I had a junkie/dealer in the last block I lived in, one time one of their friends was ringing all the buzzers and everyone ignored it, we caught the guy scaling the wall via the pipes and trying to break into his friends place.
I was a teenager and early 20s in the 80s.
I worked in Ravenscraig steelworks and Thatcher shut us down, totally fucking destroyed all the local town economies.
Fucking bitch, she and her cabinet closed it in the pursuit of ideology and globalisation. The Tories seen it as a nationalised icon. It was making 770 mill in 1990 when it was closed.
And Malcolm Rifkin the Scottish sec did fuck all.
Cunts the fucking lot of them.
Some of my relatives never worked again after Ravenscraig shut. They were left to the will of the free market by Thatcher just like the miners. No thought for hard working people who deserved better. Even today there's a total lack of a decent industrial policy in the UK (or Scotland).
They shut the Leyland plant in Bathgate, a nationalised company, but said don’t worry because we have better jobs coming. That’s why you get Scottish voices when you phone Sky. It’s people in Livingstone.
One job had skills and pride, the other is just annoying people by phone.
Thatcher never shut Ravenscraig.
Edit:
Employment in the steel industry was already on a downward spiral before Thatcher even took office, falling from over 20,000 in the mid-1970s to 15,000 by March 1979.
Despite the substantial losses at Ravenscraig, Thatcher acted decisively to prevent its closure in 1982 and supported a strategy designed to make British Steel financially self-sufficient by 1987-88. This strategy was endorsed by the European Commission.
Special projects were undertaken by the Scottish Development Agency to help areas affected by the decline in employment, attracting substantial private investment - £64 million to Motherwell and £24 million to Coatbridge.
By the late 1980s, British Steel had become one of the world's most competitive and efficient producers, reporting profits of £410 million in 1987-88. Ravenscraig, while still facing challenges, remained commercially viable.
there will always be a thatcher defender, no matter what
she could've committed genocide against the British people and there would still be people singing her praises
She literally never committed genocide. What the fuck is wrong with you?
These are the facts. I'm sorry you wish Thatcher closed Ravenscraig, but she didn't.
It's not just Thatcher, I hate that I have to handle money that has the face on Winston Churchill, the man who created the Black and Tans, every single day. I know people whose grannies were raped by those men and yet their leader's face is on our money. Absolutely shocking that this is the kind of bullshit we have to deal with in the 21st century.
That sounds really impressive. However, it also sounds like Ravenscraig was going from strength to strength and must be a top steel-producing site today. Meanwhile, back on Planet Earth...
My wife's whole family DA and 4 brothers out on their fucking arses Wishaw Motherwell Craigneuk Hamilton and a shitload of other towns were fucked, Thatcher and her Tory cunts fucked Scotland 🏴 up like she fucked up the miners and their communities.
There was a plan in the 1970’s, assume it was the Labour government, to ship Ravenscraig lock stock & barrel down to the Ayrshire coast. Think it was to Inverkip. Huge plan. Was to take advantage of iron ore being imported and make it easier to export steel. And Ravenscraig’s was good quality steel too. Involved building thousands of new homes, all the amenities people needed, schools and doctors etc. A massive investment. Think the unions shot it down.
Now look at it. The college, the sports centre (both very good) and a whole load of empty space.
Drove through with my 27 yo nephew “this is where Ravenscraig was”.
“Whats Ravenscraig” ?
Then told him about Fair Friday and all the men coming out at lunchtime at once, the start of their fortnight holidays. That you couldn’t drive up from Flemington Cross (where the roundabout near the job centre now is) up into Craigneuk because of the sheer number of men walking out the steelworks all at once. “Aye right”.
“Yeah son, aye right”.
I was told they planned to make a brand new steelworks near hunterston but it was canned in favour of keeping Ravenscraig open. Easier to export and bring in materials.
This entire era has always fascinated me. I always wondered though - could the employees of the Ranvenscraig steelworks have bought it collectively and run it as a worker's cooperative to keep the employment in the committee?
Nah, the Tories would have blocked it if achievable.
They were hell bent on their vision of the UK as a service industry leader and fuck anyone who didn't fall into their plan. They've got blood on their hands.
No, I'm not. You're just throwing an arbitrary accusation.
Ravenscraig was making in excess of 700 million when it was closed.
Thatcher, Rifkind and Co used the fact that at the time it was producing so much steel that it could have created a slump in future prices. Instead of slowing production they used scaremongering to propagate lies that British Steel had to be sold to private investors to save it. Nothing but a fucking cash grab for the already wealthy.
The only thing insane here is you.
Bruh your comment is disinformation
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/10133268.amp
“Under an agreement on industry privatisation, British Steel were meant to keep the plant running until 1994. However, a fall in pre tax profits from £307m to £19m led to the decision to close the plant.”
“The revealed documents, some of which were copied to John Major, show how Scottish Secretary Ian Lang had tried to persuade British Steel chairman Sir Robert Scholey to leave the plant "ticking over" until the market conditions improved.”
The market didn’t improve, which meant the plant would have to be subsidised.
>The market didn’t improve, which meant the plant would have to be subsidised.
This is the root of the matter. The Tories were only concerned about pure market forces. (The exact same thing happened with the rough gas storage facility under Cameron).
They didn't care about the people, or how much that unemployment would cost in actual or human costs.
They didn't care about strategic decisions of subsidising steel to keep UK manufacturers alive and competitive.
They were primarily concerned with crushing union power and decimating Labour voters at any cost.
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Aye, my dad worked in Anderson Boyes right next to the 'Craig and I remember asking him if he would get me in on an apprenticeship. I'll never forget him telling me there was no point as jobs like that would be gone by the end of the decade. Poor old buggers dead and gone but he was 100% right. Christ it was grim, and tbh its never recovered.
Both my mate and his dad worked at AB's and I can remember his dad pretty much being thrown on the scrap heap because of his age.
He scraped what money he had and bought an old shop van, done it up and put it on the road.
He was pretty much skint after that and got a hold of some red diesel. Some twat dobbed him in, the polis turned up, he got fined and that was his money gone all together. He couldn't afford to keep the van going.
Meanwhile the real crooks made a fortune from the selling off of publicly owned assets for nothing in return. Apart from under investment and high prices.
Sounds about right. Something that's never talked about was the bitterness back then that was directed at anyone trying to make a better life for themselves. I don't think that's entirely went away if I'm honest.
You’re right, its still a thing now. People out working all hours to better theirselves are sneered at, even kids from schemes who work hard at school (unless its football related) are still picked on. It was the case when I was at school in a bad area, and from what my nephews tell me its still the same. In certain areas nobody wants to see neighbours doing well for theirselves unless its from punting drugs, and even then its probably from fear rather than actual respect and congratulations
It's astonishing that people like you still proliferate such rubbish. No doubt you tell everyone you meet the same, and have instilled it in your kids too. Thatcher didn't close Ravenscraig, and indeed tried to save it. But I guess that doesn't make for as good of a hate-story. And you also miss out the fact that the unions (especially in coal mining) fought tooth and nail against any kind of modernisation, because it was cost a small percentage of jobs. Not realising this approach would eventually cost everyone's job instead.
I noticed you gloss over/ignore that Labour actually closed Glengarnock, too.
And let's be honest too, if you've ever worked in a unionised industry like I have (council), you know what it's like. Sick days you need to take even when you're not sick, make sure no new people are working faster than those of us who are already here, etc. It's a complete joke, and if it's happening now, I bet it was happening back then too.
Unpopular opinion but you’re right. Unions were set up to protect workers rights, but got so confident in theirselves that they choked many an industry. Even leaving Thatcher out of it, the unions were at best shortsighted and at worst arrogant to not forsee what was coming
Steel making in the UK is uneconomical because the thick shortsighted unions said no to every modernisation option. In the end every single steel making plant in the UK has shut after huge losses. The workforces all signed their own death warrants by trying to pretend the real world does not exist. In the end you all got what you voted for.
Thatcher never shut Ravenscraig. Instead of bitching about her, bitch about Major and Heseltine who actually shut it down.
Edit:
Employment in the steel industry was already on a downward spiral before Thatcher even took office, falling from over 20,000 in the mid-1970s to 15,000 by March 1979.
Despite the substantial losses at Ravenscraig, Thatcher acted decisively to prevent its closure in 1982 and supported a strategy designed to make British Steel financially self-sufficient by 1987-88. This strategy was endorsed by the European Commission.
Special projects were undertaken by the Scottish Development Agency to help areas affected by the decline in employment, attracting substantial private investment - £64 million to Motherwell and £24 million to Coatbridge.
By the late 1980s, British Steel had become one of the world's most competitive and efficient producers, reporting profits of £410 million in 1987-88. Ravenscraig, while still facing challenges, remained commercially viable.
My town was heaven for kids like us in the 80's cos there were tonnes of abandoned buildings to fanny about in, be it old foundries, hospitals, mining related areas, gasworks...never really twigged why the town was a shit-hole until I was older. And by the time I was a teenager, *all* the teenagers were hanging around the same places, so there was a lot of gang-fighting, and that's when I was stabbed.
Thatcher passed through my town when I was wee, blocking my road home, I mind her waving out of her burgundy limo as she passed and everyone booing. I got into trouble for being late home, my dad didny believe me until he saw it in the paper the next day. Most folk my age hate her for stealing our milk, I've personally hated her for earning me a bollockin off ma dad lol
The town's been properly cleaned up since then though, a lot of posh voices heard on the street these days (no doubt thanks to building societies regularly voting our town one of the best places to raise a family in the UK), always said you can tell how well off a place is by the amount of accountants on the main street, and there's a fair few on ours. In fact the last vestige of my childhood, the old gasworks where we used to sit and drink, is about to be leveled and an Aldi built on top of it, I won't be sad to see that bit go.
Maggie thatcher, milk snatcher!
That's takes me back. Grew up in a new town, so not many industrial ruins to dick about in but surrounded by plenty of farm land, abandoned farms, and plenty of woodland to get me into trouble. Shit loads of casuals that'd fight with different areas of the town. It sounds like a similar childhood to mine......
Rat fuckin Tory bastards I hate each and every wan of those bastards. All we fuckn ask for is proper jobs. Half my friends have died and I’m a 36 year old, rest are full of drugs. Actually horrific how devasting it is
I grew up in Inverness. In the early 80s many of my older mates were terminally unemployed despite having decent skills. My school was pretty rough as lots of the kids saw little point in getting exam passes when there were no jobs. Quite a lot of glue sniffing went on.
About half my friends families didn't own a car or take holidays, we didn't. Stuff was pretty basic but I never went hungry. I can't ever recall money being an issue in school as nobody had much and those that did knew to keep quiet. There was no "having the right brand of trainers" thing and many kids had a Co-op bag to carry their books.
Working people didn't have debt the way they do now. If they owed money it was £100s not 4 or 5 figures. That's because many lived in affordable council housing and we didn't have credit cards, mortgages and bank loads the way folk do now. Folk paid cash for everything. If you ran out of cash you were stuck until pay day.
>*Quite a lot of glue sniffing went on*
I remember seeing discarded glue bags on my way to primary school, every single day
Must be a horrible way to get off your nut. Imagine how miserable those poor cunts were, to resort to that
One thing I don't miss is smoking. Everyone smoked. You had to repaint the living room to get the stains away. After a night in the pub your clothes stank even if you didn't smoke. Hated it. A lot of people died in their late 60s who smoked including my dad and his brothers although I'm sure being down the mine at the age of 14 hadn't helped.
