On the eve of an election, when there is, for the first time in years, the very real possibility of waking up tomorrow to find a Conservative government in power, I find myself reflecting on my memories of being a teenager and a young adult in Thatcher's Britain.
Ah, what a sad day it was when school milk was stopped when I was 6. It was a point of the day that we all looked forward to on our run-down council estate. Most parents there couldn't afford to give their kids a glass of proper pasteurised milk - most of them could only afford the longer life sterilised milk which, let's be honest, tasted like it was suckled from a robot's weak tit - so to have a small bottle of creamy milk was a real luxury for us primary kids. It was ended because Thatcher and the Conservatives didn't believe in spending government money on the public sector - things like schools, NHS hospitals, public transport - and so made massive cuts in those areas.
As a teenager, I saw the government closing down coal mines, shipyards, docks, and crippling other industries by not investing in them because, again, the Conservatives believe in letting businesses stand or fall on their own - government intervention bad, massive rising levels of unemployment good. I saw friends in jobs that paid £1.50 an hour when they left school, because with record unemployment of well over 3 million, and with the government making live unbearably hard for the long-term unemployed, people had to grasp at any job that came their way. I remember being outraged when the Poll Tax was pushed through and I learned just how much the wealthiest few were saving with the new tax, and how much more the poor (which was basically everybody I knew) were going to have to pay. We're talking about people working 40 and, in some cases, 60 hour weeks for £2 an hour, suddenly having to find extra money every month whilst people earning over £50,000 a year suddenly had even more pocket money to play with. Even when it was replaced by the Council Tax in 1993, the disparity was still obvious despite the vague attempt to make it look scaled.
I remember being appalled by the Falklands War, even though I was too young to understand it. As I grew older, the more I learned, the more I despised what happened. It was a war with no purpose other than to sell Thatcher to the country in order to win another election. The General Belgrano, sunk (on Thatcher's personal orders) as it was complying with warnings and was sailing outside the exclusion zone, went down with over 300 lives just to keep a flagging Prime Minister in power. As a teenager, this disgusted me and really showed me the kind of values that the Conservative party treasures; power, at any cost. At all costs.
Trying to find a job in epic, record unemployment was hard. It took me almost a year before I managed to get a 'zero hours' job at a department store over Xmas, and then lucked out and started working at a certain wargames shop on the princely sum of just over £3 an hour - how superior I felt to my friends who were only earning £2 and £2.50! Of course, the company I worked for could get away with all kinds of appalling exploitation because the Conservatives don't believe in regulating businesses in any way - whether with obstructive and irritating health and safety procedures, or with horrid things like a minimum wage, or limits on how many hours you could be forced to work.
Since 1997, we've been given tax credits, minimum wages, schools and the NHS have been re-invested in and revitalised, waiting lists are down from almost 2 years (seriously, that's what it used to be like under the slash and burn Tories) to less than 2 months, we have the human rights bill, the EU working time directive, a corporate manslaughter law, Surestart, state funded nursery places for the under 5s, Child Trust Funds, council estates have been cleaned up and modernised with double glazing and, in many cases, central heating. Yes, we had an unforgivable war that nobody is forgetting anytime soon, especially the relatives and friends of the almost 1 million dead Iraqi civilians - but I don't see anybody saying "What about the Falklands?" when they say they want Labour out. Nobody seems to recall the government that started a war just to keep a politician in power. Memories are short, it seems, and the grass really is always greener on the other side to most people.
All I can say is that if we wake up tomorrow with a Conservative government, you will all get to experience the horrors of it for yourselves. Forget everything you've gotten used to this last decade. Forget your comfy, tax-credit fuelled wages, and your right to expect rapid treatment on the NHS. Forget your clean, well-staffed schools. Forget council estates that don't actually resemble war-torn Bosnia. Forget being able to find work when you leave school. And forget being able to live on Jobseeker's Allowance. And I'll sit around and watch your miserable faces and every so often snipe bitterly "I fucking TOLD you so" at you.
Good luck.
