Bring Back 1970s

[ska invita]

Couldn't agree more mate! Load of righty wimps today. About time we had a bit of balls, or else we'll end up like a chinese worker. No rights, shit pay, shit life.
RISE UP AND CRUSH THE OPPRESSORS!!

Funny, I was having a proper pissed up rant just the other night saying all this - even seventies TV is subversive by comparisson to whats out there now. And 70's wasnt just punk - all kinds of radical music getting made, from Pharoah Sanders and Velvet Underground to Philip Glass and Dub.

Its not that the 70's generation did everything right - but they were up for having a go. This generation is defeatist and too polite to step on toes or break eggs - shite and lightweight - style over content. The sooner the pendulum swings back the better. I work with women in the Peace Movement in their 60's and 70's who are far more hardcore than most peeps nowadays.

Bring back the draft and lets have a riot!

Maybe if some of the so called trots and anarchists at university forgot about their nice careers in the public sector and started working for the working class movement instead of lecturing to it, we might return to the 70s quicker than you think.

Even lectures are shortcoming - I think people are too polite to force their messages down peoples throat, having been trying for years and getting nowhere

 

[nino_savatte]

Is L&L a pointless sniper ? Gosh.

Sorry, I should have created a tabloid style banner headline shocker.

 

[upsidedownwalrus]

Hummm . . . . I'd quite like something to kick off, but people are real pussies these days.

It does surprise me that we've not had more skirmishes over the last few years. My friends and I can't be the only people that have been priced out of society - though people emigrating might have taken the pressure off a bit (over half my mates from 10 years ago are now in Europe).

Maybe it is the calm before the storm.

Agreed, I was finding it impossible to have a decent life in the UK despite a Degree etc. I have a much better standard of living as an ESL teacher in China than I could afford back home. I miss so much about Britain that I want to move back - but don't know whether I can really give my wife and baby a good life over there.

 

[treelover]

Are you sure about that?

Funny, I was having a proper pissed up rant just the other night saying all this - even seventies TV is subversive by comparisson to whats out there now. And 70's wasnt just punk - all kinds of radical music getting made, from Pharoah Sanders and Velvet Underground to Philip Glass and Dub.

 

[treelover]

maybe, just look at London, but why should social unrest come for the left, it can of course, in times of social and economic crisis come from the far right

London: The rich get so much richer under Blair

Keith Lee | 10.03.2007 09:05 | Analysis | Social Struggles | London
The last ten years of a Labour government has seen a significant increase in the number of billionaires living in London. According to Forbes magazine, London is home to 23 of the 54 billionaires that are resident in Britain, 11 of whom are foreigners.

Paul Maidment, a journalist for the magazine, said London “still attracts the elite of the world’s rich and successful. And it can lay claim unchallenged to one title, it is the magnet for the world’s billionaires.”

There are many reasons London has become a magnet for the wealthy, among them the role of English as a global language and easier immigration compared to the United States. More important, however, is the fact that tax regulations are so lax.

London has the highest number of non-domiciled rich residents anywhere in the world, whose combined wealth comes close to £45 billion ($88 billion). When it came to power the Labour government promised to close the loophole used by billionaires, whereby “non-domicile” status is offered to foreigners or those with foreign-born parents living in the UK.

This get-out clause enables wealthy individuals to claim they are “domiciled” abroad, even though they may carry British passports and have lived in the country for decades. Those afforded such privileged terms are free to locate their assets in offshore tax havens and liable only to pay tax on those sums they choose to bring to Britain.

Accountancy firm Grant Thornton has calculated that the UK’s 54 billionaires paid a miserable £14.7 million ($28.3 million) to the Inland Revenue last year.

http://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2007/03/364755.html

 

[Haller]

Er, no it wasn't it was a media-led campaign by the Murdoch press and Saatchi and Saatchi that did it for Thatcher.

I wouldn't argue with the contribution made by the Sun (Murdoch's only daily paper of the time), which had switched allegiance from Labour to Tory in the mid-'70s. But the Saatchi campaign had little effect on voting patterns - it was a superb bit of self-promotion for the Saatchis that turned them into the most famous ad agency in the country, but there's no evidence that I've ever seen that it changed votes.

The winter of discontent was significant. It wasn't anywhere near as protracted as earlier periods of union action in the '70s (certainly wasn't a winter, more like a couple of weeks), but it did involve a lot of workers, and there were 13.5 million days lost to strikes in the ten months leading up to the 1979 election, more than the whole of 1976 and 1977 put together.

