wolfpurplemoon replied to your post: I was talking to my mum about Brexit recently -...
I tell people to look up “the sick man of europe” to find out more about britain before the EU
Oooo this is very interesting.
Throughout the late 1960s and 1970s, the United Kingdom was frequently called the "sick man of Europe", first by foreign commentators, and later at home by critics of the third Wilson/Callaghan ministry, because of industrial strife and poor economic performance compared to other European countries. This era is considered to have started with the devaluation of the pound in 1967, culminating with the Winter of Discontent of 1978–79, the period between the Three-Day Week in 1973-74 and the IMF bailout in 1976 is generally seen by Britons as one of the darkest periods in the country's modern history.
Google tells me the UK joined the European Union in 1973, and we’ve not had a period of poverty like that since then.
Someone who was 16 at the time of the devaluation of the pound would be 67 now, so here’s the proportion of the population who’d be old enough to remember all of that stuff:
According to the Wikipedia page on UK demography, the data from the 2011 census indicates that in 2011 only about 23% of the population were old enough to properly remember these events as adults - and that number will be lower now.