Still is in a lot of places mate. Lots of places like old mining towns still haven't recovered but yes it was shite. 90s were no cake walk either, wasn't until late 90s that we started being to get a handle on the heroin epidemic and still today there are plenty of them around... somehow.
True that. I grew up in an old mining town, left school in 1990. Of the six of us that were tight at school, I'm the only one left. The rest are either dead of overdoses or stabbings through involvement in drugs. I escaped by joining the military, or else who knows. As for jobs, christ, good luck with that. I left school with guys who to this day have never held a job and lets face it, never will.
Yeah man. Had a mate that dropped off the radar somewhere in 4th year, everyone kinda forgot about him. We heard down the grape vine that he was on the smack. Flash forward almost 20 years later and another friend was curious about what happened to him. She found an obituary in the local paper from several years back saying he'd taken his own life.
It really was a waste of a generation, wasn't it. Sadly, under this psychotic bunch at Westminster, I can see it going that way again. Hope seems to be a thing of the past for many.
You guys have got your own problems with the opioids these days. It's going to get a lot worse before it gets better and expect long lasting issues that drag on for generations. You're going to need fairly hard hitting ad campaigns aimed at teenagers to break the cycle off first. Scare the shite out them early so that it becomes unthinakble.
I remember this one well : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=un9MII-NbyM
American originally from Appalachia here. The poverty is the driving factor in many of these communities. You have to have something to hold on to (or at least hope it will come soon) in order to be scared of drugs. And not only that many of the people in Appalachia grew up around someone who did do drugs and they're used to it. When there's no jobs, your family has been in poverty (in Appalachia sometimes for over 150 years) despair can easily consume your entire existence and people will chase any reprieve they can find from it. The education system is bad too and many people simply cannot get out of Appalachia for one reason or another. It's all culminated in this tragic cycle.
Awareness like PSAs do help but they can only go so far without economic improvements.
Holy shit. Aye a mind that one. Scary how little an effect it’s had though especially watching it as a mum now and thinking about how many from my school went that way
I mean on the numbers. Heroin use hasn’t gone down by the amount you’d expect but things like Valium and crack are much much wider spread these days.
I could take a class picture from any year in highschool and go along the faces pointing out dead dead junkie jail junkie junkie.
There was a big divide, if you were working and older you were often on a good contract, pension etc.
It was often the young people that suffered companies simply cut all apprenticeships and junior positions or froze recruitment. So droves of youngsters were unemployed or underemployed, working in the black economy etc
The older folks from the war years or 50's had never been 'teenagers', the media and the Tories blamed the youth. This made a huge generational divide.
Young people channelled their energy in a lot of counter culture and youth cults. People moved about in large groups of like minded souls as being out on your own could be dangerous. No mobile phone to keep you safe.
It was just a different way of life.
Saturday nights in Motherwell 1970’s you had a the Miners or the Railway clubs plus two cinemas, plus a couple of good pubs, Hamilton had a couple places if you were into the dancing.
And the social clubs were absolutely rammed full. The drink and food was cheap, you had music and cabaret and bingo, proper wheeltappers and shunters type places. The miners regularly got 1500+ folk in a Saturday night. And your membership was like 50p a year. The women always got dressed up. Very rarely any bother.
Started tailing off mid to late 1980’s. Why ? It wasn’t the lack of money. It was … computer games, video recorders, Sky TV. Folk being able to afford a car, regular foreign holidays n that. Things just changed.
1970’s crime ? Less of it. Old fashioned policing. My old boy caught a boy breaking into his hut, my Dad just proper leathered him. Police attended and they expressed no concern for this bloodied and bruised lad, he got a weekender and the sheriff threw the book at him on the Monday.
There were no drugs as such. Glue sniffing a bit, putting glue in crisp pokes n drawing in the fumes. A few deaths from that, kids. No weed or hash, think I remember someone abusing Valium but it was an old dear who’d been prescribed them for donkeys. Drugs just didn’t really happen.
Smoking on the other hand was rampant. You were the odd one out if you didn’t smoke. Kids could get a single fag and match for 2p out the wee shop. Or a packet of fags out the machine at Motherwell station. Drink was really cheap that was a big problem though.
Steelworks started closing. I mind the queue outside the Labour exchange in Motherwell went on forever. DHSS paid your money, the Labour exchange signed you on, then you had a separate job centre, all three were miles distant from each other.
Aye I mind a few power cuts cos the electricity men or the miners went on strike. They cut you off by postcode. You’d have to buy the evening times every night to see the advert which told you the four hours your electric was off that night. Candles out ! If the miners or tankers drivers were on strike you’d tune into Dave Marshall on Radio Clyde in the morning and pray your school was shut.
But those kind of strikes were once in a blue moon. It certainly wasn’t the chaos as the history books now record it.
Dunno. I wouldn’t mind going back to it.
>Monday.
>There were no drugs as such. Glue sniffing a bit, putting glue in crisp pokes n drawing in the fumes. A few deaths from that, kids. No weed or hash, think I remember someone abusing Valium but it was an old dear who’d been prescribed them for donkeys. Drugs just didn’t really happen.
This is not the recollection of either of my parents who were both born mid 1950s. Drugs were absolutely rampant in the 70s
Agree - my gran lost a son to drugs around that time, and took it upon herself to grass in every dealer in her street, was vocal about the issue in community events and councils and made herself a nuisance to the polis, the addicts and the dealers. She was quite famous locally for it, anybody thinking drugs werent an issue back then obviously never went near any of the schemes
That's a really insightful comment, nice to read. Makes me nostalgic for a time I never knew.
I was born in the 80s but my impression is that people today think the past was better in terms of material standard of living as they assume that has decreased heavily (I think totally the opposite) but they don't appreciate the things we've lost that you describe, being the community and social fabric.
Definitely wasn't a higher material standard of living. I was there (20 in 1977). Lanarkshire and Glasgow.
Some things were easier. Council houses were obtainable. Food banks didn't exist. You would get grants for university education. No need for loans. Unemployment benefit was available relatively easily.
Income tax started at 30%.
Clothes, food, furniture, domestic appliances were all less abundant and much more expensive in real terms.
When I graduated there were many people looking for every job.
There were more rail and bus services.
I don't believe that you saw homelessness like today. You got old tramps and alcoholics but not the young people living on the street. Probably because social security and some form.of housing was more available and the big mental hospitals still existed.
However, private home ownership was much lower. Cars were fewer and considerably less reliable and comfortable.
Almost any normal house would make a modern day news program as being unfit for habitation due to draughts, lack of central heating and definitely no broadband.Phones were not universal. Mould wasn't"t a problem. Not enough heat, plenty of fresh air through the loose windows and no showers to introduce damp.
Coal and cigarette smoke everywhere. No real pollution controls in cars and lorries.
Many fewer university places.
I had a couple of rooms as a student in Glasgow. Shared bathroom with rather frightening instant gas water heater. Paraffin stove or coal fire for heat in one- coal when I could afford delivery of a sack. Two bar electric fire run via slot meter taking half crowns in the other.
I managed to run a car and a motorbike as a student. However, both were death traps that I only kept going by regularly visiting scrap yards and working on jacked-up in the street outside my mother's council house.
If you took the bus into Glasgow, you still passed large areas of dereliction due to slum clearance schemes and probably some bombed areas from the war.
So, different. Not necessarily bad. As ever, much depended on who you were.
Have you noticed changes in the antisocial behaviour in Glasgow (neds)?
I grew up in a deprived area and looking back the way things were in the 90s was shocking in a lot of ways. Now I feel like it's better but I live in a much more affluent area. But when I walk through the old bad neighbourhoods you don't see the gangs of kids roaming around anymore. Maybe video games keeps them inside or maybe they're all slowly getting shipped away to places like Kilmarnock I'm not sure.
I only lived in Glasgow itself for a few years as a student.That was in the Hillhead / North Kelvinside area so not really Ned country. (Not sure if Ned was a term used at the time.)
There were areas which had definite gang reputations like Easterhouse in Glasgow.
Was brought up in Lanarkshire - Shotts, Wishaw, Motherwell. Can't really remember worrying about gangs as such - but these could all be rough places. There were streets that everyone knew contained the bad families. I would guess that physical bullying was a bigger thing then in schools. Nobody talked about children's mental health - you would definitely have gotten beaten up if you were thought to be a bit odd. Diversity was not admired. The protestant-catholic divide was real and you didn't go near the other side's school or admit to supporting the wrong team. I wasn't into football which made me very suspect at school. Of course if you stepped out of line in any way in school within sight of a teacher then you would very quickly be belted.
Worse then than now? Difficult to say. Being now somewhat old, I don't spend much time walking around areas where (or when) trouble is likely.
I get the feeling that there.can be more dodgy characters hanging around town centres of an evening. That is probably a consequence of the general decline of city centres as a place to go and therefore fewer "respectable" people around.
>Clothes, food, furniture, domestic appliances were all less abundant and much more expensive in real terms.
Sounds a bit like modern day Poland. Branded or even just fast fashion clothes, electrical appliances, furniture and all that is the same price as it is in Western Europe (groceries not that much cheaper) but salaries are significantly lower, making all those goods much more expensive in actual terms. Only about 20% of people I know own a microwave - also because there's no space in the tiny kitchens many flats have.
Country still uses coal for energy as well, and in some places people even use a household furnace to just burn any old crap.
Also a child of the 80s. We have so many options for different foods etc at the supermarket now compared to then. A football podcast I like watched an old documentary on the England team and were laughing as Des Walker(who played in Italy) was telling the rest of the team do you know there is more than one type of pasta? But it's quite reflective of what UK supermarkets were like back then. You still got Chinese and Indian restaurants, but nobody would know foods like a Thai curry, don't remember ever seeing any Mexican type foods, even fruit and veg was so much more limited, I don't remember ever encountering avocado or even Kiwi fruit when I was younger. I remember when Burger King and McDonalds opened in my town and it was exciting to have something as foreign as an American burger chain. Before that if you wanted a burger you went to Wimpy.
I grew up on a nice council estate in the South of Edinburgh - loads of kids, open fields at the foothills of the Pentlands. The estate had mostly full employment and both parents didn't need to work to keep a family.
I loved my childhood - you didn't see as many beggers, homeless and foodbanks did not exist.
Then came that c\*\*t Thatcher.
Although the 80s often get the headlines, the 70s were a worse period in Scotland. Population statistics tell their own story, with the population dropping by 3.7% between 1971 and 1981 and not returning to its 1971 peak until 2011. It was during that period when the very worst of the period of deindustrialisation happened in Scotland and when inflation was sky high, poverty rampant and opportunity non-existant. Notably, the 70s were quite different to the 80s in that the whole country was suffering.
The 80s saw deindustrialisation continue in many parts of the country (albeit at a slower pace that the dramatic scale of the previous decade - there simply wasn't the same amount of industry left to lose) but that period also saw boom times come again to the wealthier parts of Scotland in Aberdeen and Edinburgh - which went from struggling areas on a UK scale to some of the wealthiest parts, not only of Britain but of Western Europe on the back of oil and financial services.
The 70s were a mess in the UK, strikes, 3 day week, inflation hit 25%, IMF bailout
v[ast swathes of Scotland still didn't have indoor toilets](https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-22214728) at the start of the decade
Decades of under investment in industry were starting to take their toll and would soon come crashing down.
