I was born in wartime and lived through all the privations that followed. I was born and spent my early childhood in London, my graandmother's huse was destroyed in the Blitz. All my eneration, and the Boomers lived through the Cold War, where we lived under the fear that every day could be our last one.
Employment now may be difficult, but do you not remember the 1980s when tens of thousands of people were being made redundant every week and British manufacturing industry was collapsing.
At that time I can remember having to drive from Reading to the other side of Hull for a business meeting in the mid 1980s I left home with plenty of time expecting the motorways to be as busy as I remembered in the 1970s and I was appalled to find how empty the roads were. Driving north past derelict industrial estates, one after the other, all tatty 'to let/for sale signs. I remember seeing children begging at tube stations in London. Something I had never ever seen before in this country.
In the 1990s there was another round of major redundancies, this time part hidden by encouraging older people, 50 plus, to retire later. I worked for a company that had to lose 75,000 staff as a result of a change in its regulatory regime. I was one of the over 50s who 'volunteered' for redundancy because I knew that if i did not, the moment the generous redundancy scheme ended, I would be out on my ear with a minimal pay-off. Then there were all the foreclosures and evictions and plunging house prices that ruined so many in the late 80s, early 90s. DD got on the housing ladder because the flat she bought in South London halved in price between 1988 and 1992. In 1988 someone paid £68,000 and sold it to DD in 1993 for £32,000. Houses were cheaper then because interst rates were so high. Do you remmeber mortgage interest being 10% plus?
Now I do not deny all the things Franbern said, but that was only half of the story. Our lives have not been a smooth untroubled path, with houses dropping into our hands for, we have had as many problems and diffculties as today's generation, just different and as we get older we tend to forget the bad times and remember the good, while the young only see the advantages we had and not the disadvantages.
