live in wet Wigan or on the drier, sunnier and warmer South Coast with cleaner air?’ Once you take away the coal, do people want to live on the side of a mountain in South Wales looking at the slag heaps, or would they prefer a job in cosmopolitan and thriving Cardiff? It was even happening in 1930, when my mum, aged 15, was sent away from Tredegar to skivvy in Bournemouth hotels, because you could earn money to send home there.

The Heads of The Valley road construction 2019, South Wales. EU funded.

This year we watched the billions of pounds Heads of The Valleys road being cut out of the mountainsides in South Wales, supposedly to breathe new life into the semi-abandoned coal and steel towns at the end of the valleys. I don’t think it will work. So ask the average school leaver whether they’d rather live in a derelict post-industrial town or move to London? Unfortunately, it’s natural and irreversible.

Boarded up social club / community centre, Cefn Goula Tredegar 2019 

The latest row is over the initiative to help deprived towns. Surprise, surprise, much is going to marginal constituencies which the Tories have targeted. That’s what every political party has done since time immemorial. In the Blair era, we drove back from Cardiff’s splendid entertainment complex next to the Welsh National Assembly (lots of posh restaurants for the politicians) along an M4 motorway lit up all night on the Labour loyal Welsh side. Then you crossed the Severn Bridge onto the dark motorway with potholes everywhere in Conservative rural England.

At that time, there was a massive shortage of school places in our heavily Conservative area. When we wrote  to our MP to protest that one grandchild had been allocated a school 3 miles east of home, and the sibling (18 months apart) 3 miles west, meaning schools six miles apart, our MP wrote back “I am tired with getting complaints about education in Poole. I don’t have time for this. Please do not write to me again.” Robert Syms. Tory Brexiteer. Expenses scandal in  2009. Divorced 1999 and again in 2016. Dismissed as a Tory whip for nastiness. Standing again in 2019.

Our Twin Sails Bridge linking the deprived post-industrial areas with the nicer areas of Poole was delayed for decades. Construction finally started in May 2010. Oh, yes … that happens to be the month David Cameron took office. (Inevitably it keeps getting closed again due to shoddy work). Every government favours its supporting areas and even more those areas with a chance of them winning new seats. For years, it was said elections were won or lost in areas of the West Midlands which switched sides each election, but invariably voted for the winning side. So they have the most motorways of anywhere in the UK.

Collapsing high streets seem a lottery and perhaps based on local decisions rather than national ones. Recently we thought Newbury had declined extremely, with a deserted mall, charity shops everywhere. Dismal. Central Bournemouth looks bad with the huge Marks & Spencer closed, and two large closed cinema blocks in a prestige road, killed by the new cinema complex. Why pay £4 for a couple of hours when Castle Point four miles away has free parking?  Salisbury has never recovered from the Russian poisonings.  Then in contrast, Exeter, York, Stratford-upon-Avon and Bath are absolutely humming with activity. Chichester’s pretty good. Hull is still enjoying the aftermath of its year as City of Culture, well, in some parts.

1972. Cherie Blair’s dad on the right

Racism in the 1970s was casual and everywhere. You wouldn’t believe 1970s stand -up comedy. It hadn’t changed much from my school days when we were constantly accused of “behaving like (add a nasty racial word of your choice.)” But it even got on TV. I’d argue that certainly Till Death Us Do Part was ABOUT racism, rather than racist. I don’t agree with the BBC pretending it never existed. It Ain’t Half Hot Mum was “of its time” to be polite. Pity, the main interaction among the soldiers was good stuff.

On the other hand, you never saw women veiled in Pakistani or other Moslem areas. It was a Saudi thing, almost exclusively Saudi.  I taught lots of Iranian, Syrian and Turkish women in the 70s, and their clothes were indistinguishable from Italian or English women the same age. I thought that was an extremely positive thing about the 70s.  I read the news now and wonder what happened to all those bright, outgoing girls. A lot stayed in England.

Food choice was awful. A pizza (with cheddar) was a luxury night out. One of my editors knew about wine and had a good palate. We took him to our favourite Bournemouth pizzeria in 1978. Wine came in open carafes. He took a few sips and said, ‘Bournemouth water has a particularly distinctive flavour. This red wine is 33% to 50% Bournemouth water. Also, the other half is definitely not Chianti.’ Maybe that’s why everybody used to cheerfully drive home after a carafe each. There was an appalling death toll from drunken driving.