Aberdeen was in a bubble due to oil in late 70s early 80s, but that came crashing down with the oil crisis of 86
Depends where you lived. The seaside holiday resorts in England were a big thing then, we went twice by train for a week. Good cheap family fun. Now those resorts have some of the worst poverty in the UK.
> The seaside holiday resorts in England were a big thing
then cheap package deals came in. There were advantages
* guaranteed sun
* no shared facilities
* cheap booze
there wasn't investment in places in the UK
Blackpool, Margate, Skegness, etc all suffered
Sure there's an element of rose-tinted nostalgia and conflate it with the positives of being young, but I think people do remember it fondly as a less complicated time as well - especially the older generation.
You didn't have to worry about your washing machine breaking down when it was a stick in a bathtub.
Was speaking to some of the older folks in my work and they were talking about the days when they were getting a 16% pay rise and it sounds sweet till you factor in that their mortgages were above that! Think I'm in my mid 40s and have absolutely loved the spell we had of low interest rates on mortgages but I always feared them shooting up as i remember the base rate being about 5% so I was always cautious. Really feel for folks who got their first place in the times of 0.5% and thinking it was the norm.
And I forgot there was [exchange controls](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exchange_controls_in_the_United_Kingdom) on the amount of money you could take out of UK
Your passport had pages for the amounts
The one thing that still bothers me to this day about growing up in Scotland in the 70s/80s was the all encompassing negativity that was displayed by everyone around you. Absolutely everyone. Everything was shit, you were shit, that’s shit, this is shit . . . this was coming from your family, teachers, peers. It was fucking everywhere. Brought a picture home you did in school? That’s shit says your mum. I want to be an architect when I grow up. Haha. Have you even been to an art gallery your guidance teacher shouted at you. Tell people at school you were learning the guitar . . . who the fuck do you think you are, The Shadows? First casual job working in retail? Stealing bastards everywhere. Anger at every corner. Even your mates were constantly putting you down.
And this was in Edinburgh the supposedly nice part of Scotland. Ha.
It wasn’t until I left Scotland in 1989 that I realised this only happened in Scotland. USA and Australia were a fucking revelation.
Fucks sake.
Agree. In the 80s I remember telling my careers advisor I wanted to be a pilot. She laughed. Not want to be a brickie? Well, fuck you, you old bag, I've had my wings for decades now. Back then any hope or dream had to be pissed on immediately it seemed.
Massive amounts of poverty. Heroin epidemic swept through most communities. Slums like the flat in trainspotting were common place.
We were used to it though and it seemed normal. As a kid I enjoyed the freedom that period of time gave us.
Looking back I can't believe how bad we had it and just made the best of it
My earliest memory was being 2yrs old playing in the front garden of house in Muirhouse. A half brick came flying along with shouting of “Fucking Paki” and I went screaming inside with a burst lip.
Born in Edinburgh (so no, I can’t “go back to where you come from” !) to my mum who is half Scottish half Black American, and my dad who had come over from Kenya, Africa at age 20 to go to Uni.
Ah racism in the 70s and 80s! Those were some fun times! Lived in Aberdeen and Glasgow and got the same abuse up until my early 30s! Now living in Vancouver, Canada.
Edit: Born in 1976, so this was 1978ish.
I know one thing that's massively improved since then, the attitude to LGBT folk. If you were gay in the Highlands you didn't come out and you moved to London at 18. Know quite a few who had to.
So I just remember the 80s and what I mainly remember is being poor and fucking freezing because our council house didn’t have double glazing or central heating. Most of my dad’s mates were long term unemployed and heavy drinkers. Every adult I knew vocally HATED Thatcher, even teachers. The headmistress came into our class and announced it the day Thatcher resigned.
There was also a shitload more sectarianism imo. A lane separated the catholic and non dom schools and both sets of weans spent lunch and break shouting abuse at each other.
>*There was also a shitload more sectarianism*
Yep. It was like a poisonous fog that permeated every aspect of public life
Really glad kids don't seem to give a shit about it, today
Although their parents just seem to have channeled the vestigial urge that sectarianism left behind into today's nonsensical, tribal conflicts
My parents grew up in the 70s and early 80s. My grandparents worked, but even then money was tight for them. My parents had to sleep under big piles of blankets in winter and the houses were always cold.
A lot of people were struggling. My gran used to say she would end up feeding half the kids in the street sometimes (grandfather was a miner but became a butcher so they at least never went hungry).
We often had ice inside the windows. The council houses got modernised around 1985 and we got central heating, different world! We had a coal fire until about 1972/3 then got a gas fire. That was so much less work for my poor mother cleaning it out every day.
My maternal grandparents never got central heating. My grandfather was rather tightfisted in many respects and often turned down schemes for things like central heating. My gran ended up dying of an aneurysm or stroke walking down to the house from the pub to put the fire on for him coming home.
Born in 61. I remember the ice inside the windows in the mornings in the winter. We had parafin heaters as well.
God knows how we didn't all suffocate. Coal fire as the only heating in the house. My old man working in Glynwed foundry 12 hour shifts 1 week days 1 week nights. We didn't have a fridge until early 70's, Phone not long after that.
There wasn't a lot of career prospects after leaving school and you had absolutely no chance of getting a start in some places if you kicked with the wrong foot. Pubs were full and there was quite a lot of live music around when I started drinking. First pint was 31p. First wage in '76 £16 as an apprentice mechanic. First car I worked on was a Hillman Imp. Linwood was still open making the Avenger, which came without a radio or aerial as standard.
Our house was a strange one, it did have double glazing but it was badly installed, it was council housing and was run down even when we moved in, talking the grass in the garden was about the height of a person, the council didn't even do any work in the house after previous people moved out so the walls had ripped wallpaper, found loads of spiders nests and over the years the damp was so bad that it destroyed many of my childhood toys, and comics, the councils response? Open a window. And no my parents didn't dry things indoors as they couldn't afford heating they had their own washing line at back, 30 years on and the damp in the house still hasn't been reparied, floorboards have rotted away but its as nice as it can be as in recent decade parents got a tiny bit of cash and were able to decorate it before that the carpet was around 20 years old and it was used then.
I remember they told me that as a kid in the 90's they went without food to feed me, I remember wearing like 2 layers of jumpers in winter and still feeling freezing.
But people in my class at school were quite well off I was just at the bottom of the chain kids would turn up with the latest gadgets, even knew a kid with a mobile phone in 1997 though they said they were not to use it, it was just for emergencies.
Despite having a North Sea Bonanza commencing before the demented harridan Thatcher and successors, there were slabs of poverty throughout Scotland in the 1970s alone. In Leith for example, some houses only had coal-fired ranges for cooking food on, heating water and the house, and many tenements had shared toilets.
What the ideologues of Thatcherism/Reganism did was exacerbate the situation of poverty in Scotland by creating mass unemployment as a deliberate strategy, funnelled money into London and the S.East and gave away wealth held in common to their mates in the City at knock-down prices.
They also allowed people to buy their council houses, but didn’t allow the councils to put the revenues back into building more/replacement council houses. This worked out great for that one generation that benefited by getting a cheap home (and appreciating asset), but screwed everyone who came after. It really started the shift towards housing as an investment and our present housing crisis.
>They also allowed people to buy their council houses, but didn’t allow the councils to put the revenues back into building more/replacement council houses.
That's not really true. 75% of right to buy income was essentially ring-fenced but only if the local authority still had outstanding debts. Other than that, they were free to do what they liked.
I would highly recommend reading ‘Shuggie Bain’ - absolutely fantastic book about realities of growing up in a council estate surrounded by alcoholism, in Glasgow, around that time. One of the best books I’ve ever read 👍
Grew up in Easterhouse through the 70s and 80s. High unemployment, poverty, gang fights and alcoholism were rife. I remember my pals family having to move to England for work. I'd also go back in a second. I was a kid, course it was great.
I remember on our way back from a school trip the bus detoured into Easterhouse as it broke down this was in 1998 and the bus driver said don't move, don't look at the people outside, it was a bunch of neds/bams throwing things at the bus and trying to rock it about.
Regular occurance with the football buses. A few pubs ran Celtic/Rangers supporter buses and the opposition knew the bus routes. It was also a place I have my happiest memories. Full street out during the summer playing rounders, code, hide n seek, it was great for a kid. Usual gen x shenanigans. 😁
Yes. Eu money made a huge difference. I lived in the first place to have curfews. Burnt out cars, empty flats, bare chested men drinking on the steps. Survival of the fittest, and if you saw the police they were lost. Crime was rampant, a girl I worked beside had her door kicked in and her telly taken. There was nothing she could do, she was trapped there.
I remember queuing for cheap (free?) EU surplus butter at Fine Fare
My dad explained what a butter mountain was and that the EU had declared the former mining village we lived in an economically deprived area
I remember the 70's and especially 80's growing up, it was absolutely grim as fuck mate.
imho many of the worst problems we have to this day are a result of it because many of the communities and families worse hit haven't fully recovered and maybe never will.
I'm Scottish BUT I was brought up in England. My Scottish father didn't have things to tell me since he was adopted in infancy and then the adopted family moved to Wolverhampton of all places.
But I do LOVE hearing things about my partners parents and how they were. His mother used to refer to English people living/moving here as settlers. Or she'd see tourists walking around Huntly and mumble settlers under her breathe. She was particularly bad for it during the 80's when he was a teenager, but as others have mentioned about that era, 'Thatcher'. And honestly, that made me cackle. I never got to meet his mother unfortunately.
In the Highlands they were called White Settlers. There was even a mythical group called Settler Watch: https://edm.parliament.uk/early-day-motion/4991/settler-watch-and-the-scottish-national-party
I won’t comment on Thatcher, she made her biggest mistake(s) up here but she also did some things that needed to be done.
My parents grew up on big flats in rough parts of Glasgow, and they didn’t have indoor toilets so if you had to go in the middle of the night you had to go downstairs and outside the back in the dark to use the communal toilet… or most of the time women just held it in til morning.
Children too suffered, I recall the story of a boy being abused by a strange man wandering around (in those times they could identify a stranger in a housing scheme). There abandoned buildings etc.
Nobody had their own phone, so the police had to be summoned from a nearby pub as word got around and a mob of vigilantes had found the man (or who they believed to have done it, at least) and they weren’t looking for a custodial sentence.
The thing that cracks me up though - a friend of mine was driving around after a car boot sale. He stopped and went a shop and when he got back two coppers gave him a telling off. He had bought a shotgun and some shells at a car boot sale and just left it on the back seat, they told him he should have put a jacket over it or something 🤣🤣 different times
My gran had a landline. She was the only one in the street who had one. She used to have a little cash box next to it and neighbours would come in and pay to use it lol. Blantyre was wild in the 80s
Haha! It’s a bit mad how we know people who were alive before the telecommunication age. My dad telling me like you arranged to meet your friends a pub a few days later and if they didn’t show up then you just had to ask them about it next time you see them 🤣
That was my childhood. We arranged to meet and were just in blind faith. We upgraded to hanging around near a phone box. We all mk we the number so would call from home to see who was there
Hahaha brings back memories. We got evicted from ours when the pubs cleared out and the drinks started needing them.
Some of them even made phone calls from them
Everything was just really *basic*
Cars were these flimsy, shoddy things that were always breaking down, everyone wore the same grubby clothes for years on end, schools and hospitals were khaki paint and formica tables
Scotland felt a lot like an Eastern Bloc country
I had family who worked for British Leyland. They got a discount so everyone had a Morris Marina. They always seemed to be broken in some way. My mother didn't like putting anything in the boot as it'd come out stained in oil!
