Had an unplatable thought - perhaps 1950-2000 was a one time, one way wealth transfer, and nothing to do with cycles.

[kzb]

18 minutes ago, 24gray24 said:

Ps. The government didn't export the factories, it just stopped subsidising them and they went bust. 

Then boomers sold the useful bits abroad. 

Boomers voted for this because taxes were too high, subsidising lazy union men who went on strike all the time. 

And they kept voting for it throughout the 1980's. 

Boomers were 16 to 34 years old in 1980 and 26 to 44 years old in 1990.

The vast majority were not in senior roles at that age.  The decisions were taken by a tiny minority of mostly older people, as they always are.

[24gray24]

Just now, kzb said:

Boomers were 16 to 34 years old in 1980 and 26 to 44 years old in 1990.

The vast majority were not in senior roles at that age.  The decisions were taken by a tiny minority of mostly older people, as they always are.

Boomers were profiting from it all. 

Getting council houses cheap, getting shares in privatised industries, all of it. 

Me,me,me. 

 "there is no such thing as society". 

Roll on to 2009 and you get the millionaire boomers all getting a triple lock and collecting their winter fuel allowance.  And the poorer ones squandering their assets so the government will pay for their care home fees. 

[kzb]

1 hour ago, 24gray24 said:

Boomers were profiting from it all. 

Getting council houses cheap, getting shares in privatised industries, all of it. 

Me,me,me. 

 "there is no such thing as society". 

Roll on to 2009 and you get the millionaire boomers all getting a triple lock and collecting their winter fuel allowance.  And the poorer ones squandering their assets so the government will pay for their care home fees. 

I've just told you boomers were too young to vote Thatcher in.  If you want to see archetypal boomers in their better days, see The Young Ones.

[24gray24]

1 minute ago, kzb said:

I've just told you boomers were too young to vote Thatcher in.  If you want to see archetypal boomers in their better days, see The Young Ones.

They were 15 to 33 years old in 1979, and a huge bulge in numbers coming through demographically.  

Thatcher spoke for half of them. The half creaming it in down south.

The other half, who hated her, were the socialist soon to be unemployed up north. (Who'd bankrupted whole industries by going on strike all the time)

But even they profited with council home sales, at the expense of all future generations. 

Me, me, me. 

 

 

[kzb]

4 minutes ago, 24gray24 said:

They were 15 to 33 years old in 1979, and a huge bulge in numbers coming through demographically.  

Thatcher spoke for half of them. The half creaming it in down south.

The other half, who hated her, were the socialist soon to be unemployed up north. (Who'd bankrupted whole industries by going on strike all the time)

But even they profited with council home sales, at the expense of all future generations. 

Me, me, me. 

 

 

Hardly any 15-33 year olds voted for Thatcher.  

Maybe you could take a lesson from the strikes.  All the riots I see are about climate change and women objecting to sexual attention.  I must've missed the riots about house prices.

[Big Orange]

Extreme, ossified wealth stratification seems very unstable and brittle for an advanced democracy. 

[24gray24]

1 minute ago, kzb said:

Hardly any 15-33 year olds voted for Thatcher.  

Maybe you could take a lesson from the strikes.  All the riots I see are about climate change and women objecting to sexual attention.  I must've missed the riots about house prices.

Sorry, I think you've got your facts wrong. 

Thatcher was a rejection of socialism. 

Young, old, everyone voted for or against the socialist government of the day. Thatcher won. 

[Fishfinger]

On 17/04/2021 at 12:38, zugzwang said:

 

Private sector debt fell during WWI and WWII because the entire economy was put on a war footing i.e. nationalised.

 

... And also some of the debtors and potential debtors defaulted by dying prematurely😉

[kzb]

11 minutes ago, 24gray24 said:

Sorry, I think you've got your facts wrong. 

Thatcher was a rejection of socialism. 

Young, old, everyone voted for or against the socialist government of the day. Thatcher won. 

Which age demographic voted Thatcher?

Are you seriously telling us the hippies and the punks voted Tory?  

