I remember Guardian Weekly as a homesick national serviceman in Nairobi. The airmail paper had a superb quality, but there were fewer pictures and no colour, so one saw fewer emaciated people in famine zones or on the catwalk.
But at 87 I have lived too long: 67 years ago bright yellow modern trolley buses sped, pollution-free, through the streets of Newcastle. One sat down before paying the fare. Just beyond their terminus one could hear the cuckoo and the skylark and the whirr of grasshoppers from any grassy bank.
Our NHS was the envy of the world, without prescription charges and no need to pay for dentistry or glasses. No university fees either.
In 1950 I came back from a holiday in Italy to find Britain had been drawn into war. Prescription charges had to be brought in. There came a Conservative government and an immediate 5% cut in education, at a time when the baby boom and the backlog of wartime economies required otherwise.
It was not all immediate doom and gloom. But since benign Harold Macmillan told us we had never had it so good, things seem to have gone pear-shaped, with Tony Blair as a crypto-conservative adding the final nails in the coffin of socialist ideals. The capitalists of that generation were amateurs compared with today’s outsourcing groups. How they gain contracts is hard to understand.
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