Breakfast 2019. Anywhere. No one in 1971 would recognize this as breakfast. Most would ask what the green stuff was.

In an ordinary 1970s supermarket you could not buy rocket, blueberries, avocados, papaya, mangos, kale, heirloom tomatoes, fresh pasta, fresh herbs, chilled pizza. No, people didn’t eat them. I was in Italy in 1979 and could not believe ‘hedgerow salad’ which I loved. An editor with an Italian wife explained that you could grow it just as easily in England. No one did … so we started. Salad was light green lettuce. When we were vegetarian, our Christmas dinner treat was going to the only greengrocer that sold curly salad endive (frisee), It was very expensive.

Pubs sold beer. And crisps and pork scratchings. Wine in a pub was “Ringwood Brewery Medium White. Produce of more than one country.” The Gastropub lay in the future, but by the late 60s chicken in a basket and scampi in a basket pointed the way things would go. No one paid for bottled water. No one walked around with a plastic bottle of water. That was something that only foreigners did because their water supply wasn’t as good as ours.

Around 1982 I came back from Genoa with a Gaggia espresso machine as hand luggage. It was £85 in Italy, around £300 in England … if you could find one. No coffee shops, though when I worked in Fortes in Bournemouth in 1965, they did proper Italian coffee. Customers complained it was too strong and asked if we had Nescafé.

Indian and Chinese restaurants served brown glop in bowls. You could not tell the difference between one dish and another. A friend who now lives in America loves Indian food and has fond memories of 70s Indian restaurants. He was most disappointed on a visit to find 2019 ones have recognisable fish, meat and vegetables, just like in California.

Food in general is way better and healthier now. I reckon that happened about 20 years ago. Will Tony Blair try to take the credit? I don’t know if the EU improved it, or immigration did (a major factor) or that generally climate change introduced more fruit and veg, and had us eating at outdoor tables.

We’d never heard of English wine. England produced wine until the later Middle Ages when the English crown owned the best vineyard areas of France, and it became cheaper to import. Wine production is a certain sign of climate change, and an odd beneficial one in England.

I don’t recall anyone having barbecues in the 70s. Nowhere had outdoor tables in the 1970s, the climate HAS changed  … oh, maybe country pubs, so you could take crisps and lemonade out and eat with your kids outside.

I had local New Forest strawberries and raspberries for breakfast in December this morning. Under £2 a punnet. That’s solar powered poly-tunnels. We didn’t have those.

At the doctors. 

Early NHS in schools: Doctor’s day (probably with nit nurse). That’s why no one had nits, a scourge of schools nowadays.

In the 1960s you went to the doctor’s house and sat in a cramped waiting room with 25 other people, most of them either coughing or sneezing. No appointments. He (it was always “he”) saw you in order of arrival.  His wife was the receptionist. A two hour wait reading greasy copies of Reader’s Digest was normal. My doctor, who had delivered me, was over 20 stone and chain smoked at his desk. When you went in, he offered you a cigarette once you were sixteen. He was in spite of that, a lovely man and most generous with his cigarettes.

By the 1970s, the early health centres were being built. It was still an arrive, check in and wait system.

We had a brief period when you could make appointments! Wonderful. That stopped. Our doctor’s surgery ended up with two weeks to get an appointment, and they wouldn’t book more than two weeks ahead. So you had to wait till the next Monday at 9 a.m. and try and phone to get an appointment. Otherwise it’s what I describe as Call Centre Medicine. You phone. They phone you back two hours later and consult on the phone. You go and collect a prescription.

Last year they reverted to drop in clinics. You arrive at 7.45 and queue in the rain (I was fourteenth in line  last month). Doors open at eight. You register. The doctors arrive at 8.30. I got in to see the doctor at 10.20. She (now it’s almost always “she”) said, ‘How do you like our new system?” I said “It’s exactly the same as the 1960s system. Except then the doctor gave you a cigarette to calm you down after waiting.”

Was the NHS better in the past? I could alternate recent horror stories with recent stories of amazing dedication and work.

