The 80's.

the eighties was shit.
I got a comment (or should that read "I got an advert from...") from someone (see the comments to 'oi nutter') who reckons that the 80's was a great time to grow up in. Oh yeah, dem was heady, crazy rosey days!
There were those crazy shoulder pads, Dallas on the telly and the beginnings of portable phones for all, plus we had those zany New Romantics to laugh at (oh joy), but sadly we also had the ever present threat of total nuclear war, and the UK's political stance at the time was making that a certainty, and, who can forget the shitty social situation most people were in? the 80's wasn't exactly what you could call a happy barn dance.
If I enjoyed the 80's it's because I deliberatly moved myself out of the direction of that decade in any way I could, if I enjoyed the 80's it was in spite of it not because of it.
Are those warm happy memories of the 80's honestly based upon anything other than the fondly remembered, amusing/annoying shit pop music and awful fashions that were thrown up at the time? There isn't much that I could point to in that decade that shows the time as being a decade that happily 'swung' for the people living through it, as it did for those who wallow in the memories of the 1960's.
We were just getting over the shitstorm of the 70's for God's sake. As well as the destruction of much of the countries manufactoring base, turning Britain into a country now almost totally reliant on imports, the unions were castrated (no one will deny that they were in need of a good clearing, but their impotence was not good).
The still on-going, disasterous plans to sell off the countries 'crown jewels' (gas, phone, electricity, transport, education, health -the list goes on) was put into play, which created huge unemployment, and at the same time drove down wages while simultaniously driving up the price of living overall -for years to come, it was the essence of the bogus dogma of the "trickle down effect" that Thatcher and her lick-spittles introduced into British politics, despite the preposterous idea being obviously unworkable, even to a child (within a few years the ownership of all services had gone to the few people who were already rich before the sell-off, the stock market players were the only ones to benifit from privatisation) who could see that privitasion did not raise the standard of living on any peseant estate or street, in fact it co-incided with the withdrawal of excersize books in schools and kids having to now share books.
Money was still being made, and in huge amounts -at the same time schools were being forced to make kids share stock due to acute shortages. It didn't take a genius to see that there was something wrong with 80's Britain.
We did have great music in the 80's though. and a healthy underground scene, but that was smashed. '85 saw the Tories declare war on things that they saw as 'subversive', the 'Battle of the beanfield' became the blueprint for how that 'war' was going to be faught from their side. I had spent a week at Stonehenge festival the previous year, then the police had been friendly, polite and even helpful then, Had I gone the next year I would of been attacked by them also, under orders.
The eighties also introduced a change into the average British life that was based upon the notion of competition and greed, not just Capitalism but a version of it that removed any social responsibility in exchange for naked, in your face  'ambition' that saw the humanity as chaff in the wind of profit target's (flowery!).
For the first time since the reforms made to the working conditions during the industrial revolution it was not possible for a family to choose what kind of direction they wanted to go in, women were now supposed to have gained 'freedom' and 'rights', yet most women were (for the first time in modern history) now not able to become housewifes and/or 'stay-at-home' parents if they chose to, now they only had the choice to either get a job (even though the wages of women were still less than a mans doing the same job) or become a single mother on benifits (changes to tax laws had made it too hard financially for many couples to marry or live together legally). I seriously doubt that they were the kind of changes that inspired a generation of women to do things like riot and throw their self  at galloping horses I reckon.
I didn't enjoy the 80's, nor do I enjoy it's lasting legacies -I could go on like this for ages! this was just off the top of my head, I hate to think what I could conjour up if I sat and thought about the 80's. But fuck that, I don't want to, I hated that time as it is without reliving it now.
The 80's did throw up some utterly brilliant music and bands though, but thats all it did. Mind you, when the decade began at least before the services sell-off we could still afford to heat our homes in winter, so I suppose it did have something going for it. Ho ho ho.