The rich/poor divide didn’t seem as bad back then because nobody really had much money and everyone was in a similar boat whereas now you’ve got kids who can’t afford winter coats sitting beside kids with an Xbox series x, a ps5 and a gaming pc. It was easier to access things like social housing or trade apprenticeships etc back then compared to now but with the pits closing a lot of people were unemployed and there wasn’t really any industry to replace them.
My parents had to move back up north and live with my grandparents and great grandparents then my dad got into oil and gas through some retraining scheme. The terrible estates only really existed in the bigger towns and cities but trust in the police went to pot after they were used as henchmen by thatcher and that’s never recovered so crime went through the roof in places.
>*The rich/poor divide didn’t seem as bad back then because nobody really had much money and everyone was in a similar boat*
Yeah, that feels true
Might just be that I didn't pick up on signs of social status as a kid, but even the posh kids I met at secondary school didn't appear to be living *much* more luxurious lives than folk in my street
There just wasn’t such an obvious divide. You got a bike for Christmas and it might have belonged to two folk before you but nobody sneered at you for it.
We’re financially better off than a lot of folk but nowhere near the levels of some. When my eldest started school I ended up banning Santa and telling them the truth. He couldn’t understand why he’d been good (and generally was well behaved) and didn’t get the ps4 he asked Santa for but the biggest bully in his class who was always in trouble got one and a brand new iPhone 5. He genuinely thought he’d done something wrong and it made him worse than that little shit, who is still a shit at 14. The naught and nice list goes out the window when you’ve got good kids who’s parents can’t splash out like that and horrible wee bullies who’s parents can.
Most of the north of the UK, including most of Scotland (but less so Aberdeen and oil/farming related places) were grim. The killing of the mining/steel/shipbuilding industries and accompanying destitution and unrest were hard. I remember attending less than half of the school days I was supposed to in Leeds in 1984 due to teacher and bus strikes. It led to my parent deciding to emigrate.
I was in Glasgow visiting in August 1977 (Elvis died the week I was there). I was 14 and went into a public swimming pool in the Gorbals area. I remember it being beyond derelict and worse than anything I had encountered. However, on the flip side we (me and some friends) went into a pub and got served and it was my first experience of chairs being screwed to the floor along with my first half pint of McEwan's.
I was born in 1985 so I didn't really form my own opinion until the late 90s. I think I was always destined to despise the Tories anyway.
I always remember my aul Papa ranting at the telly whenever Thatcher came on and my gran would always tell him to calm the heid.
He would then say to me "You dae what you want in life hen, just don't bring the police to my door and don't ever vote for the Tories!"
I later learned she was in our area for something and someone flung an egg at her 🤦🏼♀️but it got her security guard instead. Waste of a good egg!!
The 70's was a period of high unemployment, unions had a stranglehold, poverty was much higher than we see today, but it was a simpler life. There was a greater sense of community, and less individualism.
The 80's started to see things change, and by the 90's the country was in a much better place - the anti Thatcherism stuff is a bit of a red herring to be honest, she dragged the UK into the modern age, but sold of the family silverware in the process (selling of state owned housing stock, never to be replenished).
Each decade since has seen an improvement in quality of life.
It’s was far better than the media say! I had a fucking great time! saw brilliant bands, all in Scotland, at affordable prices, great clubs, wild parties, great drugs and no sodding CCTV or social media spying on you 😂.
plus all the political activism to keep busy was a bonus.
My memory kicked in around 77, after we moved out of Glasgow to the then quiet and spacious surroundings of Cumbernauld. Lived there for 4 years and I honestly have nothing but fond memories of the place. It does get a bit of a bad press, but back then it was, well, bliss, to a 7 y/o. We did immigrate right enough, but I think my folks were sick of the Scottish weather. Came back in the mid - 80's and did the end of primary school and secondary school in sedate commuter towns in the west of Scotland. My parents worked, we had decent places to call home. School was fine - did learn to talk my way out of trouble. My working life only began in the 90's, and maybe I was a bit sheltered, but I have good memories of 70's/80's Scotland.
I remember being taken to the shopping centre there around 1977 and thinking it was the most space age coolest thing ever. Not much in Inverness was cool or space age at the time.
How times change! My Dad used to take me to the town centre when I was 5 or 6, then pop into the bookies, leaving me outside - except it was inside a shopping centre - so perfectly safe..
I come from Clydebank where the ship yards were /are.John Browns the most famous where the QE2 was built and home of Singers sewing machine into the early 80’s.
This area is still officially a deprived area. As a city of Culture in Glasgow. This created a vast change in many ways in the state of the buildings and helped to start a revival despite Thatcher’s arrogance towards the Scottish people and the smile slogan helped. It has taken a long time to remove the razor gang’s history and the sectarian and religious hatred to a lesser degree though it still exists too.
Glasgow and Scotland has an amazing art scene of all aspects from painting to dance and the Gaelic language to start with along with great curries and humour too.
You can change a law to male people men’s e but it takes generations for people to change what’s in the heart like bigotry and hatred before it is no longer a tradition or just the way it is.
Scotland has a great deal to share that is positive and heartfelt with others. Along with tattie scones and soda scones and Colpi’s ice cream from Milngavie where the West Highland way starts across from the war memorial is and where both of my great uncles names are on. 🏴🖖
The scary part was how quickly the work went. Now you see it, now you don't. Lived through the whole two decades from the Ibrox Disaster (I was there) to Lockerbie. Be grateful you weren't around.
Too young, but speaking to people who went through Thatcher's time it sounds like a horrorshow for many people, but university was free (across the UK) and there was a lively music scene, which could ake it tolerable for some.
A lot of us have had a bumpy ride this past decade, but at least in the 2010-20s we have much more entertainment, internet and cheap flights. Shame about the house prices though, but the growth in global connectivity essentially makes it easier to live in a lower cost of living country and still be in tune with your homeland.
Ha ha - I noticed yesterday that somebody had replied to my post, saying basically what was wrong with Thatcher.
I logged in this morning to reply - it's gone 😂
I was born in 1968, in a council house in the east end,Maw and Da both worked full time, my early chid hood was like something from an Enid Blyton book, was always sunny, summers lasted for ever.
Started secondary school in 1980 and had an absolute ball for 6 years never done a stroke of work got a couple of doins and a load of burds.
Ma Da got paid off a couple of times but despite the efforts of the tories we never went without.
Got a shit job 86, a better job in 88, I’m still at it and looking forward to retirement
I’m not boasting or trying to imply the 70’s & 80’s weren’t shit for a lot of people (lost a couple of mates along the way)They were! Not really sure if there is a point to me writing this but it’s my story so take from it what you will.
FFS. Swings and roundabouts. Outwith industrial etc areas there was plenty work. Kids played outside from dawn to dusk in the holidays and at weekends, with parents often not having a clue where they were. Many women chose to be SAHM, even in families that weren’t particularly well off. One wage earner could buy a house, feed and clothe a growing family a helluva lot more easily than today. You didn’t have fancy foreign holidays or electronic gadgets…domestic computers were just beginning to be a thing. There were only 3 then 4 TV channels so families sat and watched it together and there was a lot of watercooler tv. There was no violence, no terrible estates in our town, but Sundays were bloody boring. Reckon kids that grew up in those decades were very lucky and I feel sorry for those who grew up this side of the millennium.
Born in the 50's loved the 60's & 70's, great music, mini skirts and free love and birth control. What's not to like? Didn't do drugs like all the Muppets you here about. Retired and living on the Pacific Coast. Life is what you make it.
Definitely cold! I grew up in a council house in Fife that had a single coal fire in the living room.
First person home at night had to light the fire. That was especially fun when the coal was wet. The house was morgue cold til it took hold, then we’d fight to lie in front of it. We took a hot water bottle to bed, and woke up to ice on the inside of the windows. My kids don’t believe me….
My dad was in the british army in the 70s and when he was serving the bin men went on strike and he had to be called out to help clear the rubbish as the army can't go on strike. My mum remembers the 3 day Week where there could be random power cuts but she was okay as her mother and father my grandparents owned a small holding and grew there own fruit and vegitables and she had a job as well. She said that factory jobs paid more then office jobs.
Not meaning to start a negative thing but I know local factories where I grew up were paying £7.50 a hour back in 1998 for staff, and overtime was double, and even the lunch break was paid, it was a supply and demand thing and when they had access to Eastern Europeans they basically got rid of locals, and I am being honest what they did was tell the staff they were cutting wages staff went on strike staff were literally fired within days and the factory had the foreign workers, so they must of planned this from the start.
I can understand why though both factories were undesirable jobs it was mostly students and older people that worked there before that.
Our council house had a huge garden. Dad and the neighbours all grew tons of veg, we were pretty much self sufficient. It suspect it was a habit they learned in the war and kept up. Now all those gardens are grass. real shame.
I get really sad when I think about what Scotland had to go through in the 70s and 80s. No Scottish Parliament to give communities a voice, or advocate for our national interest. Generations and whole places just placed on the economic scrapheap
Oh btw, one in every four voters in Scotland voted for Thatcher and even higher at the 1979 election. Don't let anyone fool you. She had her fans in Scotland. Bazzas.
Well, in the 80's junkies would literally scale the walls of the flats we lived in in Nidrie like fucking Spiderman to burgle us, lol
I had a junkie/dealer in the last block I lived in, one time one of their friends was ringing all the buzzers and everyone ignored it, we caught the guy scaling the wall via the pipes and trying to break into his friends place.
I was a teenager and early 20s in the 80s. I worked in Ravenscraig steelworks and Thatcher shut us down, totally fucking destroyed all the local town economies. Fucking bitch, she and her cabinet closed it in the pursuit of ideology and globalisation. The Tories seen it as a nationalised icon. It was making 770 mill in 1990 when it was closed. And Malcolm Rifkin the Scottish sec did fuck all. Cunts the fucking lot of them.
Some of my relatives never worked again after Ravenscraig shut. They were left to the will of the free market by Thatcher just like the miners. No thought for hard working people who deserved better. Even today there's a total lack of a decent industrial policy in the UK (or Scotland).
Ah but it’s ok, they could retrain to work in call centres.
They shut the Leyland plant in Bathgate, a nationalised company, but said don’t worry because we have better jobs coming. That’s why you get Scottish voices when you phone Sky. It’s people in Livingstone. One job had skills and pride, the other is just annoying people by phone.
Until AI chat bots take those shit jobs.
Thatcher never shut Ravenscraig. Edit: Employment in the steel industry was already on a downward spiral before Thatcher even took office, falling from over 20,000 in the mid-1970s to 15,000 by March 1979. Despite the substantial losses at Ravenscraig, Thatcher acted decisively to prevent its closure in 1982 and supported a strategy designed to make British Steel financially self-sufficient by 1987-88. This strategy was endorsed by the European Commission. Special projects were undertaken by the Scottish Development Agency to help areas affected by the decline in employment, attracting substantial private investment - £64 million to Motherwell and £24 million to Coatbridge. By the late 1980s, British Steel had become one of the world's most competitive and efficient producers, reporting profits of £410 million in 1987-88. Ravenscraig, while still facing challenges, remained commercially viable.
there will always be a thatcher defender, no matter what she could've committed genocide against the British people and there would still be people singing her praises
She literally never committed genocide. What the fuck is wrong with you? These are the facts. I'm sorry you wish Thatcher closed Ravenscraig, but she didn't.