I was in hospital in 1982. Hernia operation. The junior nurse took a blood test the first day. She took four attempts. Then she dropped it on the floor where it shattered. When I left three days later, the blood and broken glass were still on the floor. The nurses weren’t allowed to touch broken glass. The cleaners refused to touch blood.  Demarcation dispute. There were 24 men on the ward (no mixed wards thankfully). It was quite convivial, but the screaming and shouting of two old men with dementia all night was horrendous. One man smuggled a bottle of whisky in and drank the lot the night before an operation. We grassed him up to the doctors.

The surgeon wouldn’t tell me anything about the operation, but grunted ‘You will definitely need the other side done within a year. Good day.” I said, “I will not. I’m not going to lift anything heavy ever again.” And I haven’t. All the information I got about the operation and after effects (numb area) were conveyed by the male nurse who shaved me.

NHS surgeons in 1982 lived up to the joke:

A prominent surgeon died and went to heaven. He looked through the Pearly Gates and saw a tall man in a pinstriped blue suit barking sharp commands at people. ‘Excellent,” he said, “As  I thought surgeons get into heaven.”
St. Peter shook his head, ‘Oh, no. That’s not a surgeon. That’s God. He just thinks he’s a surgeon.”

In my experience, surgeons and consultants nowadays are vastly more friendly and open and willing to discuss stuff. That’s a huge change. It may be a generation change (partly that’s true) or better training.

So that’s my recall of the golden age of the NHS. It was generally horrible. My tonsils operation aged five was deeply traumatic. Now it might still be horrible, stuck in a corridor for three days subsisting on tuna baguettes with hard crusts (it happened to a relative, too old to crunch through the hard crusts), but it’s very patchily so. Equally, it can be absolutely magnificent. We need to eradicate the waiting lists, the queues. It’s ludicrous that ambulances are tied up, parked with patients in the back who they can’t move into Emergency.

A great deal is bed blocking by patients who are elderly and need professional care in a care home, but do not need a hospital. We had a relative in hospital ten days with a fracture, waiting to be moved to a geriatric hospital. We need a massive building programme of that ‘half way quasi-hospital’ facility between an NHS hospital and an ordinary care home. They’re cheaper than full hospitals too. I’m very suspicious of the mega regional hospitals causing smaller ones to be closed.

The population is ageing. So the tax base is shrinking. We’re all living longer. Can the State really afford care for all the elderly in care facilities without contribution? (If so, as my mum and mother-in-law’s meagre savings got eaten up in care home fees, will we get a retrospective rebate?) That’s just another reason why Brexit is daft. Spend some time in Care Homes. If you took away the Polish, Portuguese and Romanian workers (they’re the main ones round here), who would do the job? You see VERY few British people doing it.

Football. In 1975, Bournemouth, Swansea and Reading were 4^th Division teams. Brighton, Cardiff, Crystal Palace were Third Division. There has been a positive spread of Premier and Championship football towards the South and West, Wales and East Anglia. There are still twenty-one teams in the four divisions from the North-West, Lancashire and Cheshire. That’s virtually a division. It’s historical, but football benefits from a wider spread. Here in Bournemouth, we may have local rivalry with Southampton and Brighton, but we want them to stay up. We’d like Reading and Portsmouth to do better too.

Thuggery and racism are being eradicated very fast among fans. Partly that’s a change of social attitudes, though sadly some is because of rocketing prices to attend matches, or the Chelsea effect. I was talking to some young people in Southampton. They all support Eastleigh, a non-league team, because they can afford the price of admission, which they can’t for Premier League Southampton.

On the pitch, 70s players went out to cripple opponents. injury stoppages were long. Careers were ruined. Leeds United were particularly notorious for this. Back in the very early 80s, Bournemouth pedestrianised two major shopping streets, and planted trees right through the new pedestrian area. Leeds United came down for a bank holiday cup game. The Leeds fans snapped every single new tree off at the base. Like team, like fans.

The best thing about the football 70s was watching Liverpool. That seems to be coming back.

Racism was not alone. Homophobia was rife in sport (Brighton fans got chants everywhere, but especially in Bournemouth due to South Coast rivalry), as was ‘fattism’ (ask Paul Gascoigne).

