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these things do the rounds from time to time, usually funded by centre-right evangelist types based in the USA with connections to Northern Europe (often having emigrated from a European country due to annoyance at having to pay higher taxes, often conveniently just after the kids have grown up and been at least part funded through University).
they are on a par with mad evangelists who used to (and maybe still do, though I haven’t heard them for a while) pay a lot of cash (ironically in Euros) to rent airtime on HF (shortwave) radio transmitters based in Germany for their preaching
I grew up in the 1970s and 1980 in London and SE England – they claim it was a near a full on warzone which is untrue. there was some social unrest from both extremes of politics (unfortunately much targeted at ethnic minorities, and even the Left back then were suspicious of immigrants) but the worst that normally happened was that electricity would cut out for a day or so, telephones (if they worked at all) were expensive to use and there was a long waiting list to get them, one year television was put off air repeatedly by strike action from the TV technicians along with some other strikes.
similar stuff happened elsewhere in mainland Europe, often with worse consequences including gendarmes (who were always military as their name suggests) firing live rounds into crowds of protestors as well as the widespread use of IEDs by extremists.
Southern Europe (including Ireland (both IE and NI) tended even then to be more volatile – in France there were folk getting shot at all the time, Spain had a full military dictatorship for the first part of my life and even then Brits still went there on holiday. It was positively unsafe to be a person of non white skin in some of these countries.
Northern Europe often fared better – although this was to a great extent because the money “confiscated” by governments in taxes was actually spent on well run public services (especially transport, utilities and telecoms) so people had more pride in their countries outside of basic nationalism (which had got a bad name since the aftermath of WW II anyway).
DE, DK, NL and NO had technology we could only dream of (or try and copy or begrudgingly import), at least part funded by the public sector – I only learned the extent of this recently as it was not possibly to study any Germanic languages and IT/engineering at high school at the same time, in spite of having been encouraged to learn about the diversity of the world from an early age, partly due to ancestry but multiculturalism developed in the 1970s.
When my parents ran a launderette I would help count the (old size) 5p coins, there was a Spanish coin similar in dimensions (probably contract for the Royal Mint) that would often be substituted for an English one.
Dad told me to put those aside for “his collection” though what he actually did with them many was open up the coin box for the downstairs telephone, and swap the Franco ones for genuine English coins. Unfortunately Dad didn’t realise (it wasn’t that widely known) many Post Office Telephones coinboxes were made in Wales – not so far from the Royal Mint, their engineers eventually decided to work together to ensure that only decent coins from Blighty found their way into the boxes.
however large size tumble dryers had less sophisticated mechanisms (that would accept any small coin used in Europe) so he was eventualy rumbled and the Post Office ceased both our phone lines (as Mum had also run up a large bill calling Malaysia) – but I had already become fascinated by the concept that two pieces of copper wire carrying electricity could be used to communicate with the whole world.
What this video is suggesting is of a combination of what my Dad did, and those people who thought it a smart idea to try and defraud a small family business run by folk from overseas (for what would to them have been a relatively small amount), having just come back from a holiday abroad that wasn’t within the reach of everyone – just on a larger scale, and it was stuff like this what led to much of the social problems in 1970s/80s Britain..