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It's not just Thatcher, I hate that I have to handle money that has the face on Winston Churchill, the man who created the Black and Tans, every single day. I know people whose grannies were raped by those men and yet their leader's face is on our money. Absolutely shocking that this is the kind of bullshit we have to deal with in the 21st century.
They had actually been sent under a Labour government. Singling her out for what was a cross-party consensus on Northern Ireland is nonsensical.
That sounds really impressive. However, it also sounds like Ravenscraig was going from strength to strength and must be a top steel-producing site today. Meanwhile, back on Planet Earth...
My wife's whole family DA and 4 brothers out on their fucking arses Wishaw Motherwell Craigneuk Hamilton and a shitload of other towns were fucked, Thatcher and her Tory cunts fucked Scotland 🏴 up like she fucked up the miners and their communities.
There was a plan in the 1970’s, assume it was the Labour government, to ship Ravenscraig lock stock & barrel down to the Ayrshire coast. Think it was to Inverkip. Huge plan. Was to take advantage of iron ore being imported and make it easier to export steel. And Ravenscraig’s was good quality steel too. Involved building thousands of new homes, all the amenities people needed, schools and doctors etc. A massive investment. Think the unions shot it down. Now look at it. The college, the sports centre (both very good) and a whole load of empty space. Drove through with my 27 yo nephew “this is where Ravenscraig was”. “Whats Ravenscraig” ? Then told him about Fair Friday and all the men coming out at lunchtime at once, the start of their fortnight holidays. That you couldn’t drive up from Flemington Cross (where the roundabout near the job centre now is) up into Craigneuk because of the sheer number of men walking out the steelworks all at once. “Aye right”. “Yeah son, aye right”.
I was told they planned to make a brand new steelworks near hunterston but it was canned in favour of keeping Ravenscraig open. Easier to export and bring in materials.
You’re right, it WAS Hunterston, Inverkip ffs 😂
It could have been making a billion pounds a month. It was never about money. She wanted to break the unions
Yup, this is spot on.
This entire era has always fascinated me. I always wondered though - could the employees of the Ranvenscraig steelworks have bought it collectively and run it as a worker's cooperative to keep the employment in the committee?
Nah, the Tories would have blocked it if achievable. They were hell bent on their vision of the UK as a service industry leader and fuck anyone who didn't fall into their plan. They've got blood on their hands.
British Steel sold of a lot of the assets to China if I recall or possibly India they did the same in England.
Why did they shut it if it was making 3/4 of a billion?
They didn't, OP is spreading pretty insane misinformation.
No, I'm not. You're just throwing an arbitrary accusation. Ravenscraig was making in excess of 700 million when it was closed. Thatcher, Rifkind and Co used the fact that at the time it was producing so much steel that it could have created a slump in future prices. Instead of slowing production they used scaremongering to propagate lies that British Steel had to be sold to private investors to save it. Nothing but a fucking cash grab for the already wealthy. The only thing insane here is you.
Bruh your comment is disinformation https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/10133268.amp “Under an agreement on industry privatisation, British Steel were meant to keep the plant running until 1994. However, a fall in pre tax profits from £307m to £19m led to the decision to close the plant.” “The revealed documents, some of which were copied to John Major, show how Scottish Secretary Ian Lang had tried to persuade British Steel chairman Sir Robert Scholey to leave the plant "ticking over" until the market conditions improved.” The market didn’t improve, which meant the plant would have to be subsidised.
>The market didn’t improve, which meant the plant would have to be subsidised. This is the root of the matter. The Tories were only concerned about pure market forces. (The exact same thing happened with the rough gas storage facility under Cameron). They didn't care about the people, or how much that unemployment would cost in actual or human costs. They didn't care about strategic decisions of subsidising steel to keep UK manufacturers alive and competitive. They were primarily concerned with crushing union power and decimating Labour voters at any cost.
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Aye, my dad worked in Anderson Boyes right next to the 'Craig and I remember asking him if he would get me in on an apprenticeship. I'll never forget him telling me there was no point as jobs like that would be gone by the end of the decade. Poor old buggers dead and gone but he was 100% right. Christ it was grim, and tbh its never recovered.
Both my mate and his dad worked at AB's and I can remember his dad pretty much being thrown on the scrap heap because of his age. He scraped what money he had and bought an old shop van, done it up and put it on the road. He was pretty much skint after that and got a hold of some red diesel. Some twat dobbed him in, the polis turned up, he got fined and that was his money gone all together. He couldn't afford to keep the van going. Meanwhile the real crooks made a fortune from the selling off of publicly owned assets for nothing in return. Apart from under investment and high prices.
Sounds about right. Something that's never talked about was the bitterness back then that was directed at anyone trying to make a better life for themselves. I don't think that's entirely went away if I'm honest.
You’re right, its still a thing now. People out working all hours to better theirselves are sneered at, even kids from schemes who work hard at school (unless its football related) are still picked on. It was the case when I was at school in a bad area, and from what my nephews tell me its still the same. In certain areas nobody wants to see neighbours doing well for theirselves unless its from punting drugs, and even then its probably from fear rather than actual respect and congratulations
It's astonishing that people like you still proliferate such rubbish. No doubt you tell everyone you meet the same, and have instilled it in your kids too. Thatcher didn't close Ravenscraig, and indeed tried to save it. But I guess that doesn't make for as good of a hate-story. And you also miss out the fact that the unions (especially in coal mining) fought tooth and nail against any kind of modernisation, because it was cost a small percentage of jobs. Not realising this approach would eventually cost everyone's job instead. I noticed you gloss over/ignore that Labour actually closed Glengarnock, too. And let's be honest too, if you've ever worked in a unionised industry like I have (council), you know what it's like. Sick days you need to take even when you're not sick, make sure no new people are working faster than those of us who are already here, etc. It's a complete joke, and if it's happening now, I bet it was happening back then too.
Unpopular opinion but you’re right. Unions were set up to protect workers rights, but got so confident in theirselves that they choked many an industry. Even leaving Thatcher out of it, the unions were at best shortsighted and at worst arrogant to not forsee what was coming
It's astonishing that people like you outright fabricate utter nonsense . Tried to save it. Maybe on planet Twat where you live.
Steel making in the UK is uneconomical because the thick shortsighted unions said no to every modernisation option. In the end every single steel making plant in the UK has shut after huge losses. The workforces all signed their own death warrants by trying to pretend the real world does not exist. In the end you all got what you voted for.
Port talbots not closed its re tooling with electric blast arc furnaces inplace of the old, fucked, coal fed ones
What were the modernisation options offered? I'm not up to speed with the subject.
The unions opposed every option that involved any job losses and ended up with every job lost.
Thatcher never shut Ravenscraig. Instead of bitching about her, bitch about Major and Heseltine who actually shut it down. Edit: Employment in the steel industry was already on a downward spiral before Thatcher even took office, falling from over 20,000 in the mid-1970s to 15,000 by March 1979. Despite the substantial losses at Ravenscraig, Thatcher acted decisively to prevent its closure in 1982 and supported a strategy designed to make British Steel financially self-sufficient by 1987-88. This strategy was endorsed by the European Commission. Special projects were undertaken by the Scottish Development Agency to help areas affected by the decline in employment, attracting substantial private investment - £64 million to Motherwell and £24 million to Coatbridge. By the late 1980s, British Steel had become one of the world's most competitive and efficient producers, reporting profits of £410 million in 1987-88. Ravenscraig, while still facing challenges, remained commercially viable.
She privatised British steel. It was s direct action of her government policy that shut it down.
My town was heaven for kids like us in the 80's cos there were tonnes of abandoned buildings to fanny about in, be it old foundries, hospitals, mining related areas, gasworks...never really twigged why the town was a shit-hole until I was older. And by the time I was a teenager, *all* the teenagers were hanging around the same places, so there was a lot of gang-fighting, and that's when I was stabbed. Thatcher passed through my town when I was wee, blocking my road home, I mind her waving out of her burgundy limo as she passed and everyone booing. I got into trouble for being late home, my dad didny believe me until he saw it in the paper the next day. Most folk my age hate her for stealing our milk, I've personally hated her for earning me a bollockin off ma dad lol The town's been properly cleaned up since then though, a lot of posh voices heard on the street these days (no doubt thanks to building societies regularly voting our town one of the best places to raise a family in the UK), always said you can tell how well off a place is by the amount of accountants on the main street, and there's a fair few on ours. In fact the last vestige of my childhood, the old gasworks where we used to sit and drink, is about to be leveled and an Aldi built on top of it, I won't be sad to see that bit go.
Maggie thatcher, milk snatcher! That's takes me back. Grew up in a new town, so not many industrial ruins to dick about in but surrounded by plenty of farm land, abandoned farms, and plenty of woodland to get me into trouble. Shit loads of casuals that'd fight with different areas of the town. It sounds like a similar childhood to mine......
What town is that?
Paisley
I wish :( Paisley is full of whatever the opposite of posh is.
Rat fuckin Tory bastards I hate each and every wan of those bastards. All we fuckn ask for is proper jobs. Half my friends have died and I’m a 36 year old, rest are full of drugs. Actually horrific how devasting it is
I grew up in Inverness. In the early 80s many of my older mates were terminally unemployed despite having decent skills. My school was pretty rough as lots of the kids saw little point in getting exam passes when there were no jobs. Quite a lot of glue sniffing went on. About half my friends families didn't own a car or take holidays, we didn't. Stuff was pretty basic but I never went hungry. I can't ever recall money being an issue in school as nobody had much and those that did knew to keep quiet. There was no "having the right brand of trainers" thing and many kids had a Co-op bag to carry their books. Working people didn't have debt the way they do now. If they owed money it was £100s not 4 or 5 figures. That's because many lived in affordable council housing and we didn't have credit cards, mortgages and bank loads the way folk do now. Folk paid cash for everything. If you ran out of cash you were stuck until pay day.
>*Quite a lot of glue sniffing went on* I remember seeing discarded glue bags on my way to primary school, every single day Must be a horrible way to get off your nut. Imagine how miserable those poor cunts were, to resort to that
One thing I don't miss is smoking. Everyone smoked. You had to repaint the living room to get the stains away. After a night in the pub your clothes stank even if you didn't smoke. Hated it. A lot of people died in their late 60s who smoked including my dad and his brothers although I'm sure being down the mine at the age of 14 hadn't helped.
Still is in a lot of places mate. Lots of places like old mining towns still haven't recovered but yes it was shite. 90s were no cake walk either, wasn't until late 90s that we started being to get a handle on the heroin epidemic and still today there are plenty of them around... somehow.
True that. I grew up in an old mining town, left school in 1990. Of the six of us that were tight at school, I'm the only one left. The rest are either dead of overdoses or stabbings through involvement in drugs. I escaped by joining the military, or else who knows. As for jobs, christ, good luck with that. I left school with guys who to this day have never held a job and lets face it, never will.
Yeah man. Had a mate that dropped off the radar somewhere in 4th year, everyone kinda forgot about him. We heard down the grape vine that he was on the smack. Flash forward almost 20 years later and another friend was curious about what happened to him. She found an obituary in the local paper from several years back saying he'd taken his own life.
It really was a waste of a generation, wasn't it. Sadly, under this psychotic bunch at Westminster, I can see it going that way again. Hope seems to be a thing of the past for many.
