I GREW up as a kid in Granton, Edinburgh. Just down the road from my house there was a public toilet, continuously staffed by male and female “lavvy attendants”. These same attendants may not have been particularly well paid, but they could afford to eat and they had roofs over their heads, courtesy of affordable council housing. They could also afford to heat those homes thanks to plentiful cheap coal and affordable gas and electricity from our nationalised utilities.
Later, when I started working, I was a clerical assistant in the telecoms side of the Post Office – a wonderful, nationalised industry which provided decent employment for thousands. Yes, it was fairly heavily subsidised, but it provided reasonably well-paid employment for those thousands, so much so that aged 19 I was able to afford and successfully obtain a mortgage for a small flat in Gorgie, five minutes’ walk from my place of work. I was still only a clerical assistant, bottom of the ladder, mainly because I did not take my employment very seriously.
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In 1978 I joined British Rail, another marvellous, nationalised industry. At that time it was grossly overstaffed and again, heavily subsidised, but it too provided mass employment with relatively good wages.
One year after I joined British Rail, Thatcher became Prime Minister and Thatcherism was worshipped as the saviour of our exalted Union. Council houses were sold off, cheaply. No replacements were built. The utilities were privatised, coal mines were closed down, “British” oil was sold off, even buses were “deregulated”.
Later on, good old British Rail was privatised too, having been starved of investment for more than 20 years, and having been forced to sell off its more profitable sidelines such as Sealink and British Transport Hotels. I suffered a position as a manager with Railtrack for a couple of years before leaving; I despised the company and even more so the people running it, most of whom wouldn’t recognise a train if it ran up their backsides.
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My next job was with a cash-in-transit company on close to minimum wage. Blair and the Tory-lites were in power and introduced family tax credits; a boon for me at the time as I
was a single parent with three kids to care for. Although tax credits were viewed as a great thing at the time (I certainly thought so), the down-side to that was that it took the onus away from employers to provide a decent wage. Add to those growing problems the wizard wheeze of “buy to let” mortgages and you complete the set of government-inspired poverty: low, low wages; unaffordable housing; high energy costs; high transport costs; food banks; homelessness; high stress levels; increasing suicides.
Contrast that with the growing number of extremely wealthy people, billionaires, multi-billionaires, and soon trillionaires. And let’s not forget that Blair (another Thatcher fan) and “Broony” gave the banks free rein to trash the economy in 2008.
All the ills of our current society can be laid at the door of the blessed Margaret and those devotees whom she still inspires.
SIR Keir Starmer, progressive socialist? It would be funny if only it wasn’t so bloody disgusting.
Cal Waterson
Lennoxtown
REGARDING the families burned alive in the tent encampment near Rafah, and as Sunak and Starmer still fail to call genocide genocide, I wonder if the dead were in those tents Sunak was were crowing about a while back?
Plus – I hope the dead got a bit of that UK/US food aid before they died so horribly...
Amanda Baker
Edinburgh
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