and if the absence is due to death?

A lot of that is down to the lack of affordable housing. And as countless surveys have shown, everyone apart from those at the very top, have seen their incomes fall against the rising cost of living over the last 30 years.

So in effect, the need for both parents to work is almost inevitable.

I'd actually dispute your view that, at some point in the past, most households would have just one parent working. The histories of the industrial north show something quite different – the mills, for instance, were largely staffed by women, and not just women who were single or had no children.

Where the difference has come, I think, is in the numbers of middle-class (for want of a better definition) households where couple have been seeing it as essential that both partners need to work.

So one might say that, in the past, what we'd now descry as 'latch key children' was quite normal.



But that's where we come back to the wider question: if everyone stopped buying things, what would happen to the national economy?

The decision was made that that would be the basis of the economy.

Not to mention affordable energy, food, fuel etc.

I would love the luxury of having 2 wages in this house. My mum and dad both worked so not everyone had one parent at home.

I was born in 1952 and lived my first year in my grandmother's terraced house down St James Square, Hessle Road (St James Street has Dick Wrights or Vauxhall if you wish, on the corner), we then moved to the new estate at Longhill in 1953. Both my parents worked. My dad worked on Albert, then Alexander, then King George Docks, my mother worked at Northern Dairies. My sister was born prematurely in 1954 and died after 12 hours. Shortly after my sister's death my mother started work again. When she restarted work, I used to travel with her, on a bus from Longhill and then a trolley bus down Hessle Road to Northern Dairies at Campbell Street, the old man used to ride his bike to work.

So from the age of two, I used to attend Villa Place nursery from 07.30 until 4.00pm. At the age of five I graduated to Villa Place infants and later Villa Place juniors. For nine years I accompanied my mother on the bus journeys from home, to her work and back.

My mother worked not because we wanted to run cars or anything like that, we wanted to eat decent food, stay as warm as we could and keep a roof over our heads. I remember the open fire (the only heating we had apart from an Aladdin paraffin heater) and lino on the floors, although we did have a mat in the middle of the room. The furniture was wartime utility, nowt special but it was somewhere for the three of us to sit. From the age of five, we used to go on holiday every year, usually to Jersey or Guernsey but that was only beause it was the furthest we could get on the old man's free British Rail passes. He used to come home every Thursday and hand his unopened wage packet to the old lady, she'd give him his beer & baccy money for the week and put the rest in the bank. She used to pay a few bob extra rent every week, so that we didn't go into arrears over Christmas or at holiday time (Hull Museums were ecstatic when I gave the rent books to them). I remember listening to "the wireless" as a kid, that's until we got our first telly - a big hulking cabinet with a 12" screen from Radio Rentals (later replaced by another rented set from Reddifusion), we also had a radiogram for entertainment.

The old lady was also an agent for Brian Mills catalogue, to earn some pin money but she also used it to buy a Christmas hamper every year and other clothes etc. I can also remember when she bought my uniform for Grammar School, that was all bought with "clothing cheques", the forerunner to Cattle Holdings Shopacheck. Every week she'd go along to their office under City Hall and pay a bit off.

My old man never did own a car, he cycled to work or caught a bus. If we travelled anywhere we went on train. The rent we paid was a fair rent, decided by the people who built the house, Hull City Council.

The trains we used to catch to Withernsea, Hornsea and even Cleethorpes stopped running. The buses and trolley buses stopped running. The fair rents that councils used to charged stopped being fair. Those events were not caused by people wanting ever more "things". They were caused by politicians, often basing their decisions on nothing but ideology.

Over the near 60 years I've been around, there's one striking thing I've noticed in the political landscape. Labour governments have worked hard to build things to benefit most of society. From the NHS and Welfare State through the building boom of the post-war years, to the recent building programmes for schools and hospitals. Only to find that once a Conservative government gets in power, they start to systematically tear down everything that's been built for the majority, in favour of their rich chums.

The Conservatives ripped up half the railway lines in this country, they then privatised not only the railways but also the buses and allowed market forces to dictate who would benefit from a "service". Hence a real need for people to own cars who never needed them before. The Conservatives gave council house owners the "right to buy", at the same time they prevented councils from using the proceeds to build more affordable housing, they even "encouraged" them to flog off their remaining stock to "housing associations" in the hope that "the market" would take up the slack. Hence the over-inflated house market we have today. The Thatcher government encouraged debt because they knew that a debt-slave society was a more compliant society, with ever less likelyhood of strikes.

So please don't fooking tell me it's got nothing to do with politicians.

Thank you for that, Coddy.

I feel like some Hovis after that.





Except the last one, arguably. Though they did do a great deal more that was to the benefit of society than the current lot.

Ahhhh Golden Hill, Shaftesbury. More ooh aarrrrhhhh, ooh aarrrrhhhh than ey up lad

Thanks, I feel better now. I think I'll jump in me car, pop down the supermarket and buy a couple of bottles of Bolli

Did they let you in?

You posh git - typical 'champagne socialist.' We never once went on holiday and I am younger than you. In fact, I only remember one family, one year going as far as the Channel Islands when I was a kid.