I believe that fans’ prejudice against one category of the disabled, the myopics (myopia afflicts so many referees), is impossible to eradicate.

Law – One of several poisonous legacies of Tony Blair was the growth of the tentacles of lawyers into so many more areas. Tony and Cherie were both lawyers and it really showed. Health & Safety laws meant window cleaners had to break your upstairs windows with swaying poles. You need a tower to clean gutters or paint them. Ladders are virtually illegal. Every year I have to prove my identity to my accountant and family lawyer. I have to show my lawyer my passport and a utility bill to prove my identity and address. He signed my passport application last time. I’ve known him thirty years.

My first publishing contract in 1977 was four pages. The addendum for the American edition of a whole series was half a page of A4.  We never had a dispute over either. Now thirty page contracts are common. Much of it is lawyers creating work for themselves. I did a series where each level was agreed to be on the same terms. Every time we did a new level, we got a new and longer contract, which had to be read and discussed with more lawyers. It was ever thus, to a degree.

Anyone who has ever bought a house will have heard the lawyer say “The other people’s lawyer is very slow and awkward.” The other party’s lawyer will be telling them the same thing about your lawyer. It suits them both to be slow and awkward.

Local politics was spectacularly corrupt, and as long term Private Eye readers will know, it was equally as bad in both Conservative and Labour councils. Mostly, councillors lined their pockets and were rewarded with having blocks of council flats, old people’s homes and cul de sacs of council houses named after them.

Standards in national politics were usually different. True, Wilson’s Deputy Prime Minister George Brown rivalled John Prescott and Alex Salmond in the (alleged) “political groper accusation stakes.” In late 1960s Hull, George Brown openly tried to grope at female students wholesale, drunk as a skunk.  A guy whose girlfriend’s breast he grabbed had to be restrained from punching him. Nothing changes. There have always been power hungry, sexually aggressive male politicians, from George Brown to Jeremy Thorpe.

On the other hand, I see no one around nowadays of the intellectual stature of Harold Wilson, Barbara Castle, Tony Benn, Roy Jenkins, David Owen, Anthony Crosland, Shirley Williams, Denis Healey … or indeed several Conservatives.

Maybe that’s why both our major parties have been hi-jacked by their extreme wings. The Conservatives now look like UKIP, but even nastier, and Labour look like the Socialist Worker party (considered a dire enemy of Labour in the 70s) Militant has made it into the sun.

I did American Studies and Politics with Drama subsidiary. Hull was a very good politics faculty. One of my third year options was The One Party State taught by Bob Benewick, later at Sussex. Yes, I have read Marx and Lenin extensively. Most haven’t. (BTW, Marx was the nice guy of the two. All you need to know.) At Hull, Chris Mullin was editor of the union newspaper, and considered moderate to right wing by the militants. That’s how far left-wing Hull was. Chris was  later thought to be on the left of the Labour party (as well as writing one of the best political autobiographies). Prescott was allegedly there at Hull at the same time on a Union scholarship, but I don’t know anyone who ever met him and I asked a lot at the 2018 reunion. The invisible man.   Tom Fawthrop tore his exam papers up during my Part One exams. I was in the hall. He lived on the same floor as me and his room was decorated with pictures of Chairman Mao. That was just after the Cultural Revolution, one of the greatest mass murders in history. I was heavily involved in the 1968 sit in. I’m just saying I have first hand contact with extreme left wing politics of the 60s.

Oxford

I’m not in awe of Oxbridge. Far more kids qualify than get in, so it is something of a lottery. But the starting line for application is set extremely high even if it’s  luck to cross it. The most fiercely intellectual man I’ve known, Robert O’Neill, had no degree but had drama qualifications, which is the same as Karen. I’ve met many people with Oxbridge degrees or doctorates in applied linguistics that Robert could have run rings around. I saw him do it too. Some of the best ELT teachers I’ve known had drama qualifications. I guess that’s all Shakespeare had, and via experience not a certificate. Neither Bob Dylan nor Van Morrison attended university. Nor did Winston Churchill. But …

Mr Corbyn has two grade Es at A level (i.e. he could spell his name correctly and to be fair, that “y” is hard) in spite of the advantages of a private education, generally thought to add at least one grade (which takes him back to two fails) and dropped out of a soft degree in Trades Union studies at a polytechnic.

