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No. 456174
Anonymous
23rd January 2023 Monday 4:10 am
456174
>>456173
In every decade since the 1940s, things basically got better on average. Lots of shit things happened in the 1970s, but most people had a better life in 1979 than they did in 1969 - they had more money in their pocket, the stuff in the shops was better, more people had more civil rights and so on. Some people had their lives marred by deindustrialisation in that decade, but a much larger number of people saw a substantial improvement in their wages, got on the property ladder, took their first foreign holiday and so on. Pick a post-war decade and you'll see marked improvements in all sorts of areas of the lives of working people. That trend also broadly maps to the period between the start of the industrial revolution and the outbreak of the Great War, albeit on a slightly longer timespan.
The period since 2008 is the first major reversal of trend. Most people were no better off in 2019 than they were in 2009; people are definitely worse off in 2023 than they were in 2013. The reasons for that are complex and contested, but we can at least start by acknowledging that the wheels have in fact come off and this isn't just nostalgia.
Something happened in Britain at the end of the 2000s that put a hard brake on the usual march of progress; "voting in the Tories" is part of the answer, but only part. The Tories of today are unrecognisable compared to the Tories that won the election in 2010. Cameron was daft enough to call a referendum, but he campaigned to remain. I don't think anyone who voted for Cameron in 2010 imagined that we'd end up with Liz Truss in Downing Street, however briefly. The Tories didn't invent Jimmy Faragé.
The only pithy explanation I can give is that we've all gone a bit mad - like Germany's national madness of the 1930s, only in a quintessentially British way that is shit and ineffective and ultimately self-destructive. A certain section of the British public has hypnotised themselves into believing that nothing is going wrong, it definitely isn't the fault of the Tories or Brexit and actually these snowflakes could do with a bit of hardship to toughen them up. I never stole your shoes, you can't prove I stole your shoes and your shoes were uncomfortable.
In the 1990s, there was a magazine called Continuum that denied the existence of HIV. It ceased publication in 2001, because all of the staff had died of AIDS. I'm reminded of that magazine every time I see the front cover of The Daily Express.
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