Again, that was nowhere near the levels of 1972, but as a trend it provided perfect propaganda for those on the right who wanted to claim that Labour's policy of appeasing the unions (I'm using their terminology) was ineffective.

 

[Dissident Junk]

Mind you, there's been more strikes over the last few months than I've seen for years. PCS went out for a day a couple of weeks back. Engineers went out for a day at Fujitsu of all places.

 

[rhys gethin]

Mind you, there's been more strikes over the last few months than I've seen for years. PCS went out for a day a couple of weeks back. Engineers went out for a day at Fujitsu of all places.

A DAY! Enough to strike fear into all capitalist hearts!

 

[Groucho]

Pay curbs were the main cause of the winter of discontent.

A public sector pay freeze - below inflation increases - has been imposed by Gordon Brown. The return of mass strikes has to be the rerponse. There is still a lot of recovering to do. We have the toughest anti-union laws in Europe, higher personal debt and it is harder to get a job than in the 70s. All these factors have an impact but to my mind the biggest factor is the legacy of 80s defeats weighing heavily on the hearts of many activists. (The other factor of cowardly conservative self-service bureaucrats is no more a problem now than it was in the 80s)

Anyway, this thread would not be complete without mention to Hot Pants and space hoppers.

 

[subversplat]

That'd be great - AIDS didn't even exist in the 70s

 

[Fullyplumped]

Pay curbs were the main cause of the winter of discontent.

A public sector pay freeze - below inflation increases - has been imposed by Gordon Brown. The return of mass strikes has to be the rerponse.

Interesting point. Is it desirable - not from the point of view of public sector workers but from the point of view of everyone - for public sector pay to outstrip general inflation by any degree? Suppoose the Government settled for what the staff sides want, and that inspired private sector staff to go for the same or higher, and we got back into the inflationary cycle that we had in the 70s and 80s. Would that be a particularly good thing? Or was 70s style inflation a myth?

 

[Fullyplumped]

That'd be great - AIDS didn't even exist in the 70s

But syphillis and gonnorhea did.

 

[JHE]

Anyway, this thread would not be complete without mention to Hot Pants and space hoppers.

And platform shoes and round collars... but there was one good thing about the 70s: In those days, Trots were Trots.

OK, some of them were daft sods and into all sorts of weird stuff, but they were recognisably Commies. If you'd told them that 30 years on their political descendants would be a bunch of Dhimmis queueing up at the mosque to get their orders from a bunch of 'slamists, they would not have believed you.

 

[Groucho]

Interesting point. Is it desirable - not from the point of view of public sector workers but from the point of view of everyone - for public sector pay to outstrip general inflation by any degree? Suppoose the Government settled for what the staff sides want, and that inspired private sector staff to go for the same or higher, and we got back into the inflationary cycle that we had in the 70s and 80s. Would that be a particularly good thing? Or was 70s style inflation a myth?

Below inflation increases are pay cuts. It means that people will not be able to keep up with the increases in travel costs, mortgages, rents etc.

The idea that pay increases are a main cause of inflation is simply wrong. Pay chases inflation.

Important here that we differentuate between CPI - the Govts favoured measure which includes the greatest cost burdens on people (Brown wants to curb public sector pay to increases below CPI which is hoverring around 2% - 2.5%). RPI is the more reliable measure of cost of living increases and is at around 4.5%. Now if cost of living stops increasing so much demand for pay rises slow up too. But if the cost of living spirals upwards then pay has to keep apace.

Not an unusual argument from a Chancellor - that if the majority become worse of in real terms by accepting pay increases below the rising cost of living that we are all better off. The all here meaning the rich and is all Gordon Brown gives a fuck about.

 

[nino_savatte]

I wouldn't argue with the contribution made by the Sun (Murdoch's only daily paper of the time), which had switched allegiance from Labour to Tory in the mid-'70s. But the Saatchi campaign had little effect on voting patterns - it was a superb bit of self-promotion for the Saatchis that turned them into the most famous ad agency in the country, but there's no evidence that I've ever seen that it changed votes.

The winter of discontent was significant. It wasn't anywhere near as protracted as earlier periods of union action in the '70s (certainly wasn't a winter, more like a couple of weeks), but it did involve a lot of workers, and there were 13.5 million days lost to strikes in the ten months leading up to the 1979 election, more than the whole of 1976 and 1977 put together.