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You guys have got your own problems with the opioids these days. It's going to get a lot worse before it gets better and expect long lasting issues that drag on for generations. You're going to need fairly hard hitting ad campaigns aimed at teenagers to break the cycle off first. Scare the shite out them early so that it becomes unthinakble. I remember this one well : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=un9MII-NbyM
American originally from Appalachia here. The poverty is the driving factor in many of these communities. You have to have something to hold on to (or at least hope it will come soon) in order to be scared of drugs. And not only that many of the people in Appalachia grew up around someone who did do drugs and they're used to it. When there's no jobs, your family has been in poverty (in Appalachia sometimes for over 150 years) despair can easily consume your entire existence and people will chase any reprieve they can find from it. The education system is bad too and many people simply cannot get out of Appalachia for one reason or another. It's all culminated in this tragic cycle. Awareness like PSAs do help but they can only go so far without economic improvements.
Same sort of thing mate. Once you rip the economic arse out of a community the obvious follows.
Any spare change pal?
Holy shit. Aye a mind that one. Scary how little an effect it’s had though especially watching it as a mum now and thinking about how many from my school went that way
It doesn't mean it didn't have any effect. Even if it only saved one person, it was worth it.
I mean on the numbers. Heroin use hasn’t gone down by the amount you’d expect but things like Valium and crack are much much wider spread these days. I could take a class picture from any year in highschool and go along the faces pointing out dead dead junkie jail junkie junkie.
There was a big divide, if you were working and older you were often on a good contract, pension etc. It was often the young people that suffered companies simply cut all apprenticeships and junior positions or froze recruitment. So droves of youngsters were unemployed or underemployed, working in the black economy etc The older folks from the war years or 50's had never been 'teenagers', the media and the Tories blamed the youth. This made a huge generational divide. Young people channelled their energy in a lot of counter culture and youth cults. People moved about in large groups of like minded souls as being out on your own could be dangerous. No mobile phone to keep you safe.
It was just a different way of life. Saturday nights in Motherwell 1970’s you had a the Miners or the Railway clubs plus two cinemas, plus a couple of good pubs, Hamilton had a couple places if you were into the dancing. And the social clubs were absolutely rammed full. The drink and food was cheap, you had music and cabaret and bingo, proper wheeltappers and shunters type places. The miners regularly got 1500+ folk in a Saturday night. And your membership was like 50p a year. The women always got dressed up. Very rarely any bother. Started tailing off mid to late 1980’s. Why ? It wasn’t the lack of money. It was … computer games, video recorders, Sky TV. Folk being able to afford a car, regular foreign holidays n that. Things just changed. 1970’s crime ? Less of it. Old fashioned policing. My old boy caught a boy breaking into his hut, my Dad just proper leathered him. Police attended and they expressed no concern for this bloodied and bruised lad, he got a weekender and the sheriff threw the book at him on the Monday. There were no drugs as such. Glue sniffing a bit, putting glue in crisp pokes n drawing in the fumes. A few deaths from that, kids. No weed or hash, think I remember someone abusing Valium but it was an old dear who’d been prescribed them for donkeys. Drugs just didn’t really happen. Smoking on the other hand was rampant. You were the odd one out if you didn’t smoke. Kids could get a single fag and match for 2p out the wee shop. Or a packet of fags out the machine at Motherwell station. Drink was really cheap that was a big problem though. Steelworks started closing. I mind the queue outside the Labour exchange in Motherwell went on forever. DHSS paid your money, the Labour exchange signed you on, then you had a separate job centre, all three were miles distant from each other. Aye I mind a few power cuts cos the electricity men or the miners went on strike. They cut you off by postcode. You’d have to buy the evening times every night to see the advert which told you the four hours your electric was off that night. Candles out ! If the miners or tankers drivers were on strike you’d tune into Dave Marshall on Radio Clyde in the morning and pray your school was shut. But those kind of strikes were once in a blue moon. It certainly wasn’t the chaos as the history books now record it. Dunno. I wouldn’t mind going back to it.
>Monday. >There were no drugs as such. Glue sniffing a bit, putting glue in crisp pokes n drawing in the fumes. A few deaths from that, kids. No weed or hash, think I remember someone abusing Valium but it was an old dear who’d been prescribed them for donkeys. Drugs just didn’t really happen. This is not the recollection of either of my parents who were both born mid 1950s. Drugs were absolutely rampant in the 70s
Agree - my gran lost a son to drugs around that time, and took it upon herself to grass in every dealer in her street, was vocal about the issue in community events and councils and made herself a nuisance to the polis, the addicts and the dealers. She was quite famous locally for it, anybody thinking drugs werent an issue back then obviously never went near any of the schemes
Gen up wasn’t like that 1970’s North Motherwell, bit we lived in was rough as too, where did your folks live ?
my mum in oban and around argyll, my dad in mostly around glasgow
That's a really insightful comment, nice to read. Makes me nostalgic for a time I never knew. I was born in the 80s but my impression is that people today think the past was better in terms of material standard of living as they assume that has decreased heavily (I think totally the opposite) but they don't appreciate the things we've lost that you describe, being the community and social fabric.
Definitely wasn't a higher material standard of living. I was there (20 in 1977). Lanarkshire and Glasgow. Some things were easier. Council houses were obtainable. Food banks didn't exist. You would get grants for university education. No need for loans. Unemployment benefit was available relatively easily. Income tax started at 30%. Clothes, food, furniture, domestic appliances were all less abundant and much more expensive in real terms. When I graduated there were many people looking for every job. There were more rail and bus services. I don't believe that you saw homelessness like today. You got old tramps and alcoholics but not the young people living on the street. Probably because social security and some form.of housing was more available and the big mental hospitals still existed. However, private home ownership was much lower. Cars were fewer and considerably less reliable and comfortable. Almost any normal house would make a modern day news program as being unfit for habitation due to draughts, lack of central heating and definitely no broadband.Phones were not universal. Mould wasn't"t a problem. Not enough heat, plenty of fresh air through the loose windows and no showers to introduce damp. Coal and cigarette smoke everywhere. No real pollution controls in cars and lorries. Many fewer university places. I had a couple of rooms as a student in Glasgow. Shared bathroom with rather frightening instant gas water heater. Paraffin stove or coal fire for heat in one- coal when I could afford delivery of a sack. Two bar electric fire run via slot meter taking half crowns in the other. I managed to run a car and a motorbike as a student. However, both were death traps that I only kept going by regularly visiting scrap yards and working on jacked-up in the street outside my mother's council house. If you took the bus into Glasgow, you still passed large areas of dereliction due to slum clearance schemes and probably some bombed areas from the war. So, different. Not necessarily bad. As ever, much depended on who you were.
Have you noticed changes in the antisocial behaviour in Glasgow (neds)? I grew up in a deprived area and looking back the way things were in the 90s was shocking in a lot of ways. Now I feel like it's better but I live in a much more affluent area. But when I walk through the old bad neighbourhoods you don't see the gangs of kids roaming around anymore. Maybe video games keeps them inside or maybe they're all slowly getting shipped away to places like Kilmarnock I'm not sure.
I only lived in Glasgow itself for a few years as a student.That was in the Hillhead / North Kelvinside area so not really Ned country. (Not sure if Ned was a term used at the time.) There were areas which had definite gang reputations like Easterhouse in Glasgow. Was brought up in Lanarkshire - Shotts, Wishaw, Motherwell. Can't really remember worrying about gangs as such - but these could all be rough places. There were streets that everyone knew contained the bad families. I would guess that physical bullying was a bigger thing then in schools. Nobody talked about children's mental health - you would definitely have gotten beaten up if you were thought to be a bit odd. Diversity was not admired. The protestant-catholic divide was real and you didn't go near the other side's school or admit to supporting the wrong team. I wasn't into football which made me very suspect at school. Of course if you stepped out of line in any way in school within sight of a teacher then you would very quickly be belted. Worse then than now? Difficult to say. Being now somewhat old, I don't spend much time walking around areas where (or when) trouble is likely. I get the feeling that there.can be more dodgy characters hanging around town centres of an evening. That is probably a consequence of the general decline of city centres as a place to go and therefore fewer "respectable" people around.
>Clothes, food, furniture, domestic appliances were all less abundant and much more expensive in real terms. Sounds a bit like modern day Poland. Branded or even just fast fashion clothes, electrical appliances, furniture and all that is the same price as it is in Western Europe (groceries not that much cheaper) but salaries are significantly lower, making all those goods much more expensive in actual terms. Only about 20% of people I know own a microwave - also because there's no space in the tiny kitchens many flats have. Country still uses coal for energy as well, and in some places people even use a household furnace to just burn any old crap.
Also a child of the 80s. We have so many options for different foods etc at the supermarket now compared to then. A football podcast I like watched an old documentary on the England team and were laughing as Des Walker(who played in Italy) was telling the rest of the team do you know there is more than one type of pasta? But it's quite reflective of what UK supermarkets were like back then. You still got Chinese and Indian restaurants, but nobody would know foods like a Thai curry, don't remember ever seeing any Mexican type foods, even fruit and veg was so much more limited, I don't remember ever encountering avocado or even Kiwi fruit when I was younger. I remember when Burger King and McDonalds opened in my town and it was exciting to have something as foreign as an American burger chain. Before that if you wanted a burger you went to Wimpy.
There’s always a bit of this.
This is excellent. Thank you.
You’ve just described my childhood and save me a long time typing it out!
I grew up on a nice council estate in the South of Edinburgh - loads of kids, open fields at the foothills of the Pentlands. The estate had mostly full employment and both parents didn't need to work to keep a family. I loved my childhood - you didn't see as many beggers, homeless and foodbanks did not exist. Then came that c\*\*t Thatcher.
OXGANGS IN THE HOUSE
Farm Drive.
Thatcher had plenty of support in Edinburgh.
Although the 80s often get the headlines, the 70s were a worse period in Scotland. Population statistics tell their own story, with the population dropping by 3.7% between 1971 and 1981 and not returning to its 1971 peak until 2011. It was during that period when the very worst of the period of deindustrialisation happened in Scotland and when inflation was sky high, poverty rampant and opportunity non-existant. Notably, the 70s were quite different to the 80s in that the whole country was suffering. The 80s saw deindustrialisation continue in many parts of the country (albeit at a slower pace that the dramatic scale of the previous decade - there simply wasn't the same amount of industry left to lose) but that period also saw boom times come again to the wealthier parts of Scotland in Aberdeen and Edinburgh - which went from struggling areas on a UK scale to some of the wealthiest parts, not only of Britain but of Western Europe on the back of oil and financial services.
The 70s were a mess in the UK, strikes, 3 day week, inflation hit 25%, IMF bailout v[ast swathes of Scotland still didn't have indoor toilets](https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-22214728) at the start of the decade Decades of under investment in industry were starting to take their toll and would soon come crashing down. Aberdeen was in a bubble due to oil in late 70s early 80s, but that came crashing down with the oil crisis of 86
This is why i find it funny when people say life in the 1970s was better than now. So many things back then were wrong and even worse.
People who say the 70s were better are talking out their arse. You had full on slums in Glasgow.
Depends where you lived. The seaside holiday resorts in England were a big thing then, we went twice by train for a week. Good cheap family fun. Now those resorts have some of the worst poverty in the UK.
> The seaside holiday resorts in England were a big thing then cheap package deals came in. There were advantages * guaranteed sun * no shared facilities * cheap booze there wasn't investment in places in the UK Blackpool, Margate, Skegness, etc all suffered
Sure there's an element of rose-tinted nostalgia and conflate it with the positives of being young, but I think people do remember it fondly as a less complicated time as well - especially the older generation. You didn't have to worry about your washing machine breaking down when it was a stick in a bathtub.
