1988 - Down Memory Lane

During a spring clean I came across a book of hand-written teaching notes from my first two years at the chalk-face - 1987 and 1988. There were some pleasant reminders of time spent getting my hands dirty on the banda machine (do you remember the smell of those freshly printed pages?) and also numerous flashbacks to how dependent I was on getting the scissors out to cut useful articles, charts and tables to insert into student worksheets and handouts - has anything changed? Two images below take us back to the end of the Lawson Boom of the late 1980s.

In the first a feature-length analysis page of the type that the Financial Times and the Guardian used to specialise in on the causes of Britain’s record trade deficit. Notice the sub headlines ......“services have been success story of the 1980s”, “poor quality of goods may be to blame”, “North Sea saviour grows anaemic”..... how much has changed twenty years on?

In the second - “Wage deals threaten anti-inflation policy” .... we recall the class ic wage price spiral that accompanied the surge in inflation in the late 1980s and Roger Bootle makes an appearance!