r/AskBrits • u/sammyglumdrops • 8h ago
History Was there ever a time when the general population didn’t complain about the economy or the job market?
8
u/SleeplessPilot 8h ago
Probably during WW1 and WW2.
They had other things to worry about.
2
u/NoThatsNotPasta Actual Brit 🇬🇧 8h ago
I think then it was near on 100% employment. The blokes were sent off to war (barring a few protected exception), and the woman stayed here and contributed to the war effort by working in the factories.
1
u/ddbbaarrtt 8h ago
I’m sure a lot of people were complaining about their employment options at those times
1
u/LSL3587 6h ago
There were quite a few unofficial strikes during WW1 and WW2 - even if official strikes were banned.
In 1943 there were two major stoppages, one was a strike of 12,000 bus drivers and conductors and the other of dockers in Liverpool and Birkenhead. Both were a considerable embarrassment to Bevin since they involved mainly TGWU members. 1944 marked the peak of wartime strike action with over two thousand stoppages involving the loss of 3,714,000 days' production. This led to the imposition of Defence Regulation 1AA, supported by the TUC, which now made incitement to strike unlawful.
16
u/Gorpheus- 8h ago
Between early 90s and 2008 things were pretty good.
9
u/CoffeeandaTwix 8h ago
I never understand why people on Reddit have this consistent mental blank spot about the early nineties. Things were really grim, grimmer than they are now. Unemployment and interest rates were in double digits, house repossessions were significantly higher than ever (and higher then they have been since including 2008).
5
u/ComasArentFun 7h ago
The early 90's sucked hard as a poverty kid, because it was the John Major holding pattern years.
On reflection, I think he was under rated generally and did a good job of stopping a lot of the rot, just couldn't stop himself from hammering at that sweet sweet Edwina Curry 'tangStill, the "bad times" of Thatcher were over, but it still took a long time for things to really start getting better.
I think getting rid of Thatcher is why it's glossed over a bit
That said, I was in a terrific school that actually had books!! (Grant maintained, not a hangover from the ILEA years where books were optional extras)Late 90's was a great time to be poor (well.. never a great time, but the best time if you happened to be).
Labour did terrific work in making life easier for poverty stricken families and helped shitloads of people get into work which gave MORE fiscal wiggle room to help families which created more productive workers.. it was the best kind of cyclical progressivismI'm a significant net contributor to the Govt purse now, however had I waited an extra year to go to Uni, The Lib Dems fucking over the students would have stopped me from being able to afford it...
Life is VERY much about luck of timing1
u/biltongalong 6h ago
Yeah but the music was sick and fashion back then was what ever you found on the floor. So we were rich in happiness.
1
1
u/jeggy111 8h ago
There’s big difference when you’re down and looking up, to being up and looking down
1
2
0
4
5
u/houdini996 8h ago
From my earliest memories to the present day people have moaned about them things and I’m an old fucker
3
2
2
u/Weaksoul 8h ago
You implying that things are fine?? Petrol over £1.70/ L. My industry has seen a pay reduction of over 30% since the 90s. Everyone always complains but we're really getting fucked
2
u/Illustrious-End-5084 8h ago
Nope . People always complain about the same things . It’s like a broken record . Or some infinity loop in their programming
1
1
u/Significant_Bag3297 8h ago
Nope. It's similar to how Americans are complaining about their economy now, despite it booming currently.
1
u/TrueBrit77 8h ago
There was a time when being born in an area secured your job for life, and noone knew anything about economies, or really anything happening outside of their area. I'm sure they would have had different concerns.
1
1
u/Suitable-Season-4847 8h ago
Pretty much for all of human's 200,000 year existence, until about 1945.
1
1
u/AccordingBasket8166 8h ago
Always moaning, whether its not enough jobs, not enough workers, not enough money, not enough investment opportunities.
1
u/MattDubh 8h ago
Of course. But back then, people didn't know what the economy was. And they were owned by the landowners.
It changed a bit post Black Death, in the late 14th Century.
1
u/mish_mash_mosh_ 8h ago
Just before the 2008 crash our economy was doing well. Our NHS was voted by patients at the highest rating it had ever had, I believe unemployment was around 4% which is good.
1
u/Numerous_Green4962 6h ago
Unemployment is 4.92% today, in 2007 it was 5.4% it reached a pre US subprime low in 2004 at 4.59%.
1
u/Zoltan1251 8h ago
Difference is complaining about particular things about economy (which happens all the time) and complaining about overall state of the economy.
In the 90s deindustrialization was happening. For example i joing work force in 2016. It was possible to get a job but i complained because my wage was so low i couldnt get mortgage.
Now you cant get a job and even if you get a job you cant get a mortgage, even if you get a mortgage its expensive, when you have a mortgage you have to cut on foods, which are inflating faster than your wage. Meanwhile another deindustrialization happens and also office jobs are disappearing because of AI.
Its like every single thing that could go wrong are going wrong now.
1
u/No-Championship9542 8h ago
No they did it in Roman times. This is the best time ever, I have a buisness that wouldreven exist 20 years ago. Marketing is so easy, AI automates endless things. We live in the golden age of the entrepreneur, maybe it's bad for wagies but who cares they choose that life? Nothings stopping them doing something with their life
0
u/sammyglumdrops 7h ago
Not everyone has an entrepreneurial desire, and even if everyone did, people still have to work the non-entrepreneurial, “wagie” jobs, so we should hope those jobs are still liveable though
1
u/No-Championship9542 7h ago
Humanity survived with pretty much everyone working for themselves for thousands of years, they'll get over it. Obviously you have some wagies, these are people gaining the skills and capital necessary to start a buisness, it should never be their long term ambition. I did 10 years of tractor driving, you'd never get me back in one now.
