Apologies Helen, I’m easily confused! 
He stood up to Richard Nixon with regard to sending British troops to Vietnam while maintaining a good relationship with the USA.
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Those were bad times, I remember hearing Vietnam constantly mentioned on the news but had no idea what the word meant.
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Yes, it pretty much went over my head too. I vaguely remember watching the news, there was a kind of protest where veterans were ditching their medals. I couldn’t understand why until my dad explained.
In Harold’s first tenure of PM I was 14 - 20 years old and everyone loved him in our village, except for the posh gits who always voted Conservative and sent their kids to grammar school.
Not because they were smarter than us, but their parents had enough money to buy their expensive uniforms.
There were ticks in everyone’s window saying ‘Vote Labour’ so we did, or ended up being the Billy no mates at school.
Harold seemed a nice fellow at the time, and labour were the working man’s party.
Our council was labour run and emptied the bins (not some big contract rip off outfit) and the roads were in good shape and they subsidised the bus companies so it only cost a few pence to ride into town on the bus.
Then the council got swallowed up by Doncaster Metropolitan Council who were a big business and more interested in selling stuff off and wasting the money on no hope projects.
Everything that a proper council should do is now done by some contractor or other and all the money comes from central government, where they go cap in hand every year.
Last year they spent millions (of residents money) trying to open the airport and putting in cycle lanes that are rarely used in most places. But government stipulates that the grants can only be spent on cycle lanes, so rather than not obtain the money, they put in cycle lanes where there isn’t enough room for one. The government also stipulates that hundreds of new houses must be built on every bit of available land, and massive solar farms should surround Doncaster whether the people or council like it or not. Compulsory purchase is big around here at the moment.
So the council is just an extension of national government and have no part in deciding what happens in and around Doncaster. We are also lumbered with the obsessive Ed Miliband who really needs sanctioning…
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Harold Wilson went to Grammar School becoming head boy!
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It does seem that the significant consolidation of councils - I think starting in 1972 and then 1990’s. The logic must have been about removing duplications, bigger buying power and efficiencies. I doubt those benefits really came about and instead very costly & bureaucratic regional councils came about. Worse, they were highly incentivised to outsource rather than have emplyees doing the work - and they created councils very removed from communities.
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Margaret Thatcher went to Grammar School as well and got a scholarship to Oxford - as did Harold Wilson!
Yes and no.
Was this not time when one person in work could afford a family and a house? in fact, people in their first years of working could afford to buy property. Wasn’t this the time of lowest gulf between rich and poor? Was it not the time of education being free, including university, and from that social mobility was at its highest? Those are surely good things and things we have lost. Weren’t there lots of major infrastructure projects - motorways, bridges, etc?
I’m not saying it was all lovely and there were issues - excessive strike action, 3 day week, the oil crisis, badly built cars, really awful fashion, etc. But its surely forgetting lots of positives to dismiss all of the Heath / Wilson period as bad.
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I didn’t learn about Vietnam until I did a history A level. It’s not something that I guess anyone wanted kids to learn too young, might make them cynical
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I only remember his tenure in 74 to 76. I wasn’t born for much of his first term. The second term was a time when my family could hardly afford to put food on the table and pay the power bills, there was rubbish on the streets, everything in the shops was very expensive and if you had a house the rates were going up and up. We had a house, my dad was working all hours, nobody had a comfortable life and everyone was complaining. I think it’s about this time that my mum had to get a job too to make ends meet. Houses were cheap because at that time you had CGT on your owned residence. That’s what thatcher reversed.
That’s an interesting thought!
I remember the trouble in Grovner Square outside the American Embassy back in 68 although I was very young at the time…
The West End of London was quite a place to grow up in at a number of levels. There was also trouble at The Chinese Embassy in Portland Place from time to time.
I was a little bit nervous of walking past the place as a child, we lived in Harley Street just around the corner.
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Never a dull moment in some ways.
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I’m not sure that is correct. Individual primary residence exemption was part of the CGT in its introduction by Callaghan in 1965. From an article in tax.org :-
"Callaghan also followed Inland Revenue advice in placing no upper limit on principal private residence relief. "
I’d understood that the relatively low house prices (as a ratio to wages) at that time were more a result of very strict limits on mortgages, mortgages only available from building societies and relatively high deposit to value requirements. That and the fact that with high levels of public housing building going on the demand for private houses was lower.
That and the fact the wallpaper and decor in the 70’s was really bad - putting off many a potential house buyer.
We bought our present 2 bedroom semi detached home in a suburb of Aberdeen in 1969 for £4,300. At that time my take home pay for a 44 hour week was £18 which covered a month’s mortgage. A wife’s earnings didn’t count for a mortgage in them days.
I can see that Thatcher significantly lowered the CGT tax % for many who would otherwise have paid 60%.
It was an economics tutor who conveyed this Thatcher myth of private residence relief creation to me or perhaps I’ve mixed up the timeline as it was a tutorial back in the 80s. I can now see it was Callaghan.
Houses would have been cheaper in the 60s because of huge increase in inflation in the 70s. So over the course of ten years the cost of buying a house didn’t increase as fast as wage rates.
She did, parents were from Sheffield and I was born in Manchester, and I saw what she did to local communities, tearing them apart to attack the unions, and destroying our manufacturing base and becoming a service economy - this will bite us in the arse in the upcoming recessions and oil collapse…we don’t have any real independence anymore. Our economy is reliant on others, and that was her doing.
Hiowever you feel about the unions in the 70’s, and I’m not a fan - what she begat we still live with and will not end well. We need more independence and local manufacturing and green energy and technological production, not less.
No point being arms dealers, bankers, marketers and lackeys for corporations and oligarchs when the world economy collapses?
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Every government since the Thatcher years could have reversed the situation but it was actually the EU that destroyed our manufacturing base and cheap imports from the far east.
I agree that we are now reliant on foreign imports and if we had all bought British like Maggie had suggested we wouldn’t be finding ourselves in the mess that we now find ourselves in
Green energy is a joke, and as a result we are paying for the most expensive energy in the world (almost) solar panels on private houses, farms and businesses are a great idea to offset their energy costs, but providing the national grid in this country is just plain stupid and uneconomical. When you consider the amount of farmland being obtained by compulsory purchase when most of our food comes from the other side of the world, and tons of dangerous lithium storage facilities that will only provide a few thousand houses for little more than a few hours…I could go on and on, and I haven’t even started on wind turbines and the production from scratch of over one million Electric vehicles since 2002…Do the maths, how much CO2 have we actually saved? Nothing is sustainable.
I remember Wilson as one of the better PMs compared to the conga line of absolutely useless PMs that preceded and followed him. If nothing else he did no damage. (except for Rhodesia perhaps)
The British political system seems designed to enforce the Peter Principle. Politics only needs the occasional really good PM to make a difference for decades to come. Britain has never had one in my lifetime (Blair perhaps came closest). Thatcher made a long term difference but in the worst possible way.
I mean just look at the shower - Eden, Macmillan, Alec Douglas Hume, Edward Heath, Boris Johnson, that Truss woman; you’d have to wonder if any of them could tie their shoe laces all by themselves each morning.
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Oil is going to be even worse. Unless they get the Straits of Hormuz open, you’ll find out why.
So yes we need energy independence…please don’t say ‘nuclear’ - we know why that’s not a good idea (Fukushima, Chernobyl, 3 Mile island etc)
nuclear is used safely all over the world and is cleaner than other forms of energy in its impact on the planet despite the waste. Unfortunately our nuclear infrastructure needs far more investment and we are running out of time. AI is just a total waste of energy we need for domestic and business use.
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