Tag: 80s

What did new technology look like in 1983?

Posted on by The Thatcher Crisis Years

These are adverts and one competition feature from SHE magazine in December 1983 – discovered in my 80s archives. A good spread of new technology from that year. A computer inside your washing machine, a Sunday roast done in your microwave and the latest in hi-tec cameras. The camera advertised below is a Minolta. That company’s cameras were taken into space with the Apollo missions and the company partnered with Leica on its lenses. It was later merged with Konica then swallowed up by Sony.

The gap-toothed man pointing at the microwave is “comedian” Jimmy Tarbuck – not a favourite of mine hence the speech marks – and the legendary Diana Dors is the heavily airbrushed lady. She died in 1984. Once a British screen diva, she had a starring role in the Adam and the Ants video for Prince Charming.

How the jobless tried to amuse themselves in the Thatcher years

Posted on by The Thatcher Crisis Years

It’s impossible to imagine now how endemic youth unemployment was between 1979 and 1983. In the Toxteth area of Liverpool, about 90% of the youth had no work. One survey in London estimated that 26% of young unemployed had contemplated suicide.

Still, it spawned a rather dark sense of humour…

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Larks in the Park – pop in Liverpool’s Sefton Park

Posted on by The Thatcher Crisis Years

Through the early 80s, Liverpool’s Sefton Park used to reverberate to the sound of some of the top bands from the north west. Hard to remember now but Liverpool ruled the pop waves at the time with combos like Teardrop Explodes, The Mighty Wah!, Echo and the Bunnymen, China Crisis, Flock of Seagulls, Frankie Goes to Hollywood, etc. They didn’t play this festival – think I’m right in saying. But some like Frankie did.

Here’s the festival mag for the 1985 event. It includes ads from some great nightspots of the time in Liverpool like Keith’s wine bar (we used to think that place was very posh), Jody’s (gay upstairs and futurist downstairs) and the Armadillo (a trendy eatery opposite Probe records).

 

 

Does a 1970s NF manifesto show how far right we’ve moved today?

Posted on by The Thatcher Crisis Years

National Front leafletDigging up this National Front filth from my archives, I was struck how far to the right the mainstream political parties have moved these days.

There was the NF calling on Britain to leave the Common Market (forerunner of the European Union) and we’ve now gone the whole  hog and voted for Brexit.

On immigration – the main parties haven’t advocated repatriation but the assumption that immigration is a ‘bad thing’ has become the conventional wisdom.

Back in the 70s, the NF wasn’t shy about talk of “sending THEM back” – even if the people they were referring to were second even third generation black and Asian Britons. Today, UKIP has called for the children of immigrants to be classed as migrants and all parties have promised to ‘get tough’ on immigration and remove benefits.

The NF made great headway spreading lies about immigrants grabbing social housing – yet that assumption goes unchallenged today by many mainstream politicians. Ditto the health service being overrun by so-called “health tourists”.

And we’ve had British jobs for British workers rhetoric from politicians on the left that would have been screamed down as utterly racist 30 years back.

What’s your view?

 

Newspapers for and by the jobless in the early 1980s

Posted on by The Thatcher Crisis Years

 

After 1979, there was a calamitous rise in unemployment – especially among the youth. In northern cities like Liverpool, Manchester and Newcastle – a kind of dole culture took hold. You could be forgiven for thinking that not having a job was the norm while being in work was some kind of privilege.

Local authorities and trade unions funded unemployment centres. I recall the centre in Liverpool on Hardman Street with a pub attached at the back called The Flying Picket where you might bump into Alexei Sayle at the bar on some nights.

Some of these centres produced cheap newspapers for and by the unemployed. They would normally reflect the opinions of the dominant political group within the centre – often on the ultra-left.

Here are some examples – note the attack on the TUC for not doing enough for the unemployed. A common theme at the time was that the Labour Party and trade union leadership were sadly wanting in the face of the Thatcherite onslaught.