The decade when Brits embraced the Good Life
Paralysing strikes. Ghastly fashion. Terrifying Public Information films. We may wince looking back at the 70s — but it was a time of hope, humour and rising affluence in a nation at ease with itself
IT was not pain we felt when news broke so unexpectedly last week of the death of David Bowie. It was nostalgia, at least for those of us pushing 50 or more who can remember – and increasingly pine for – a decade long struggling for rehabilitation.
To be sure, musical genius was beyond dispute. He was besides extraordinarily well-read, personable, modest, and to the last extraordinarily handsome. The timing of the announcement, as most of us were preparing breakfast, allowed an entire day to wallow in disbelief and sorrow; for radio stations to carpet-bomb us with his songs.
Of course, those who were young in the 1970s are now broadly those running the country – our politicians, commentators and academics, the editors of national papers, the boss es of significant businesses, the captains of radio and television – and naturally assumed such emotion was universal.
In fact, the fuss mystified most senior citizens. To conservatives of our parents’ generation, Bowie was a rather shocking young man who painted his body and seemed uncertain as to whether he was boy or girl. Those under 30, meanwhile, are probably too young to remember him as a truly popular artist.
But, really, my generation ached for the years with which he was most associated, a time long maligned as ‘the decade taste forgot’.
It was an era long associated with appalling fashion: flared trousers, a riot of crimplene, far too much hair-product and lapels on which you could land a 747. We had such dangerous toys as clackers and Raleigh Choppers as well as awful food, sickly sweets (cola-flavoured Spangles, anyone?) and television sitcoms now so dated, racist and sexist they are unbroadcastable.
They were years, too, we tell ourselves, of palpable British decline. Three successive governments were brought down by trade union militancy, inflation spiralled out of control and the streets of Belfast seemed to run with blood before, shockingly, this horror was exported to mainland Britain.
There were incessant, paralysing strikes; America finally lost a war and in short order, after extraordinary scandal, that country’s disgraced president was forced to resign. Here, we humiliatingly stumbled about amidst power- cuts, shortages and drab winters in filthy cities as Germany and Japan – who had lost the war! – preened and prospered.
It was not that our rulers were in the least corrupt – standards in public life were higher then than they are now–or particularly in competent. Edward Heath and Harold Wilson were most able men. James Callaghan, to the last, was personally popular. It was just that they seemed helpless, paralysed by forces they could not understand or control, and democracy itself suddenly seemed vulnerable in ‘the sick man of Europe’.
Scotland, too, surged in political tumult after the discovery of North Sea oil. The SNP broke through in the 1974 elections, securing 11 MPs and at one point touching 40 per cent in the opinion polls. Yet it failed to deliver devolution and then, suicidally, brought down the government, just after our humiliation at the World Cup in Argentina. For a decade thereafter the party was a feuding, squabbling irrelevance.
But from all this, we have long assured ourselves, we were finally delivered by the grocer’s daughter; the stern nurse who made her country swallow the nasty medicine it really needed.
The mighty premiership of Margaret Thatcher restored strong government, brought unions to heel, faced down the forces of the Left at home and abroad and, against long odds, won a war in t he South Atlantic.
She so completely rewrote the rules of British politics that, by 1997, the three main political parties had all embraced her central tenets: the free market, a most limited public sector, nuclear defence, American alliance and European engagement. At that time we became, and have remained, a country obsessed with home ownership and lots of shopping.
Among the first of the many mere men she vanquished, one clearly saw it coming. ‘There are times, perhaps once every 30 years,’ Jim Callaghan told his t r usted aide Bernard Donoughue, ‘when there is a sea change in politics.
‘It then does not matter what you say or what you do. There is a shift in what the public wants and what it approves of. I suspect that there is now such a sea change, and it is for Mrs Thatcher.’
By then, in the spring of 1979, the UK had endured the dreadful winter of discontent with its strikes and cold and chaos. The sick had gone untended and the dead unburied. Amidst the rubble of Labour’s incomes policy and Scottish devolution plans, yes, there had been a sea change.
However, had Callaghan done what was widely expected and gone to the country months earlier, in October 1978 when Labour was polling strongly, few believe Mrs Thatcher, a shrill and ineffectual Leader of the Opposition, could have won. Thatcherism was not, in truth, inevitable.
Certainly the 1970s had their dark aspects. There was still, i n Glasgow and elsewhere, appalling urban poverty. Families lived in Victorian slums amidst squalor unthinkable today. The appalling case of Maria Colwell, who was starved by her stepfather and – despite the ineffectual oversight of the local authority – finally murdered by him, sickened the nation and permanently dented our trust in social services.
THEY were the years when White hall, which had since 1921 clung to the hope that the ‘Irish Question’ was a dead duck, was finally forced to impose direct rule on the corrupt, failed statelet of Northern Ireland and thus (despite continued efforts to portray it all as doughty defence against common criminals) entangled us in a war that would last till century’s end.
We were still, of course, at the height of the Cold War, and our defence budget an enormous drain on national resources – the fear of implacable Soviet balefulness all the greater