Abstract
If you were born in the UK in 1930 then you have seen many changes in your lifetime. Perhaps you were born in inner London, and you have some vague childhood memories of your parents’ struggle against Mosley’s blackshirts in the East End. You certainly remember the bigger struggle against fascism in World War II; you were evacuated to the country along with your younger sister and you have never forgotten the kindness you were shown by the people who looked after you. Then came the prosperity of the 1950s and much of the 1960s before the increasing difficulties in the 1970s and 1980s. But you worked in the private sector, you and your family came out of these difficulties more or less unscathed and you now have a prosperous old age, with a second home in Spain to which you relocate each winter. You feel sorry for your grandchildren though; the so-called “jilted generation” who seem to be excluded from much of the prosperity that older people have enjoyed. But you help them out as much as you can with deposits for a home of their own from your savings. You were shocked by 9/11 then the London bombings a few years ago and also the bombings in Madrid; but you’ve been just as shocked by the 2011 riots in London and other cities of the UK. You felt that things were getting bad for some but to you that is no excuse for the looting and disorder that you witnessed on your TV screens.
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Cook, I.G., Halsall, J. (2012). Aging in the UK. In: Aging in Comparative Perspective. International Perspectives on Aging, vol 1. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-1978-5_3
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