Scotland's first minister has launched an outspoken attack on the "spivs and speculators" he blames for targeting Scottish-based bank HBOS.A few words of explanation may be helpful for our younger readers. Spivs were invented during and after the Second World War. In a time when many goods were rationed, spivs were a (relatively speaking) reliable source of black market goods. So, if you needed cloth to make a wedding dress (that was what people did in those days), recourse to a spiv was necessary. At a price of course, a spiv could always get hold of a few eggs to make a cake (another quaint pastime of those days).
Rationing lasted until well into the 1950s, along with powdered egg and a peculiar orange juice to which I was addicted. And so did spivs. Some would say that spivs lasted a lot longer - apart from careers in financial services, some of them probably became members of one parliament or another ...
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