In Saturday’s M.E.N., we carried the reminiscences of readers about VE Day. What struck me most of all was the modest scale of most people’s celebration, to say that this was the end of six years of world war.

There were tales of impromptu street-corner bonfires, modest firework displays and sing-songs. One reader, then 10 years old, was swept up by an American soldier and taken to Albert Square where crowds were dancing in the street.

“There was chewing gum for all,” he recalled, as if this was the very height of sophisticated indulgence. Arriving home at the ungodly hour of 10pm, the lad ‘got a good hiding’. “But it is a night I will never forget.”

Then the nation went from war to austerity. Britons may no longer have been losing their loved ones in a foreign field, but life on the home front remained tough. Rationing continued, in fact July 1946 even saw the start of bread rationing – something that had been avoided during wartime. The privations of the next few years were born with grudging stoicism and a certain amount of black market trading.

Why should we care about this slice of bygone Britain? Because the path of history now leads us back the same way. Whatever the patchwork composition of the next government, a new age of austerity beckons. This government will have to clobber us so hard that canny politicians will be happier to sit in opposition and let the other lot do the clobbering.

As governor of the Bank of England Mervyn King is reported to have said before the General Election, the next government will need to impose such swingeing measures that it will not see power again for a generation.

I’m pondering just how prepared we are as a society for this new age of austerity. Our expectations of life are so much greater than 65 years ago, when a baked potato from the bonfire and a chorus of Run Rabbit Run constituted a jolly good time.

Of course, no-one this time round will be told they can only have so much bread every week. But, in terms of our relative material comfort today, it is going to hurt. And insofar as that teaches us to live within our means, perhaps that is a good thing. It’s undoubtedly true that it was our unrealistic expectations of life – the mountain of ill-advised debt – coupled with the machinations of bankers blinded by their own greed which caused economic meltdown.

Our austerity will be less about powdered egg, more about limiting our aspirations for foreign holidays, a better car, the new laptop, the inexorable rise up the housing ladder.

But at least those suffering austerity 1940s-style had hope of better days to come, the promise of Prime Minister Clement Attlee’s ‘New Jerusalem’.

If our ‘new politics’ deserves a theme tune, it is a bitter postscript to the song which ushered in the last political age: Things Can Only Get Grimmer.

IRA will get no credit from us

ANY one of us would admit that good things happened to Manchester in the wake of the IRA bomb of 1996. But Dominic Monaghan – Stockport-raised star of Lord of the Rings and Lost – goes too far by saying, on a Los Angeles radio station, that the IRA ‘did one of the greatest favours they have ever done for us’ by destroying a large part of the city centre.

Yes, the explosion gave Manchester a huge opportunity to rebuild, attracting resources to the city which would not otherwise have been forthcoming. The end result is far, far better, and the only really essential thing lost to the bomb was the bohemian community of businesses in the Corn Exchange, now the unloved Triangle.

But I give no thanks or credit to the IRA for redesigning Manchester city centre.

I saw their brand of town planning three years earlier in Warrington when Tim Parry, aged 12, and three-year-old Johnathan Ball died after a bomb was put in a cast iron litter bin on the day before Mother’s Day.

Good things flowed from the awfulness of the Warrington bomb too, in the sense that the inspirational courage of Tim’s parents Colin and Wendy Parry shamed those apologists for the men of violence, gave impetus to the peace process and led to the establishment of the Tim Parry Johnathan Ball Foundation for Peace and a £3m peace centre.

But let’s give no credit whatsoever to the terrorists for our own communities’ resilience in dealing with needless tragedy and vandalism on an epic scale.

Tweet