In contrast, a ludicrous majority of our post 1945 Prime Ministers were Oxford educated (Atlee, Eden, Macmillan, Douglas-Home, Wilson, Heath, Thatcher, Blair, Cameron, Teresa May and ugh, Johnson) and some (most) of them were total bastards as well, but even so, I’m going to be horribly meritocratic, intellectually snobbish,  two grade Es is not good. Two Es at A level would exclude you from many permanent local government jobs or from work in banks. You would not get into a good drama school either. It’s better not to have done A levels (and I know many very intelligent people who didn’t and left school at age 16) than to have done them and got two Es.

If you look back at my list of Labour greats, most also had Oxford degrees … Denis Healey, Barbara Castle, Roy Jenkins, Tony Crosland, Tony Benn, Shirley Williams. Dr David Owen was Cambridge as was Andy Burnham, and Tory Rab Butler.  Harold Wilson at 21 was the youngest Oxford don in economics. Michael Heseltine was at Oxford too.

That joke in Yes, Minister is true. The minister asks why there are two motorways serving Oxford but only one to Cambridge. He gets a pitying look, ‘The Ministry of Transport have always been Oxford men.’ I remember an interviewer asking whether Nick Clegg could ever become Prime Minister.

‘Good Lord, no!’ said the expert.
‘Why? Because he’s a Liberal Democrat?’ asked the interviewer.
‘Not at all, because he went to Cambridge.’

Then the same story was told about Diane Abbott and the Labour leadership. (Is it because she’s black?’ ‘No, not at all, it’s because she was at Cambridge.’)

I wrote for Oxford University Press for decades and have no illusions about the “niceness” of the institution. I corrected introductions to my talks from  “Peter Viney from Oxford University” to “Peter Viney from Oxford University Press” countless times. Finally, a senior manager said, ‘Don’t worry. You’re making Oxford enough money. They won’t care. Just go with it.’ But it is extremely hard to get into Oxford. I wouldn’t have managed (No Latin ‘O’ level). Gordon Brown went to Edinburgh, and holds a Ph.D in History (which he has never flaunted by calling himself “Dr”).

The bright ones (I didn’t say ‘nice’ or ‘good’) don’t stay in politics anymore. At the last election ITV had two former Chancellors of the Exchequer sitting together and commenting, Ed Balls (Labour) and George Osborne (Conservative). They were getting on so well – often laughing together at the misfortunes of their previous colleagues. Osborne became an editor, and like many ex-Tory chancellors, was invited into lucrative directorships. Ed Balls went on to become a TV star, first on Strictly Come Dancing then with a very good TV travelogue. He has personality, but then to be Education minister and visit schools and stand on a stage to be introduced to 1000 kids as “Mr Balls” you need personality. They both got out. What did they have in common? Not background, Osborne was a posh boy … but yes, both were at Oxford University. Balls was also at Harvard and taught there. He still does academic work, and chairs Premier League side Norwich City.

Ed Balls achieved a 1st in PPE (Politics, Philosophy & Economics) as did David Miliband, who did postgrad at MIT. Yvette Cooper is another with an Oxford First in PPE, postgrad studies at Harvard, and an M.Sc in Economics from the LSE. Ed Miliband was yet another Oxford PPE graduate, who also holds an M.Sc in Economics from LSE. He has stayed on the backbenches.

The current tragedy of the Labour party is that people of  the stature and obvious intelligence of Ed Balls, David Miliband, Ed Miliband, Gordon Brown, did not stay and fight Momentum’s takeover of Labour. Yvette Cooper has stayed and put up with the Momentum boys. Hilary Benn (Sussex, Russian & European Studies, deliberately eschewing elite Oxbridge) is another obviously very bright light now partly under a bushel. Chuka Umunna, once thought a very likely leader, and with rare charisma, has jumped ship to LibDem.

On the other side, Cameron retired, hurt, along with Osborne and Clegg. Then again, in spite of having Barbara Castle, Shirley Williams, Mo Mowlam, and Clare Short, among the best politicians of their eras, Labour never let a woman get the top job. ‘You take the notes, luv’ still exists. The Conservatives elected woman leaders twice.

