Question to people aged 40+

I finished university at the height of the Thatcher cuts in the early 1980s. I was unemployed for two years with my shiny new science degree. If you listen to 'Ghost Town' by The Specials it will give you some idea of the zeitgeist. The 2008 financial crisis was a mere blip compared to the misery of the early Thatcherite era, the later 'Loadsamoney' boom, which only really put money in the hands of London stock market traders, tends to overshadow the dire earlier period for those who did not live through it. My wife was at school with Nick Leeson a derivatives trader whose speculative trades resulted in the 1995 collapse of Barings Bank. In its effect on ordinary people 2008 was chickenfeed in comparison to Thatcherism. She sold off the national 'family silver' which we are still dealing with the consequences of, with bankrupt water companies who have not invested in infrastructure, a not fit for purpose prison and probation service, disarticulated rail system, non-existent rural bus services etc. etc.

I finished university at the height of the Thatcher cuts in the early 1980s. I was unemployed for two years with my shiny new science degree. If you listen to 'Ghost Town' by The Specials it will give you some idea of the zeitgeist. The 2008 financial crisis was a mere blip compared to the misery of the early Thatcherite era, the later 'Loadsamoney' boom, which only really put money in the hands of London stock market traders, tends to overshadow the dire earlier period for those who did not live through it. My wife was at school with Nick Leeson a derivatives trader whose speculative trades resulted in the 1995 collapse of Barings Bank. In its effect on ordinary people 2008 was chickenfeed in comparison to Thatcherism. She sold off the national 'family silver' which we are still dealing with the consequences of, with bankrupt water companies who have not invested in infrastructure, a not fit for purpose prison and probation service, disarticulated rail system, non-existent rural bus services etc. etc.

Certainly a bad time to graduate back then, there was fierce competition for what few job vacancies that there were.  I felt that I would have been better off if I had just left school and got a job rather than spending three years at university (while the unemployment rate soared).  My father didn't understand as he had not known such difficult times to get work but my grandparents did as they lived through the tough economic times of the 1930s.

I think a lot of today ill's can be traced back to Thatcher, Ghost Town is a good example of how things felt then. It wasn't just the selling off of all our national assets into private hands, but the way in which it was done created privately owned monoplies instead of public one's. The telephone system was a good example, as is water, competition was a myth, it's the same water no matter who you pay your bills too and being private companies they put profit first.  I remember having good cheap bus services that went where you needed them to go at times you needed them.

But even more importantly it was what her policies did to the fabric of society, the poll tax, sounds fair, on the surface, but in practice it was a disaster, a family living next door but one to me, were paying a huge sum of money, because they had two college age sons living at home, plus an elderly parent, they ended up paying 5 lots of poll tax on a 3 bed ex council house. The sale of council houses and the refusal to allow councils to invest in public housing has led directly to the housing crisis we have now.

The attacks by government on gay people was scary, far scarier than today, if they could of got away with it I really believe they would of made being gay a crime again. Teenage pregnancies were at an all time high and yet they cut sex education in schools in the belief that if you didn't tell young people about sex then they wouldn't do it. Racial minorities were under attack too, that's another legacy of Thatcher, the imigation problems and how they're not dealt with.

Child poverty went up massively too, parents out of work because of the intentional shut down of industry in favour of a "service economy", before that child poverty had been going down. There was a closure of youth centres and other public services and surprise surprise vandalism and petty crime went up. Young people were demonised as lazy and bad, the work situation was so bad that if you were a young person and not living with parents and out of work, the state would move you around the country every fortnight to a new area to find work, of which there was none. I remember the police marching young people across the country, people were so appalled they were coming out of their houses and giving care packages to those being marched around. The whole country felt like a tinderbox, there were frequent riots, the threat of nuclear war was very real. 

This was an age when everyone from government to ordinary people were encouraged to think of the price of everything and the value of nothing.

Of course not everything was rosy before Thatcher, we had 3 day weeks, The Winter of Discontent and over mighty trade unions and some things were very backward and took ages. But what Thatcher did wasn't the answer and people like Blair pandering to her legacy and going further down the privatisation route was just as bad.