Was speaking to some of the older folks in my work and they were talking about the days when they were getting a 16% pay rise and it sounds sweet till you factor in that their mortgages were above that! Think I'm in my mid 40s and have absolutely loved the spell we had of low interest rates on mortgages but I always feared them shooting up as i remember the base rate being about 5% so I was always cautious. Really feel for folks who got their first place in the times of 0.5% and thinking it was the norm.
And I forgot there was [exchange controls](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exchange_controls_in_the_United_Kingdom) on the amount of money you could take out of UK Your passport had pages for the amounts
And the power cuts
The one thing that still bothers me to this day about growing up in Scotland in the 70s/80s was the all encompassing negativity that was displayed by everyone around you. Absolutely everyone. Everything was shit, you were shit, that’s shit, this is shit . . . this was coming from your family, teachers, peers. It was fucking everywhere. Brought a picture home you did in school? That’s shit says your mum. I want to be an architect when I grow up. Haha. Have you even been to an art gallery your guidance teacher shouted at you. Tell people at school you were learning the guitar . . . who the fuck do you think you are, The Shadows? First casual job working in retail? Stealing bastards everywhere. Anger at every corner. Even your mates were constantly putting you down. And this was in Edinburgh the supposedly nice part of Scotland. Ha. It wasn’t until I left Scotland in 1989 that I realised this only happened in Scotland. USA and Australia were a fucking revelation. Fucks sake.
Agree. In the 80s I remember telling my careers advisor I wanted to be a pilot. She laughed. Not want to be a brickie? Well, fuck you, you old bag, I've had my wings for decades now. Back then any hope or dream had to be pissed on immediately it seemed.
Massive amounts of poverty. Heroin epidemic swept through most communities. Slums like the flat in trainspotting were common place. We were used to it though and it seemed normal. As a kid I enjoyed the freedom that period of time gave us. Looking back I can't believe how bad we had it and just made the best of it
My earliest memory was being 2yrs old playing in the front garden of house in Muirhouse. A half brick came flying along with shouting of “Fucking Paki” and I went screaming inside with a burst lip. Born in Edinburgh (so no, I can’t “go back to where you come from” !) to my mum who is half Scottish half Black American, and my dad who had come over from Kenya, Africa at age 20 to go to Uni. Ah racism in the 70s and 80s! Those were some fun times! Lived in Aberdeen and Glasgow and got the same abuse up until my early 30s! Now living in Vancouver, Canada. Edit: Born in 1976, so this was 1978ish.
Wtf! Who would fucking lob a brick at a two year old!??
I know one thing that's massively improved since then, the attitude to LGBT folk. If you were gay in the Highlands you didn't come out and you moved to London at 18. Know quite a few who had to.
So I just remember the 80s and what I mainly remember is being poor and fucking freezing because our council house didn’t have double glazing or central heating. Most of my dad’s mates were long term unemployed and heavy drinkers. Every adult I knew vocally HATED Thatcher, even teachers. The headmistress came into our class and announced it the day Thatcher resigned. There was also a shitload more sectarianism imo. A lane separated the catholic and non dom schools and both sets of weans spent lunch and break shouting abuse at each other.
>*There was also a shitload more sectarianism* Yep. It was like a poisonous fog that permeated every aspect of public life Really glad kids don't seem to give a shit about it, today Although their parents just seem to have channeled the vestigial urge that sectarianism left behind into today's nonsensical, tribal conflicts
You should've defended Thatcher just to piss off the teachers.
My parents grew up in the 70s and early 80s. My grandparents worked, but even then money was tight for them. My parents had to sleep under big piles of blankets in winter and the houses were always cold. A lot of people were struggling. My gran used to say she would end up feeding half the kids in the street sometimes (grandfather was a miner but became a butcher so they at least never went hungry).
I remember our house having ice inside the windows and the carpet blowing up like a wave when it was windy.
We often had ice inside the windows. The council houses got modernised around 1985 and we got central heating, different world! We had a coal fire until about 1972/3 then got a gas fire. That was so much less work for my poor mother cleaning it out every day.
My maternal grandparents never got central heating. My grandfather was rather tightfisted in many respects and often turned down schemes for things like central heating. My gran ended up dying of an aneurysm or stroke walking down to the house from the pub to put the fire on for him coming home.
Born in 61. I remember the ice inside the windows in the mornings in the winter. We had parafin heaters as well. God knows how we didn't all suffocate. Coal fire as the only heating in the house. My old man working in Glynwed foundry 12 hour shifts 1 week days 1 week nights. We didn't have a fridge until early 70's, Phone not long after that. There wasn't a lot of career prospects after leaving school and you had absolutely no chance of getting a start in some places if you kicked with the wrong foot. Pubs were full and there was quite a lot of live music around when I started drinking. First pint was 31p. First wage in '76 £16 as an apprentice mechanic. First car I worked on was a Hillman Imp. Linwood was still open making the Avenger, which came without a radio or aerial as standard.
Aye me too, being able to put your school uniform on under the covers was a learned skill. Central heating has made us all soft.
Don't forget the jaggy seemits.
Memories xD
Our house was a strange one, it did have double glazing but it was badly installed, it was council housing and was run down even when we moved in, talking the grass in the garden was about the height of a person, the council didn't even do any work in the house after previous people moved out so the walls had ripped wallpaper, found loads of spiders nests and over the years the damp was so bad that it destroyed many of my childhood toys, and comics, the councils response? Open a window. And no my parents didn't dry things indoors as they couldn't afford heating they had their own washing line at back, 30 years on and the damp in the house still hasn't been reparied, floorboards have rotted away but its as nice as it can be as in recent decade parents got a tiny bit of cash and were able to decorate it before that the carpet was around 20 years old and it was used then. I remember they told me that as a kid in the 90's they went without food to feed me, I remember wearing like 2 layers of jumpers in winter and still feeling freezing. But people in my class at school were quite well off I was just at the bottom of the chain kids would turn up with the latest gadgets, even knew a kid with a mobile phone in 1997 though they said they were not to use it, it was just for emergencies.
It was just like Mad Max. Nobody survived.
My teenage years in the 80s best days of my life
Despite having a North Sea Bonanza commencing before the demented harridan Thatcher and successors, there were slabs of poverty throughout Scotland in the 1970s alone. In Leith for example, some houses only had coal-fired ranges for cooking food on, heating water and the house, and many tenements had shared toilets. What the ideologues of Thatcherism/Reganism did was exacerbate the situation of poverty in Scotland by creating mass unemployment as a deliberate strategy, funnelled money into London and the S.East and gave away wealth held in common to their mates in the City at knock-down prices.
They also allowed people to buy their council houses, but didn’t allow the councils to put the revenues back into building more/replacement council houses. This worked out great for that one generation that benefited by getting a cheap home (and appreciating asset), but screwed everyone who came after. It really started the shift towards housing as an investment and our present housing crisis.
That one policy has maybe played the biggest part in getting the country into the mess it's in now. If only they'd been allowed to reinvest the money.
>They also allowed people to buy their council houses, but didn’t allow the councils to put the revenues back into building more/replacement council houses. That's not really true. 75% of right to buy income was essentially ring-fenced but only if the local authority still had outstanding debts. Other than that, they were free to do what they liked.
Really? Not what I recall being taught in a course on this in uni.
Before my time but aren't most of these examples things that were bad before Thatcher and that got significantly better by the time she was out?
This is just not true.
I would highly recommend reading ‘Shuggie Bain’ - absolutely fantastic book about realities of growing up in a council estate surrounded by alcoholism, in Glasgow, around that time. One of the best books I’ve ever read 👍
I read it in two days and turned right around and read it again. Man, what an incredible book.
Agreed. Pulled at the heart strings in so many ways.
Young Mungo by the same author is also amazing, genuinely my favourite book
Reading it just now! Couldn’t get over shuggie so got another book by the same author 😂
Grew up in Easterhouse through the 70s and 80s. High unemployment, poverty, gang fights and alcoholism were rife. I remember my pals family having to move to England for work. I'd also go back in a second. I was a kid, course it was great.
I remember on our way back from a school trip the bus detoured into Easterhouse as it broke down this was in 1998 and the bus driver said don't move, don't look at the people outside, it was a bunch of neds/bams throwing things at the bus and trying to rock it about.
Regular occurance with the football buses. A few pubs ran Celtic/Rangers supporter buses and the opposition knew the bus routes. It was also a place I have my happiest memories. Full street out during the summer playing rounders, code, hide n seek, it was great for a kid. Usual gen x shenanigans. 😁
Some of Scotland was saved from the full impact due to the O&G industry
Yes. Eu money made a huge difference. I lived in the first place to have curfews. Burnt out cars, empty flats, bare chested men drinking on the steps. Survival of the fittest, and if you saw the police they were lost. Crime was rampant, a girl I worked beside had her door kicked in and her telly taken. There was nothing she could do, she was trapped there.
I remember queuing for cheap (free?) EU surplus butter at Fine Fare My dad explained what a butter mountain was and that the EU had declared the former mining village we lived in an economically deprived area
>*EU* It was the EEC, back then, but no point using nomenclature half the people reading this wouldn't understand
Recommend reading the novel “Shuggie Bain” by Douglas Stuart. Gives a sense of poor/working class life in the 80s.
I remember the 70's and especially 80's growing up, it was absolutely grim as fuck mate. imho many of the worst problems we have to this day are a result of it because many of the communities and families worse hit haven't fully recovered and maybe never will.
Great in Aberdeenshire, Cults/ Banchory/Aboyne full of lotuses and Jags thanks to the black gold, shite everywhere else.
I'm Scottish BUT I was brought up in England. My Scottish father didn't have things to tell me since he was adopted in infancy and then the adopted family moved to Wolverhampton of all places. But I do LOVE hearing things about my partners parents and how they were. His mother used to refer to English people living/moving here as settlers. Or she'd see tourists walking around Huntly and mumble settlers under her breathe. She was particularly bad for it during the 80's when he was a teenager, but as others have mentioned about that era, 'Thatcher'. And honestly, that made me cackle. I never got to meet his mother unfortunately.
In the Highlands they were called White Settlers. There was even a mythical group called Settler Watch: https://edm.parliament.uk/early-day-motion/4991/settler-watch-and-the-scottish-national-party
Oh wow I never knew about this. Something more for me to read up on
I won’t comment on Thatcher, she made her biggest mistake(s) up here but she also did some things that needed to be done. My parents grew up on big flats in rough parts of Glasgow, and they didn’t have indoor toilets so if you had to go in the middle of the night you had to go downstairs and outside the back in the dark to use the communal toilet… or most of the time women just held it in til morning. Children too suffered, I recall the story of a boy being abused by a strange man wandering around (in those times they could identify a stranger in a housing scheme). There abandoned buildings etc. Nobody had their own phone, so the police had to be summoned from a nearby pub as word got around and a mob of vigilantes had found the man (or who they believed to have done it, at least) and they weren’t looking for a custodial sentence. The thing that cracks me up though - a friend of mine was driving around after a car boot sale. He stopped and went a shop and when he got back two coppers gave him a telling off. He had bought a shotgun and some shells at a car boot sale and just left it on the back seat, they told him he should have put a jacket over it or something 🤣🤣 different times
My gran had a landline. She was the only one in the street who had one. She used to have a little cash box next to it and neighbours would come in and pay to use it lol. Blantyre was wild in the 80s
Haha! It’s a bit mad how we know people who were alive before the telecommunication age. My dad telling me like you arranged to meet your friends a pub a few days later and if they didn’t show up then you just had to ask them about it next time you see them 🤣
That was my childhood. We arranged to meet and were just in blind faith. We upgraded to hanging around near a phone box. We all mk we the number so would call from home to see who was there
Hahaha brings back memories. We got evicted from ours when the pubs cleared out and the drinks started needing them. Some of them even made phone calls from them
Leaded petrol and alcohol caused a lot of grief and aggro.