Again, that was nowhere near the levels of 1972, but as a trend it provided perfect propaganda for those on the right who wanted to claim that Labour's policy of appeasing the unions (I'm using their terminology) was ineffective.

Ths so-called Winter of Discontent was limited to London and, possibly, a couple of other connurbations. But for people to say that it was widespread is a fiction.

 

[Dissident Junk]

A DAY! Enough to strike fear into all capitalist hearts!

Tis better than nowt.

 

[poster342002]

Remember.....Eventually the worm DOES turn. Its just a matter of time and history.

Not if the worm has been stamped on so often and so hard that it's now totally flattened and in several pieces on the floor.

 

[KeyboardJockey]

Mind you, there's been more strikes over the last few months than I've seen for years. PCS went out for a day a couple of weeks back. Engineers went out for a day at Fujitsu of all places.

The PCS day strike was a fucking disaster. 80% plus scabbing. Don't believe what the lying trots spout. It wasn't 'a great success' it was a rout.

 

[jiggajagga]

Not if the worm has been stamped on so often and so hard that it's now totally flattened and in several pieces on the floor.

Have faith 342002. Capitalism will pull itself apart sooner or later simply because it is greedy. To have a winner you have to have a loser. As the gap between rich and poor grows, the poor will see the light eventually.

 

[poster342002]

Have faith 342002. Capitalism will pull itself apart sooner or later simply because it is greedy. To have a winner you have to have a loser. As the gap between rich and poor grows, the poor will see the light eventually.

I think it's gone beyond that now. The historical windows of opportunity have all been missed and the most likely outcome now is "the common destruction of all".

I think, with hindsight, capitalism reaches a point where it's paradoxially most successful AND most vulnerable to revolution. After that, it goes into a weird post-industrial decline - but with that decline any hope for revolution seems to fade as well.

 

[Haller]

Ths so-called Winter of Discontent was limited to London and, possibly, a couple of other connurbations. But for people to say that it was widespread is a fiction.

The strike by transport workers ensured that much of the country was affected.

I was living in Sussex at the time, and we had the first week of term cancelled at our school, because of lack of food and fuel supplies. I was reminded of this when reading Andrew Collins' Where Did It All Go Right, where he notes in his diary that 90 schools in Northamptonshire were closed by the strike.

The effects may have been heavily exaggerated (and I remember in the '80s the Tories blurring the lines, so that the three-day week became subsumed into the winter of discontent), but it was big.

 

[nino_savatte]

The strike by transport workers ensured that much of the country was affected.

I was living in Sussex at the time, and we had the first week of term cancelled at our school, because of lack of food and fuel supplies. I was reminded of this when reading Andrew Collins' Where Did It All Go Right, where he notes in his diary that 90 schools in Northamptonshire were closed by the strike.

The effects may have been heavily exaggerated (and I remember in the '80s the Tories blurring the lines, so that the three-day week became subsumed into the winter of discontent), but it was big.

We're talking here of the alleged " unburied corpses and piles of rubbish that remained uncollected on the nation's streets". Those are the very things that characterise "The Winter of Discontent". But the name itself is no more than a advertising slogan or similar.

 

[ViolentPanda]

The strike by transport workers ensured that much of the country was affected.

I was living in Sussex at the time, and we had the first week of term cancelled at our school, because of lack of food and fuel supplies. I was reminded of this when reading Andrew Collins' Where Did It All Go Right, where he notes in his diary that 90 schools in Northamptonshire were closed by the strike.

The effects may have been heavily exaggerated (and I remember in the '80s the Tories blurring the lines, so that the three-day week became subsumed into the winter of discontent), but it was big.

IMO it "seemed" big at the time, at least in the way it was reported by the press and represented by the tories, but it wasn't total, and it's fair to say that the unions (even the transport unions) had pre-existing agreements to allow fuel and food supplies to be moved, although individual members reserved the right to not cross picket lines to deliver (the cause of a significant minority of "essential goods" not reaching their destination). Most urban schools kept going (a fact my younger sister complained bitterly about! ), and probably the worst (and most widely used by the rightwing media) image to come out of what was basically not a "general strike", but the coinciding of several strikes by disparate workforces, mostly caused by the same policy, was of rubbish sacks stacked in mounds on park greens and other open spaces.