Book review: When the Lights Went Out: Britain in the Seventies

Published on Thursday 30 April 2009 14:46

by Andy Beckett Faber & Faber, 550pp, £20 Review by DAVID ROBINSON

REMEMBER THE SEVENTIES? THE doom decade, the decade style forgot? Remember the TV stopping at 10.30pm, the streetlights dimmed, the floodlights switched off for football matches, the maximum car speed set at 50mph? Remember candlelit evenings and the three-day week?

Britain was a different country; we did things differently then. For how differently, here's the Wall Street Journal commenting on Denis Healey's 1975 budget. It was a full year before the IMF crisis, but already Britain was being dismissed as a third-world economic basket case. After highlighting the 52 per cent corporate tax rate, 83 per cent marginal tax rate on earned income and swingeing 98 per cent tax on unearned income, the newspaper concluded that the British government was intent on confiscating all wealth. "The price can only be still slower economic growth and still lower living standards for all British, rich or poor. Goodbye, Great Britain, it was nice knowing you."

Without even mentioning the Winter of Discontent, the rats running around piled-up rubbish, hospital union shop stewards blocking deliveries of vital supplies and all the rest of it, that's the picture of the decade that's sunk deep into the collective memory. The years of the locust, not the lotus; of a country that had lost its way and was floundering in economic failure. Our Weimar, Beckett calls it. The worst of times.

Now let's take another point of view – also American, but from three years later. In 1978, in Britain: A Future That Works, Bernard Nossiter, the Washington Post's London correspondent, ridiculed the notion of Britain on the rack. To Nossiter, British tax and spending were average by European levels, decline was wildly overstated, poverty was shrinking away, educational opportunities opening up, and life expectancy figures climbing. True, productivity levels were higher in many other countries, but that wasn't the whole picture: Britons weren't as obsessed by materialism, they were happier, and made better use of their leisure. In opinion polls they reckoned themselves the happiest people in the world.

And why shouldn't they have been? In 1977, Britain was effectively a more equal society than it had ever been, or has been since. Social mobility was greater than before or since too. Unemployment was climbing – I remember interviewing the then Employment Secretary as the dreaded two million figure came into view – but no-one talked about it as "a price worth paying".

Yet precisely because the Thatcher Revolution was so complete, because it transformed Britain so absolutely, the decade before it happened now seems remote, almost to the point of invisibility. So when we think about the Seventies, the same stock images of the way the decade sputtered to a halt in the biggest wave of strikes since the General Strike are what spring most readily to mind. Governments either in hock to trade unions or brought down by them, or sometimes – as in 1979 – both at the same time. Strikes, Saltley, Scargill, social contracts: even for those of us who lived through them, the Seventies seem to have passed by without leaving a mark on the way we live now.

Yet to Andy Beckett, the Seventies aren't just the hangover after the Sixties, but a revolutionary decade in their own right – "when the great Sixties party actually got started". From gay rights to green politics, feminism to anti-racism, this is the decade where we started to think in new ways. Of course, not everyone did – the homophobic, casually racist, anti-feminist DI Gene Hunt in Life on Mars isn't such a parody of Seventies attitudes as all that – but that does not invalidate Beckett's thesis.

Yet just as, when watching Life on Mars, the thought "Did we really live like that?" is never too far away, reading Beckett's fresh, stylish, perceptive and, above all, brilliantly researched portrait of the 1970s, it's impossible not to feel similar moments of incredulity. Were Britain's university campuses really so completely dominated by hardline Marxist student leaders? (Absolutely.) Was Britain really effectively run by a cloth-capped trade unionist who had been lectured by Edward Heath in the Spanish Civil War? (Almost: though the late TGWU leader Jack Jones's palpable decency still shines across the decades.) Did Britain really have a Prime Minister as paranoid as Harold Wilson? (Yes. Sample: "I see myself as a great fat spider in the corner of the room. Sometimes I speak when I'm asleep. You should both listen. Occasionally when we meet I might tell you to go to Charing Cross Road and kick a blind man standing on the corner.")

Above all, why, when there were candidates like Willie Whitelaw around, did the Tories choose to be led by someone like Margaret Thatcher? It didn't even make sense at the time. Peter Walker, a Heathite liberal Tory, told Beckett a revealing story about Harold Macmillan's reactions to watching Mrs Thatcher's first party conference on television.

"I've always been to these conferences," Macmillan said. "You sat on the platform and you would listen to incredible remarks being made from the floor. You know, they wanted to birch them before hanging them, things like that. Then you'd get up and make a speech. You wouldn't mention anything that had been said from the floor. And they were terribly nice, they'd give you wild applause … Watching her last week, I think she actually agrees with them."

Apart from Mrs Thatcher herself, in the last five years Beckett seems to have interviewed almost every one of the Seventies' movers and shakers, from Edward Heath (a brilliantly nuanced portrait) to activists remembering Britain's first gay rights demonstration in 1970. He's travelled through the foreign country that is 1970s Britain, from Maplin Sands (where Heath wanted to build "Jet City" alongside Britain's first ecological airport) to Sullom Voe. And like the fine feature writer he is, he puts the two stories together, telling the tale of the decade with flair and understanding.

When it is written as well as this, history can constantly take you by surprise. You find yourself gripped by a subject – the IMF negotiations of 1976, for example – which might sound numbingly dull yet turns out to involve clandestine meetings in a Picadilly tailor's shop on one side and a country potentially two weeks away from bankruptcy on another.

The other quality a good history book possesses is that it makes you realise the past was never inevitable, that it was once as seething a mass of possibilities as the present. All this resurfaces in the interviews here with the old warriors on either side of the political divide, when the gleam of old campaigns often seems to return to his interviewees' eyes. It's the mark of his triumph that something similar can happen to those of his readers too.

Beckett may have been only ten days old when the 1970s began, but it's hard to imagine anyone writing a more lucid, revealing and enjoyable book about the decade.