I recently did something that I hadn’t previously done for more than ten years – probably about fifteen years, actually - I bought a suit.
For over thirty years I wore a suit every day at work. In my
last few years, the dress code in my office became more and more relaxed, from
casual clothes on special occasions (usually with a donation to charity
attached), to dress down Fridays, to dress down every day.
The last suit that I owned before retiring – worn since only
for weddings, christenings, and funerals – gave up the ghost a few years back,
and I have been relying on a black blazer and (sort of) matching trousers for formal occasions. It didn’t look as smart as I would have liked, so when my
daughter’s university graduation ceremony was imminent, I decided to buy a new
suit.
At around the time that I was making this decision I came
across news revealing that Marks & Spencer, the shop that is the first port
of call for men like me when we want to buy a reasonably priced, good quality
suit, had stopped selling them in more than half of its 254 stores.
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| Only 110 larger M&S stores, like this one at Bluewater, still sell men's suits. |
Fortunately, my local store was still stocking them,
although the choice was quite limited, but clearly my purchase made me part of
a falling number of suit buyers. Unsurprisingly, covid was largely responsible
for the drop-off in sales that saw M&S sell just 7,500 suits during the
first two months of the pandemic, 80% fewer than in the same period twelve
months before.
The number of people working from home was growing even
before covid; the pandemic accelerated that number and even now, with some
people beginning to drift back to their offices, employers are embracing the
idea of hybrid working with staff spending some working from home, and some
time in the office, with benefits accruing to both employer and employee. In
such circumstances, the demand for suits inevitably falls.
On the last couple of occasions when I have ventured into
the City of London, the lack of commuters has been quite noticeable and equally
so, the fact that many sandwich bars and coffee shops were closed – some merely
having closed earlier in the day than they would have a couple of years ago,
but some clearly closed permanently.
The detrimental effect on the local economy, and the
businesses that rely on city workers who are now working from home is undoubtedly a driver
for the government encouraging people to get back to the office. Just this
weekend, Iain Duncan Smith (a supposedly intelligent man who regularly does a
convincing impersonation of a stupid one) drew the tiresome and irrelevant
comparison between covid and the Second World War when he said that workers
still went to the office in 1940, even when the Luftwaffe were bombing London.
The comparison is pointless because not only are bombings not contagious, while covid is, few people had telephones
at home in the 1940s and the internet hadn’t been invented, so working from
home wasn’t an option. But he was actually wrong anyway. In 1940 the Inland
Revenue began relocating to Llandudno, 5,000 civil servants from the Ministry
of Food moved to Colwyn Bay, and the Bank of England moved to Staffordshire.
Living in the past, and particularly in WWII, is a bit of a national obsession in England. Had that conflict not taken place, I wonder what comparable event people like Duncan Smith would use as an alternative? The Great War? The Napoleonic Wars? And for how long will people born long after the event continue to reference the war? Will our great-grand children’s generation be doing so, or will some other event (Covid, perhaps?) supplant it?
Also living in the past, and like IDS, waxing nostalgic
about a time before she was born, Clare Foges recently wrote a piece in The
Times under a headline, “Don’t bet on a hard winter toppling Johnson,” in which
she claims that “a large chunk of the population doesn’t just endure national
crises like these but rather enjoys them.” Claiming that tracking down petrol
and grabbing the last bag of pasta in a supermarket confers a thrill on those
compelled to do so, she concluded that, “When those who were there in the
Seventies speak of it, of three-day weeks and candles burning during the
blackouts, their recollections are often tinged with nostalgia.”
There speaks a woman who was born in 1981. I was a teenager
during the 1970s and while I didn’t suffer the stresses that my parents did in
trying to keep their jobs during the three-day week, put food on the table
during the various shortages while coping with the rampant inflation and power
cuts, I don’t feel nostalgic for much of what happened in that decade. If those
of us who were alive during the 1970s remember them with any degree of nostalgia
it’s because we have blotted out the sheer awfulness of much of the decade. As
I wrote a couple of years ago, “it was a decade probably best remembered for
the Winter of Discontent, rampant inflation, unparalleled industrial strife,
IRA atrocities, and Britain being dubbed 'The Sick Man of Europe.' It was the
decade of my teenage years, and although there is much to look back on with
fondness, there was much about the 1970's that was a struggle and not all that
pleasant.” (See https://rulesfoolsandwisemen.blogspot.com/2019/02/the-1970s-part-two-strikes-shortages.html)
We had potato shortages, bread shortages, milk shortages; we
had strikes by tanker drivers, local government workers meaning that the bins
weren’t emptied for weeks in some places, and the dead weren’t buried. We had
petrol shortages, water shortages, power cuts and IRA bombs. Oh yes, plenty to
be nostalgic about.
I can’t help agreeing with Clare Foges about one thing
though: The Conservatives are supremely skilled at taking no responsibility and
pointing the finger of blame elsewhere, and, if mentioning Brexit at all,
placing all blame on the EU for our current woes. I resolved earlier this year
not to write about Brexit (the zealots on both sides of the debate aren’t
changing their minds after all), and while it’s wrong to blame Brexit for all
this country’s ills, especially when many are shared with other nations, Brexit
has undoubtedly exacerbated a lot of our problems.
In 1979, the so called Winter of Discontent led to a vote of
no confidence in the Labour government and its leader, James Callaghan. Margaret
Thatcher won the subsequent General Election and ushered in seventeen years of
Tory rule. Despite everything that has happened since Boris Johnson was elected
leader of the Conservatives, I somehow doubt that our seemingly Teflon coated
Prime Minister will suffer Callaghan’s fate, even with the evident similarities
in their situations.
People like IDS and Clare Foges are keen to invoke the mythical Blitz spirit as though Britain is a nation of stoics rather than one in which people dial 999 because KFC or Nandos have run short of chicken, who hoard toilet rolls, clog petrol stations as they brim their already nearly full fuel tanks, and have hissy fits when asked to wear a mask during a pandemic.
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| Don't panic! Motorists queue for fuel at Tesco in Ashford. Photo: PA |
Blitz
spirit? Whimsical longing for a return to the 1970s? Don't make me laugh! It’s about as realistic as
expecting future generations to wax nostalgic about the coronavirus pandemic.