(POSTSCRIPT- late December. Labour is saying it should insist on a woman as next leader. This indicates a basic, trades union derived misogyny. Labour has to use positive discrimination. Conservative, Liberal Democrat,Scottish Nationalists, Plaid Cymru and Green all managed to elect women leaders without resorting to positive discrimination).

In his autobiography Ed Balls described Corbyn’s leadership as:

A leftist Utopian fantasy devoid of any connection to peoples’ lives.

John Major had no degree, but I’m told the Institute of Bankers exams he took were tough on economics. James Callaghan hadn’t a degree either, but had worked in the Inland Revenue so took civil service exams and could certainly count.

Gordon Brown, Tony Blair, David Cameron, John Major. Probably NOT the Four Just Men.

Lest this appears to be falling on Labour, I would rate Rees-Mogg and Michael Gove as the two British politicians I loathe most of all (both Oxford degrees), along with John McDonnell. I totally believe that the stock market manipulator Rees-Mogg with his company in the Caymans is motivated to Brexit most of all by imminent EU rules on tax havens. An appalling bigot, whose comments on the Grenfell fire should have seen him thrown out of any political party.

I see Jeremy Corbyn as the seemingly avuncular but slightly dim puppet whose strings are being pulled by the brighter McDonnell.  I also consider him to be anti-Semitic and pro-terrorist by his actions, and also by his failure to act. If he thinks his actions were not anti-Semitic, then has to be either dumb, or lacking in any empathy. I don’t really care how many Jewish supporters he can line up to photograph and post on line. Surveys suggest that 85% of British Jews believe he is anti-Semitic.  That means 15% don’t, so are happy to support him on line. His much-loved Venezuela is no model for an economy.

The “pretend to be bumbling” Boris is a serial liar and cheat and bullshitter who discussed having a journalist beaten up on behalf of a friend. Then Corbyn is currently on his third wife. Add an affair with Diane Abbott. Unfaithful to their nearest and dearest, so why would I trust them? Neither of them are fit to hold power. However, I don’t believe the Labour claims that Boris will “sell out the NHS to Trump.” Jacob Rees-Mogg would do it immediately. Michael Gove might too, but Boris, I rather think not. He is a populist, like Trump. Or indeed Mussolini. Acclaim and being liked and applauded in power seems to be his motivation. He’s not daft enough to believe that selling out the NHS would not finish that.

on Radio 4, a phone in man suggested that Boris Johnson was neither a Leaver nor a Remainer, but a ‘Boriser’ and being prime minister was his primary motivation. Brexit was an opportunity.

I just ran the “You will be stuck in a railway compartment with this person for twelve hours” test on recent senior politicians. Who would you choose? (Well, delete the ones you’d want to push out of the door). My first choice would be Ed Balls, because he seems a jolly fellow, and he’d have a lot more to say about anything except politics, then in fact David Cameron, because he always seemed a pleasant and decent family man, much too considerate to “talk shop.” I recall pictures of England’s failed World Cup bid, with Prince William, David Cameron and David Beckham obviously getting on so well.

In 2019, we’re into a forced two way fight (deliberately – it suits both Conservative and Labour) between two men a surprising proportion of the public distrust and dislike. Both Brexiteers, one opportunistic, the other closet. Both from London constituencies. . Both have problems with family fidelity. Corbyn has a staggeringly large majority in North Islington. At 70% it must be around the largest vote share in the country. We’re told it is a deprived area. I presume they don’t mean my favourite bit between Ottolenghi and the Almeida Theatre. Boris was a populist mayor of London.

As a letter to The Times pointed out, a third person in the debate gets rid of the ping pong abuse.

The 70s music was brilliant, possibly never bettered. But look where the blues came from. I’d argue 1971 almost being as good as 1969, which is saying a lot. However 1971 had What’s Going On – Marvin Gaye and Surf’s Up – The Beach Boys, for starters.

The thing is, the Golden Age is when you were young. That’s why the generation before me think back to World War II, the cameraderie of the blitz, the dances with servicemen on leave, the excitement as a golden era.  That’s why I reckon 1965-1972 were the best years ever (but actually, that’s probably true).

So you might look to the late 70s or early 80s and see a golden age.

I was there.  It wasn’t. Phew!