[Fishfinger]

24 minutes ago, kzb said:

Hardly any 15-33 year olds voted for Thatcher.  

Maybe you could take a lesson from the strikes.  All the riots I see are about climate change and women objecting to sexual attention.  I must've missed the riots about house prices.

I did in 1983, that was my first GE.

I was sick to death of stroppy unions bringing misery to every one. Imagine a Bob  Crow in every workplace calling wildcat strikes at a drop of a hat...

[24gray24]

11 minutes ago, kzb said:

Which age demographic voted Thatcher?

Are you seriously telling us the hippies and the punks voted Tory?  

The Conservatives voted thatcher and the socialists voted for more winters of discontent. 

Voting en bloc solely for the benefit of your own age group wasn't invented then. 

Punk was 1977 bye the way. Whatever they were angry about was under the socialist government. 

[zugzwang]

3 minutes ago, Fishfinger said:

I did in 1983, that was my first GE.

I was sick to death of stroppy unions bringing misery to every one. Imagine a Bob  Crow in every workplace calling wildcat strikes at a drop of a hat...

 

Stroppy unions? Thatcher's disastrous expt with monetarism put 3.5 million people out of work!

 

14 minutes ago, kzb said:

Which age demographic voted Thatcher?

Are you seriously telling us the hippies and the punks voted Tory?  

The Official Sloane Ranger Handbook was published in 1982.

Yuppies were invented around the same time. A stiff-necked reaction to the countercultural movements of the 1960s and '70s.

[kzb]

1 hour ago, 24gray24 said:

Punk was 1977 bye the way. Whatever they were angry about was under the socialist government. 

So the punks were Tories?  This gets better and better.

[kzb]

57 minutes ago, zugzwang said:

The Official Sloane Ranger Handbook was published in 1982.

Yuppies were invented around the same time. A stiff-necked reaction to the countercultural movements of the 1960s and '70s.

What percentage of that age group was a Sloane Ranger?  Or a Yuppie ?

Would it be more or less than the 3.5 million on the dole?

[Insane]

4 hours ago, 24gray24 said:

Boomers were profiting from it all. 

Getting council houses cheap, getting shares in privatised industries, all of it. 

Me,me,me. 

 "there is no such thing as society". 

Roll on to 2009 and you get the millionaire boomers all getting a triple lock and collecting their winter fuel allowance.  And the poorer ones squandering their assets so the government will pay for their care home fees. 

"Me Me Me"

Most people just make the most of what is in front of and around them they make decisions on what they can see and what they have seen in the past. They also make mistakes. The Boomer Generation never formed a consortium of Boomers to Grab everything and keep the next generation poor, they never planned anything among themselves. You speak of them as a Group when they are just made up from individuals born between certain dates who also acted as and made decisions as individuals. The only time they and others can be described as acting on mass it at General Elections and yes in the 80's they Voted Thatcher as the offering from Labour was so dire. Michael Foot comes to mind when I think of Labour and the 80's.

I have boomers in my family who did the same jobs as their parents grew up in a council house that their parents never bought married and bought the council house they were then in. With Final Salary Pensions and the unprecedent rise in property their life style and net worth is in another league to their parents. Some do not understand how lucky they have been just making a few decisions at certain points in their lives that they never thought much about at the time. Others do understand and do understand how their children now paying massive mortgages or rents in the private sector and both parents having to work to survive are never going to have the life style they had , but they will also state that their children will have a better life style than their parents had. None of them conform to the notion that they collectively grabbed everything by being part of a Club called Boomers. 

 

 

[24gray24]

1 hour ago, kzb said:

So the punks were Tories?  This gets better and better.

Does not follow logically. 

[24gray24]

1 hour ago, kzb said:

What percentage of that age group was a Sloane Ranger?  Or a Yuppie ?

Would it be more or less than the 3.5 million on the dole?

Far more. Vast numbers of teenagers were doing her best to follow the fashion. (And wanting to marry a prince). And people who had kept their jobs very quickly forgot those who had lost theirs; they aspired to being yuppies. It was the rise of white van man. 

Hippies were out. Leftists were bickering among themselves . Punks just hated all government, all of society, everything. 