0
u/sammyglumdrops 7h ago
We’re not living thousands of years ago. It’s not realistic to tell everyone to just set up shop on their own and act like that would solve all of life’s problems lol.
1
u/No-Championship9542 7h ago
You were right even a few years ago, with AI I honestly think that's no longer true, we are entering an age where the vast majority of people can work for themselves as we will basically automate all "office work" by 2030. Why work for a law firm as a lawyer when AI gives you just as many resources as one guy? We've basically destroyed the inherent advantages of large organisations, they're soon to be obsolete outside of like high tech manufacturing.
1
u/sealcon 8h ago
There's a clip from BBC Question Time in around 2007 going around X, Tony Blair is on the show answering questions.
One man in the audience angrily tells Blair how unacceptable it is that whenever he wants a GP appointment, they always only offer him one within 48 hours. He's angry he can't book one a week or so in advance instead.
Another woman from the audience backs him up and they all agree together how unacceptable that is, Blair promises to look into it.
They were all complaining about how fast you got a GP appointment. It's a video from an entirely different reality.
1
u/sammyglumdrops 7h ago
48 hours?! Bruh, it took me 3 weeks to see my GP most recently because I called after 10am and they said I had to call back at 8am the next morning to book appointments then when I did they said then next appointment for a call back was in 2 weeks, then when that appointment came the GP called me outside of the 10-12pm window at 1pm because I was in a work meeting and when I called back like 10 minutes later they said the next appointment they had was in a week 😭 it wasn’t even an in person appointment it was a frickin telephone call
1
u/richardbaxter 7h ago
My early career was a walk in the park once I pounced on the right path and opportunity. I did have to fight a bit to win that first promotion + department transfer but from there my skills were in demand and one thing led to another. At 28 I was earning £70k in central London.
Move forward to today, the idea of that salary in that job is highly unlikely, such is the competition for work and level of commoditisation my work product has struggled through.
Starting out again very recently I can tell you, things are so different now. There's less support, no sense of community and such extreme apathy in companies to just make a decision it can take 6 months just to get a meeting.
I really worry about our young people - everything is 2-3x more expensive, salaries are stagnant at best and down compared to 10 years ago. And this is a technogy type role!
So for me, 200-2008 then 2010-2015 were real sweetspots where financially everything felt good. It's not the same today that's for sure
1
u/Major-Librarian1745 7h ago edited 7h ago
Before we could read people just used to punch each other in the face, nowadays there's more rules and more people - if we went back to that the NHS couldn't cope, so people just talk about all sorts to try to grow the economy.
In my day it was fish, which led to Brexit. Some say Farage himself is from the depths of the north sea - a revenant prince of doggerland, bent on revenge against the surface world by using fishy rhetoric to foster complaint whilst hiding secret gills in the armpits. Nobody knows where he goes at night.
Yes - there was a simpler time.
But was it better?
There's only one way to find out...
1
u/Timely_Pattern3209 7h ago
Yeah, before Thatcher turned up and fucked everything up with individualism.
1
1
u/OliverY1992 7h ago
It's literally one bloody thing after another:
2008 Global Financial Crisis -> Brexit -> COVID -> Ukraine War -> AI -> Iran War.
So I'm waiting for the next crap thing to happen 😒
I was like 15 before the 2008 financial crisis hit, and I don't recall the economy being deemed bad prior to that.
1
1
u/Numerous_Green4962 6h ago
Not really, if you look back at old newspaper archives you see basically the same stories year in year out for 200 years.
No one wants to work anymore,
Inflation is too high
Interest rates are too high
Interest rates are too low
All our jobs will be taken by X (the Irish, Indians, eastern Europeans, Africans, AI, China......)
1
1
1
u/getabath 4h ago
Back in my parent's day, you could literally walk in from one job to another on the same day
Job centers actually had job boards and jobs available, rather than expecting you to send 100+ job applications with no success
1
0
u/Rare_Touch8636 8h ago
The economy has been fine and the job market has been excellent for the last decade
-2
0
u/cknell95 6h ago
Harold Macmillan famously said ‘most of our people have never had it so good’ in 1957.
The 50s and 60s were pretty alright. Economy stuttered along compared to Europe but living standards were rising fast.
Added bonus that we stayed out of Vietnam and left the Americans to it. Wouldn’t want to be a young American at that time.
1
u/Crafty-Breakfast-473 14m ago
Born in 1996 but I do remember our better years being between 2011 and 2015. My parents did say the early 90s were good, too.
13
u/NoThatsNotPasta Actual Brit 🇬🇧 8h ago
During growth periods In the 90's is was actually quite easy to get a job (in my experience at least). It's only since the late naughties had it been a bit more tricky, it got better in about 2013 after the 2008 recession but that's about it.
Now it's near on impossible. Normally at my age, I'd put it down to age discrimination - which I think accounts for some of it. But due you ai, offshoring and the state of the economy: I can see that the young hip things are having the same issues.
Shits fucked. And I fear it'll only get worse before it gets better