Autobiographical

The year 1979 is always connected in my mind to the only time I had a serious political disagreement with my parents – they had decided to vote for the Conservative Party led by Margaret Thatcher for the first time in their lives. They believed that she truly wanted to change the country for the better following the sanctimonious words she uttered outside Downside Street. They were to regret it as she caused havoc throughout, froze my dad’s salary and started a decade where she decimated society, and conducted a foreign war solely to ensure electoral success, a cheap and amoral political trick that is unfortunately so common these days. Another crime was the handover of council houses to tenants with no strings attached. 

Don’t get me wrong. I realise that this move opened the door to home ownership to a significant number of people in all parts of the country who would never have been able to buy or change their lives so radically without this move. On that level it was a positive step and simultaneously a master stroke, enabling the tory party to control the economic narrative for decades to come. 

However, the reform had one major drawback: the indicative short-termism of the policy with no attempt whatsoever to contemplate the housing crisis we see now more than 50 years later.  Now there were far fewer council properties for those unable to buy a property or rent on the private market. Moreover, there was no onus whatsoever on construction companies to allocate a proportion of brand new builds as council housing. The tory party didn’t make any such demand and didn’t stipulate preferential treatment for UK residents going forward. As a result,  there is a shortage of cheap accommodation available today, property prices have soared and nationalism has reared its ugly head, with Brexit one direct consequence.

Anyway, I felt very lucky to be a year younger than everybody else when I started my A levels at the age of 15 in the autumn term running until late December 1979, with Pink Floyd’s Another Brick in the Wall (Part II), aptly describing the angst kids felt around that time. 

Study-wise, as well as Ancient Greek which I loved and French, I had opted for German, having completed an O level in business German and obtained a B. At the time I had agreed with my parents to drop back a year on completion of six months of studies in the “Second A” stream at the school in Paris. 

I was looking forward to a new beginning. However, the first few months of 1980 turned out to be far more harrowing than I had expected. But that is another story.

Painting by Kazakh artist Manas Kisamedinov (1992)