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The 1970s revisited... and why they weren't quite so bad after all
The bursting of the property bubble, rising unemployment and growing mistrust of political leaders – for those who lived through the 1970s, an era marred by the three-day week and a crippling energy crisis, today's current woes have a sadly all too familiar ring about them.
It was, by all accounts, a decade best forgotten, and over the years, the 1970s have earned a reputation for embodying all that was bad about Britain. Even the fashion was woeful.
With the country once again facing economic armageddon, thoughts have turned to the 10 years which started with the election of Edward Heath as Prime Minister, ended with Margaret Thatcher in Number 10 and, in between, saw James Callaghan and Harold Wilson attempt to stamp their own mark on British politics.
"In the '80s, when I first became interested in politics, people were always talking about the '70s and what a terrible time it had been for Britain – strikes, power cuts, economic decline and political chaos," says Andy Beckett, a man who has made it his mission to restore the decade's reputation.
"The '70s were always used as an excuse for whatever Margaret Thatcher's government was doing, whether crushing the unions or making British working life tougher and more competitive. This tendency to blame the '70s has become ever more entrenched in British politics – when Labour raised the top rate of tax last year, it was instantly condemned by the Conservatives and most of the media as '70s-style class warfare.
"All this hostility got me intrigued. I wanted to find out if things had really been that bad."
In Hull, at least, it certainly seemed they were. With the port long past its heyday and the city feeling cut off from the rest of the world, in 1979, when the hauliers went on strike, it seemed the final death blow had been delivered.
The blockade of the city was so complete that Hull became known as Stalingrad – and with good cause. With lorries prevented from entering the city, and cargo ships unable to unload at the docks, shops were forced to introduce rationing and within a matter of weeks the economy had ground to a standstill. The action, the result of years of low wages, ended when the hauliers were promised a 22 per cent pay rise.
While many politicians felt handcuffed by the unions, the action at Hull was evidence of a workforce and a public who believed they had the power to change things and who hadn't yet fallen into the grip of apathy.
The 1970s may have been a time of industrial unrest, but they also saw the fight for equal opportunities and civil liberties really come into their own.
"In Britain, it was the 1970s when the 1960s really happened for most people," says Andy, whose book, When The Lights Went Out: Britain in the Seventies, is out next month. "Feminism, gay rights, the free festival movement, Rock Against Racism, involved people all over Britain rather than a fashionable minority in London as they had in the previous decade.
"In a time of crisis, politically minded people become energised: they see the old order collapsing and they see an opportunity to create something in its place. By the 1970s, changes that had been going on since the Second World War – mass immigration, more women working – had become so important that politics had to be reshaped.
"White trade unionists who, at the start of the decade were not interested in or actively hostile to feminism and racial minorities, were, by the end, standing on picket lines to support striking Asian women in the famous dispute at Grunwick.
"While researching what really went on back then, I spoke to former members of the Gay Liberation Front, ex-hippy activists, a few former truck drivers who effectively controlled Hull during the Winter of Discontent. The '70s was a time when ordinary Britons got swept up in politics in far greater numbers than now.
"Some of them had their lives changed forever, others just went back to normal life after their political moment had passed, but all of them had an opinion and they weren't interested in giving the polite version of what they had done in the '70s."
Having found the accepted script of what went on nearly 40 years ago had many flaws, Andy also began to look more closely at the supposed villains and heroes of the piece.
"I saw Edward Heath before he died," he says. "He was much more self-critical than I expected about why his government ended up being destroyed by the three-day week and the miners' strikes. Denis Healey was full of how he saved the economy from decline in the late '70s long before Thatcher was elected.
"It's certainly true that by the time she was elected, in 1979, some of the problems that had made the '70s such a stormy time – inflation, out-of-control government spending – were already beginning to be solved by the Callaghan government. Also, the '70s were not quite the political dead-end they've been made out to be. One of Callaghan's senior advisers, for example, was even planning to privatise council housing in the late 1970s.
"And looking at Britain now, with our economic crisis, our fresh doubts about the free market, our reliance on Middle Eastern oil and our worries about terrorism and the environment, you do wonder how many of the country's fundamental problems Thatcher really solved.
"That said, she clearly did make Britain more of a confident, aggressive place. Nobody talks about national decline in the way that people did constantly in the '70s."
However, the similarities between then and now are impossible to ignore.
"Some of the early signs of the current crisis were very '70s: surging oil prices, high inflation, a bursting housing bubble, a return to mass unemployment," says Andy.
"This year there have been even more eerily precise parallels. Some British firms have put their employees on a three-day week to save their jobs, the Conservatives and the Right-wing press have repeatedly warned that the Government may need to call in the IMF and ask for a loan, as it infamously did in 1976.
"The feeling of uncertainty and dread that everyone feels about the economy now is also very '70s. After the relative calm and prosperity of the last 15 years, we are again in a situation where paying attention to dry economic stories on the news seems like a good idea.
"The 1970s were like that – tabloid front pages were full of pieces about companies going bust and the public-sector borrowing requirement. But the banking dimension to the current crisis is new. There was a banking crisis in Britain in the early '70s, but not on the scale of the one now. We have Thatcher and New Labour's deregulation of the City of London to thank for that."
Given that the future looks increasingly uncertain, it may not be too long before we are all looking back with rose-tinted nostalgia.
"The 1970s were not some utopia," says Andy. "Britain was more racist, sexist and homophobic than it is now.
A lot of people found the dramatic politics of the time frightening rather than empowering. But it was a time when people realised that politics mattered to their lives, and some things that seemed terrible look less so now.
"When unemployment reached a million during the Heath government, the country's whole economic policy was changed in an attempt to deal with it. When Blair was Prime Minister, unemployment was a million-and-a-half and everyone thought that was a gratifyingly low number.
"If the current recession gets a lot worse, people may start to look back with fresh eyes at the recession of the '70s and the struggles of the politicians then to deal with them."
When The Lights Went Out: Britain in the Seventies, by Andy Becket, is published by Faber and Faber, priced 20. To order a copy from the Yorkshire Post Bookshop, call free on 0800 0153232 or go online at www.yorkshirepostbookshop.co.uk. Postage and packing is 2.75.
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