COMMENT Step back in time E


ver get that sense that you are travelling backwards in time? Not when one looks in the mirror, obviously, but looking at the news we seem to be caught in some kind of wormhole back to the 1970s.


We saw a football match on French soil descend into anarchy, the blame being piled upon the Liverpool supporters by the French police. Wrongly, as it turns out, but reputations, once lost as they were for so many years, are hard to regain. We have a flaxen-haired Prime Minister who has lost the confidence of many of his MPs. In 1974, Edward Heath asked the question of his MPs, having lost the general election. He quit the second ballot after an up-and-coming young politician called Margaret Thatcher polled more votes. What ever happened to her? Johnson might think in his head that he is channelling his idol Winston Churchill, but his Premiership has far more in common with Heath’s that he might want to admit. The Jubilee four-day weekend filled the nation with cupcakes and street parties, Victoria Sponge cakes and the rather sickly-looking lemon posset trifle that Mary Berry inexplicably picked as the Platinum Pudding. It looked quite spectacular I suppose, but it’s no Coronation Chicken. There was a lot of bunting and Jubilee medals for school children. I still have my Silver Jubilee coin from 1977 in a box somewhere in the attic.


While we were knocking back the cava and Earl Grey over the weekend, did anyone notice what was happening at the petrol pumps? Fuel costs, blamed, as usual on the cost of a barrel of oil, are now sky- rocketing towards the ISS, veering perilously close to the £2 a litre mark. On the M40 they probably already are. I can remember the 1973 fuel crisis when cars queued down the road, desperate to get the last drops of petrol. Mind you, I can remember when they did that last year too.


The escalating cost of fuel will have a knock-on effect on everything else, it always does. In the 70s inflation soared from 5.5% to around 14% by 1980,


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driven by wage demands, by fuel costs and the spiral of higher costs leading to higher wages demands, leading to higher prices and so on. Inflation is back with a bang. On paper it allows merchants and manufacturers to do well, because their sell-out prices are rising but it’s not a sustainable way to run a profitable business in the long term. Back in the 1970s those higher wage demands were backed by strike action leading to the Winter of Discontent when everyone, it seemed, was on strike. The bin collectors, the railways, grave-diggers and NHS ancillary workers all held strikes and picket lines at some point. But that was back then, before the power of the unions was broken by the steeliness of the Thatcher regime. Oh, wait a minute. My octogenarian mother is having to take her own rubbish to the tip because the local refuse collectors have been on strike for months and the RMT union is threatening a summer of chaos on the railways. The civil service, too, has threatened to strike in protest at the 90,000 proposed job cuts. You really don’t want to get me started on that particular hot potato. Still, to take our minds off all this, we can look forward to being able to weigh out our vegetables in pounds and ounces if we so choose. A headline- grabbing non-policy, it’s designed to appease the more rapid anti-EU MPs, and show them that Johnson really did Get Brexit Done, by burning all those ridiculous EU-imposed rules on weights and measures and bringing us back to the good old imperial system. Even though no-one under the age of 55 or so will ever have been taught in anything other than the metric system, and the UK vowed to adopt it long before it joined the Common Market. Distraction politics, designed to buy the Prime Minister a bit more time. Looking at the number of votes against him in last week’s Vote of No Confidence, I’m not sure it will work.


Fiona Russell-Horne Group Managing Editor - BMJ


The time is out of joint. Oh cursed spite, that I


was born to ever


set it right. William Shakespeare


June 2022 www.buildersmerchantsjournal.net


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