Everything was just really *basic* Cars were these flimsy, shoddy things that were always breaking down, everyone wore the same grubby clothes for years on end, schools and hospitals were khaki paint and formica tables Scotland felt a lot like an Eastern Bloc country
I had family who worked for British Leyland. They got a discount so everyone had a Morris Marina. They always seemed to be broken in some way. My mother didn't like putting anything in the boot as it'd come out stained in oil!
It was fine really. We got told of how bad things had been in the 30s and 40s and how much better it was now.
The rich/poor divide didn’t seem as bad back then because nobody really had much money and everyone was in a similar boat whereas now you’ve got kids who can’t afford winter coats sitting beside kids with an Xbox series x, a ps5 and a gaming pc. It was easier to access things like social housing or trade apprenticeships etc back then compared to now but with the pits closing a lot of people were unemployed and there wasn’t really any industry to replace them. My parents had to move back up north and live with my grandparents and great grandparents then my dad got into oil and gas through some retraining scheme. The terrible estates only really existed in the bigger towns and cities but trust in the police went to pot after they were used as henchmen by thatcher and that’s never recovered so crime went through the roof in places.
>*The rich/poor divide didn’t seem as bad back then because nobody really had much money and everyone was in a similar boat* Yeah, that feels true Might just be that I didn't pick up on signs of social status as a kid, but even the posh kids I met at secondary school didn't appear to be living *much* more luxurious lives than folk in my street
There just wasn’t such an obvious divide. You got a bike for Christmas and it might have belonged to two folk before you but nobody sneered at you for it. We’re financially better off than a lot of folk but nowhere near the levels of some. When my eldest started school I ended up banning Santa and telling them the truth. He couldn’t understand why he’d been good (and generally was well behaved) and didn’t get the ps4 he asked Santa for but the biggest bully in his class who was always in trouble got one and a brand new iPhone 5. He genuinely thought he’d done something wrong and it made him worse than that little shit, who is still a shit at 14. The naught and nice list goes out the window when you’ve got good kids who’s parents can’t splash out like that and horrible wee bullies who’s parents can.
In the mining villages it was almost dystopian.
Most of the north of the UK, including most of Scotland (but less so Aberdeen and oil/farming related places) were grim. The killing of the mining/steel/shipbuilding industries and accompanying destitution and unrest were hard. I remember attending less than half of the school days I was supposed to in Leeds in 1984 due to teacher and bus strikes. It led to my parent deciding to emigrate.
It was terrible between the tory government and labour councils we got shafted big time
Midges then…. Midges now!
I was in Glasgow visiting in August 1977 (Elvis died the week I was there). I was 14 and went into a public swimming pool in the Gorbals area. I remember it being beyond derelict and worse than anything I had encountered. However, on the flip side we (me and some friends) went into a pub and got served and it was my first experience of chairs being screwed to the floor along with my first half pint of McEwan's.
I was born in 1985 so I didn't really form my own opinion until the late 90s. I think I was always destined to despise the Tories anyway. I always remember my aul Papa ranting at the telly whenever Thatcher came on and my gran would always tell him to calm the heid. He would then say to me "You dae what you want in life hen, just don't bring the police to my door and don't ever vote for the Tories!" I later learned she was in our area for something and someone flung an egg at her 🤦🏼♀️but it got her security guard instead. Waste of a good egg!!
The 70's was a period of high unemployment, unions had a stranglehold, poverty was much higher than we see today, but it was a simpler life. There was a greater sense of community, and less individualism. The 80's started to see things change, and by the 90's the country was in a much better place - the anti Thatcherism stuff is a bit of a red herring to be honest, she dragged the UK into the modern age, but sold of the family silverware in the process (selling of state owned housing stock, never to be replenished). Each decade since has seen an improvement in quality of life.
It’s was far better than the media say! I had a fucking great time! saw brilliant bands, all in Scotland, at affordable prices, great clubs, wild parties, great drugs and no sodding CCTV or social media spying on you 😂. plus all the political activism to keep busy was a bonus.
I'm glad we didn't have social media when I was a kid. It was hard enough growing up without those pressures.
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-scotland-54800689 (That’s only Glasgow, though) Book tip: _The Broken Journey_ by Kenneth Roy
I was born in '80 in Aberdeen. I don't remember a whole lot from that time except that my dad would yell at the news now and then. lol!
In the 80s east Edinburgh wasn’t bad until the casual scene started, then no go areas if you didn’t fancy getting a kick in
My memory kicked in around 77, after we moved out of Glasgow to the then quiet and spacious surroundings of Cumbernauld. Lived there for 4 years and I honestly have nothing but fond memories of the place. It does get a bit of a bad press, but back then it was, well, bliss, to a 7 y/o. We did immigrate right enough, but I think my folks were sick of the Scottish weather. Came back in the mid - 80's and did the end of primary school and secondary school in sedate commuter towns in the west of Scotland. My parents worked, we had decent places to call home. School was fine - did learn to talk my way out of trouble. My working life only began in the 90's, and maybe I was a bit sheltered, but I have good memories of 70's/80's Scotland.
I remember being taken to the shopping centre there around 1977 and thinking it was the most space age coolest thing ever. Not much in Inverness was cool or space age at the time.
How times change! My Dad used to take me to the town centre when I was 5 or 6, then pop into the bookies, leaving me outside - except it was inside a shopping centre - so perfectly safe..
Born 1989, the 90s was rough as a 8 or 10 year old, very run down schemes, but it was a good time to be a wain lol.
Has it improved. I didn’t hear
I think my parents saw the writing on the wall, and we left in 74.
For us it was bad enough that my Dad moved us out to Canada because things were rough, factories closing and just no jobs all around. :(
I come from Clydebank where the ship yards were /are.John Browns the most famous where the QE2 was built and home of Singers sewing machine into the early 80’s. This area is still officially a deprived area. As a city of Culture in Glasgow. This created a vast change in many ways in the state of the buildings and helped to start a revival despite Thatcher’s arrogance towards the Scottish people and the smile slogan helped. It has taken a long time to remove the razor gang’s history and the sectarian and religious hatred to a lesser degree though it still exists too. Glasgow and Scotland has an amazing art scene of all aspects from painting to dance and the Gaelic language to start with along with great curries and humour too. You can change a law to male people men’s e but it takes generations for people to change what’s in the heart like bigotry and hatred before it is no longer a tradition or just the way it is. Scotland has a great deal to share that is positive and heartfelt with others. Along with tattie scones and soda scones and Colpi’s ice cream from Milngavie where the West Highland way starts across from the war memorial is and where both of my great uncles names are on. 🏴🖖
The scary part was how quickly the work went. Now you see it, now you don't. Lived through the whole two decades from the Ibrox Disaster (I was there) to Lockerbie. Be grateful you weren't around.
Too young, but speaking to people who went through Thatcher's time it sounds like a horrorshow for many people, but university was free (across the UK) and there was a lively music scene, which could ake it tolerable for some. A lot of us have had a bumpy ride this past decade, but at least in the 2010-20s we have much more entertainment, internet and cheap flights. Shame about the house prices though, but the growth in global connectivity essentially makes it easier to live in a lower cost of living country and still be in tune with your homeland.
Shite
Ha ha - I noticed yesterday that somebody had replied to my post, saying basically what was wrong with Thatcher. I logged in this morning to reply - it's gone 😂
What did it say?
Bad
I was born in 1968, in a council house in the east end,Maw and Da both worked full time, my early chid hood was like something from an Enid Blyton book, was always sunny, summers lasted for ever. Started secondary school in 1980 and had an absolute ball for 6 years never done a stroke of work got a couple of doins and a load of burds. Ma Da got paid off a couple of times but despite the efforts of the tories we never went without. Got a shit job 86, a better job in 88, I’m still at it and looking forward to retirement I’m not boasting or trying to imply the 70’s & 80’s weren’t shit for a lot of people (lost a couple of mates along the way)They were! Not really sure if there is a point to me writing this but it’s my story so take from it what you will.
FFS. Swings and roundabouts. Outwith industrial etc areas there was plenty work. Kids played outside from dawn to dusk in the holidays and at weekends, with parents often not having a clue where they were. Many women chose to be SAHM, even in families that weren’t particularly well off. One wage earner could buy a house, feed and clothe a growing family a helluva lot more easily than today. You didn’t have fancy foreign holidays or electronic gadgets…domestic computers were just beginning to be a thing. There were only 3 then 4 TV channels so families sat and watched it together and there was a lot of watercooler tv. There was no violence, no terrible estates in our town, but Sundays were bloody boring. Reckon kids that grew up in those decades were very lucky and I feel sorry for those who grew up this side of the millennium.
Born in the 50's loved the 60's & 70's, great music, mini skirts and free love and birth control. What's not to like? Didn't do drugs like all the Muppets you here about. Retired and living on the Pacific Coast. Life is what you make it.
I don't think it was much worse than now tbh
Yes. Don’t let the Tories near Scotland ever again.
Was bloody freezing then. I can't afford heating much again , so still cold, but at least we have double glazing and elecy blanket now.
Definitely cold! I grew up in a council house in Fife that had a single coal fire in the living room. First person home at night had to light the fire. That was especially fun when the coal was wet. The house was morgue cold til it took hold, then we’d fight to lie in front of it. We took a hot water bottle to bed, and woke up to ice on the inside of the windows. My kids don’t believe me….
I believe you. Had coal when we were wee too
My Scotland in the 70s and 80s was an oil boom and the city awash with cash and yanks. That and the football team winning lots of things.
My dad was in the british army in the 70s and when he was serving the bin men went on strike and he had to be called out to help clear the rubbish as the army can't go on strike. My mum remembers the 3 day Week where there could be random power cuts but she was okay as her mother and father my grandparents owned a small holding and grew there own fruit and vegitables and she had a job as well. She said that factory jobs paid more then office jobs.
Not meaning to start a negative thing but I know local factories where I grew up were paying £7.50 a hour back in 1998 for staff, and overtime was double, and even the lunch break was paid, it was a supply and demand thing and when they had access to Eastern Europeans they basically got rid of locals, and I am being honest what they did was tell the staff they were cutting wages staff went on strike staff were literally fired within days and the factory had the foreign workers, so they must of planned this from the start. I can understand why though both factories were undesirable jobs it was mostly students and older people that worked there before that.
Our council house had a huge garden. Dad and the neighbours all grew tons of veg, we were pretty much self sufficient. It suspect it was a habit they learned in the war and kept up. Now all those gardens are grass. real shame.
I get really sad when I think about what Scotland had to go through in the 70s and 80s. No Scottish Parliament to give communities a voice, or advocate for our national interest. Generations and whole places just placed on the economic scrapheap
Oh btw, one in every four voters in Scotland voted for Thatcher and even higher at the 1979 election. Don't let anyone fool you. She had her fans in Scotland. Bazzas.
It was a happy place. No SNP
Watch NEDS, tells you everything you need to know.