As Tim Blair muses in his post Party like it’s 1984 today at the Daily Telegraph, students who plan to celebrate Thatcher’s passing yesterday were not even BORN when Thatcher saved Great Britain from being Ordinary Britain by smashing the choker hold that the trade union movement had on the once great nation.
Blair points us towards another excellent example of what type of society these naive young dullards are pining for as they sit around sipping chai soy lattes and chatting over the latest edition of The Green Left Weekly in the Uni Bar beer garden.
Ian McEwan, from the Guardian of all places, takes up the story to show just how hopeless things were when the unions held sway in Great Britain in the late 1970’s.
If today’s Guardian readers time-travelled to the late 70s they might be irritated to discover that tomorrow’s TV listings were a state secret not shared with daily newspapers. A special licence was granted exclusively to the Radio Times. (No wonder it sold 7m copies a week).
It was illegal to put an extension lead on your phone. You would need to wait six weeks for an engineer. There was only one state-approved answering machine available.
Your local electricity “board” could be a very unfriendly place. Thatcher swept away those state monopolies in the new coinage of “privatisation” and transformed daily life in a way we now take for granted.
Quite so, as Mr Blair and his readers often remark.
So as these historically ignorant, pseudo-intellectuals tweet on their iPhone 5’s about pissing on graves and dancing in the streets, perhaps they should take a moment to realise that they would have to wait several weeks to do anything if they lived in pre-Thatcher Britain.
Actually, as most of these raving loonies dont like doing anything actually productive perhaps that is why they pine for the “good old days” that Billy Bragg and Elvis Costello sing about in their awfully off key warbles that they call songs.
It shows quite clearly that young people today just dont know how good they have got it (My god, did I just write that? I sound like my bloody old man!).
And they want to allow 16 year olds to vote? Yeah right.
Morons.
Makes you wonder what has been taught at schools and uni’s for the last 20 years.
Quite scary.
G’day Stevo, sorry for late response on this one… but yes, it does make you wonder doesn’t it?
School nowadays is over run with child centred learning methods which just creates very self centred beasts IMO. These little people are indoctrinated quite steadily as they progress through their time in the system. There was a very interesting article that told of 3-5yrs being used as props for a campaign by United Voice for higher wages in the Child Care sector, saying they were politically aware… at 3yr old!!
By the time they are graduating from HS, most kids these days can’t spell or add up, but they care a lot about whether Kony should be in jail, man, like that’s so not cool.
University doesn’t really teach you anything other than the ability to think critically IMHO but as most of the participants can’t or don’t actually think they are like lambs to the slaughter for even more socially progressive indoctrination at the hands of the many idealistic yet naive munchkins that make up the faculties.
Thankfully there are some diamonds in the rough that make it through unscathed or seek to challenge the orthodoxy. Let’s hope that they end up in charge, otherwise the whole place is gonna go up in flames