You seem to insist 3.5 million was an electoral disaster. It wasn't.   It was washed away by pride in being British, in an economy that was picking up, and by the wholesale dismantling of socialism. 

And the dole was something like half of average wage. Far more generous. 

You're going to see something like it with 5m unemployed soon. 

[kzb]

2 hours ago, Insane said:

The Boomer Generation never formed a consortium of Boomers to Grab everything and keep the next generation poor, they never planned anything among themselves.

Well said

2 hours ago, Insane said:

and yes in the 80's they Voted Thatcher as the offering from Labour was so dire.

I doubt that boomers, who were aged 19-37 in 1983, voted majority for Thatcher.  Youth unemployment was pretty spectacular in the early 1980's.

[byron78]

You're right.

It was socialism. 

Horrible to live through, but it did rebalance and rebuild in ways that were frankly necessary after WW2.

The entire world is free market neolib capitalism now, though. We simply don't live in a world where that level of socialism would be tolerable or acceptable to most.

[Insane]

1 hour ago, kzb said:

I doubt that boomers, who were aged 19-37 in 1983, voted majority for Thatcher.  Youth unemployment was pretty spectacular in the early 1980's.

Well I did not vote in 1979 as I was 16 but did Vote Thatcher I think it was 3 times. Most of my friends who were the same age did as well.

Let's not forget most people back then were married by 25 and were starting families as we get older someone aged under 40 seems very young but it is not and many were then taking on their mortgages so wanted stability which the Labour Party did not seem to offer.

When I speak to people my age today late 50's the thing they remember most about the 70's was the Miners on Strike and the power cuts hence the Torys wins of the 80's and 90's. 

[Big Orange]

Not to mention the Soviet Union (and its client states like East Germany, etc) coming across as dysfunctional and repressive, so not such a shining alternative to the UK and US systems at the time (especially when they relatively rapidly but spectacularly unravelled around 1989-1991).

A lot's shifted and changed since then, with the UK now feeling odd and dystopian like East Germany, and the USA painting itself into a corner like the Soviet Union.

Edited April 19, 2021 by Big Orange

[skinnylattej]

15 hours ago, 24gray24 said:

Yes, people did vote for all this. 

They preferred to close all the factories and export them to China rather than keep subsidising lazy union workers who kept going on strike to extort more money from the taxpayer every month. 

You'd have to have seen the 1970's to understand why the 1980's happened. 

Red robbo led straight to Thatcher. 

And Joe Gormley led to clean electricity, and in the future will be hailed as a hero of the environment.

Corrupt, lazy commercial managers who were more concerned about the trim level of their company  car than the company, and only got their job because of who they went to school with.

I'll add two more: winter of discontent, and crazy K at Linwood.

[skinnylattej]

12 hours ago, kzb said:

I've just told you boomers were too young to vote Thatcher in.  If you want to see archetypal boomers in their better days, see The Young Ones.

I disagree, Thatcher was elected in 1979, so the voter would have to have been born before 1961, which I believe is boomer territory.

[14stFlyer]

7 hours ago, Insane said:

When I speak to people my age today late 50's the thing they remember most about the 70's was the Miners on Strike and the power cuts hence the Torys wins of the 80's and 90's. 

The U.K. miners’ strike was in 1984. Peak Thatcher. 
 

My elder brother’s mates (18-20 in about 1984) voted almost exclusively for Thatcher. They were selfish, self centred and “me, me, me”.  
 

Obvously anecdote, but it means I am with 24gray24 on this. They may not have been a collective per say, but they were following an individualistic culture that has contributed to where we are today. 

[Insane]

46 minutes ago, 14stFlyer said:

The U.K. miners’ strike was in 1984. Peak Thatcher. 

The Miners went on Strike in the 70,s as well I think it was 1971 and 1973 when we had the power cuts and the 3 day week. When the miners went on Strike in 84 Thatcher had stock pilled enough coal in order that we did not have pay cuts. 

Your brothers mates did they Join a Club called Boomer and then set the whole house price rises up for the next 40 years ?