Page 24 - Phonebox Magazine March 2012

Too Good For Our Own Good
When Harold Macmillan told us (around 1960) we’d never had it so good he was probably speaking the truth. When confronted with a great common peril complete strangers behave as brothers, such was England following on from 1939. The majority of people were content with what they had, there was little sign of envy or greed. There was no supermarket striving to steal the trade of little independent grocers. Investment companies and the insurance companies were not trying to manipulate the markets, they simply strove to give their holders a reasonable return. Besides, greed and envy do not start at corporate level and spread downwards they are born among very ordinary people and are driven up. They were still almost unknown in 1960.
So what did we have to please us so? In truth we had very little but we felt we had sufficient, therefore it didn’t matter what the people next door possessed. Also we were more neighbourly than is commonly apparent to-day. I recall a neighbour who had a 16mm cine-film projector and paid good money for film hire, when his three children sat to enjoy a film there were close to twenty of us invited along. The precious few households with a private telephone line provided a service to a dozen or more others. When Dad bought a second hand Bull Nose Morris Oxford in 1946 West View Drive (95 houses) moved from two cars to three but no one envied us. No one suffered from ‘must have syndrome’ so there
was scarcely any such event as a burglary; crime rates indeed were a tiny fraction of what we now see in our daily news.
The actual items available were of the simplest but we enjoyed them enormously. The coming of Spam led to the spam fritter, and that was accepted as a treat. Standing my girl friend a mushroom omelette with chips and peas (best item on the restaurant menu) in 1955 was one of the high spots of our week. In that year I paid £28 for a bicycle which was seen as most extravagant. I was very proud of that machine, it caught
everyone’s eye but I never felt any need for chain and padlock. My bank manager admired it because it was better than his own. Yes he cycled to work each day. Cycling meant trouser clips to keep my turn- ups clear of the chain and an oilskin cape against falling rain. We didn’t go round in shrink wrapped pyjamas and space helmets either. That bike once stood for three hours parked against the kerb in Walthamstow High Street on a busy market day. Hundreds will have admired that very showy machine but it was there waiting for me on my return. What chance of such trust to-day?
The people of a street in Canning Town where a friend of mine was living in 1957 were quite shocked when the council decided to fit unwanted Yale locks to all the front doors. It had long been the case that if you ran out of e.g. sugar you wandered along to a neighbour’s house, opened the door and called “are you in Mary, can you let me have a cup of sugar?” “Sure thing Vi, come along in”.
Now if greed and envy work their way up from the ordinary ranks just look what happens as they reach up to the top. In 1911 it was agreed that MPs should have a stipend. Prior to that time Parliament had housed successful men who chose to put something back into a world which had treated them well. But the newer politics was fetching in very ordinary people who did not enjoy independent means. That first agreed
stipend was £400 a year, it gradually grew to around £1500 by 1960 and escalation went on to over £30,000 in 1993. As the Daily Telegraph was to show in 2009 parliament had become one of the greatest scandals of our age. Whatever parliament decrees quite naturally encourages the moguls of banking and high finance to perceive as right also for themselves.
Having too much is simply not good for you, it only makes you crave for more. We now live in a world where some have got it too good by far. So many MPs today have their hands in the trough that I cannot see where the courage may be found to really rectify the position, especially with John Bercow at the helm.
In the encyclical Quadragesimo Anno of 15th 1931 Pope Pius X1 asked “Who will dare breathe against the will of the rapacious few.” It was accepted that capital is necessary but the manipulation of capital is evil. The love of money is the root.......!
Qudragesimo commemorated Rerum Novarum (1891) which had denounced the often cruel exploitation of labour.
Nor has the Catholic community been alone in upholding the rights and God-given dignity of ordinary men and women.
GB
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24 Phonebox Magazine