Living In The Past

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.

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. 

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.