The urbanising middle class of the 1960s and 1970s had schools, hospitals, roads, energy services, even cultural institutions - all created by the state, or under its aegis. When liberalisation came along, they were poised and ready for take-off.
There were schools and hospitals who were ready to take people with undescribed injuries, but not necessarily ready to take people with severe radiation poisoning.
If I were transported into my father's shoes, I would have been a Labour supporter, too, because in the 1960s and even in the 1970s, the Conservatives weren't standing up for working people; there was too much of an interest in corporatism, and that didn't start to change till Margaret Thatcher came along.
The 1970s - I was ten in 1975 - were a bad decade in all sorts of ways but the middle class had comfortable assumptions about the prospects for its children. The middle class was smaller then; it was a much less competitive Britain, less meritocratic.
Cultural dominance of middle-class norms prevail in middle-class schools with a teacher teaching toward those standards and with students striving to maintain those standards.
As public schools deteriorate, the upper-middle class and wealthy send their kids to private ones. As public pools and playgrounds decay, the better-off buy memberships in private tennis and swimming clubs. As public hospitals decline, the well-off pay premium rates for private care.
It's hard to improve our schools. It's hard to redistribute wealth created by the concentration of technological and financial power or to increase middle-class wages. But it might be easier to lower middle-class costs by building more housing.
I wish we had the $4 trillion or $5 trillion. I wish it were spent right here in the United States, on our schools, hospitals, roads, airports, and everything else that are all falling apart.
While vast sums of money are being siphoned off into hidden [military] coffers, Americas schools, hospitals and public services are facing cutbacks and closures.
The decisions MPs make as our representatives affect every aspect of our daily lives, from energy bills to the quality of our hospitals, schools and emergency services.
My government has been playing catch-ups building the schools, hospitals, roads and transport links our state needs to deal with our growing population after years of do-nothing Labor governments.
It is fitting that the Government of the United States should assume the obligation of the establishment and maintenance of a first-class university for the education of colored menand I wish to put in this caveatthat the colored race today, all of them, would be better off if they all had university education.... Of course, the basis of education of the colored people is in the primary schools and in industrial schools.... In those schools must be introduced teachers from such university institutions as this.
I agree that income disparity is the great issue of our time. It is even broader and more difficult than the civil rights issues of the 1960s. The '99 percent' is not just a slogan. The disparity in income has left the middle class with lowered, not rising, income, and the poor unable to reach the middle class.
To me, the term 'middle-class' connotes a safe, comfortable, middle-of-the road policy. Above all, our language is 'middle-class' in the middle of our road. To drive it to one side or the other or even off the road, is the noblest task of the future.
'Middle class' used to mean having two children and sending them to high-quality public schools, or even occasionally to private schools. It meant new brown Stride Rite Mary Janes with little purple and silver flowers when the old shoes were pinching the toes.
The programs that came to be known as the New Deal were not simply handed down by the benevolence of FDR and the Democrats. They were fought for. And in the 1960s, it was the similar. You had incredible movements against Jim Crow, poverty and the Vietnam War in the 1960s.
If the UCLA teams of the late 1960s and early 1970s were subjected to the kind of scrutiny (other schools) have been, UCLA would probably have to forfeit about eight national championships and be on probation for the next 100 years.