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An Enlightening Decade? New Histories of 1970s’ Britain

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AndyBeckett, When the Lights Went Out: Britain in the Seventies. London: Faber and Faber, 2009. 576 pp.
NiallFerguson, Charles S.Maier, ErezManela, and Daniel J.Sargent (eds.), The Shock of the Global: The 1970s in Perspective. Cambridge: Belknap / Harvard University Press, 2010. 448 pp.
LaurelForster and SueHarper, eds., British Culture and Society in the 1970s: The Lost Decade. Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2010. 310 pp.

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Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 March 2013

Lawrence Black
Lawrence Black*
Affiliation:
University of York
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Extract

The 1970s have made something of a comeback recently–in terms of interest, if not always reputation. This is partly because it was an unfashionable, “lost” decade, possessed of a depressing image in the shadows of its immediate neighbors and because the present economic crisis has made its difficulties relevant and brought them closer. The decade is ripe for revisionism, as well as for seeking lessons. And what ultimately emerges is not just an arc towards neoliberalism but a more fragmented picture, liberating in many respects–and which demands historians come to terms with the grim decline long associated with the decade.

Type
Review Essays
Information
International Labor and Working-Class History , Volume 82 , Fall 2012 , pp. 174 - 186
Copyright
Copyright © International Labor and Working-Class History, Inc. 2013

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References

Notes

1. For parallels, see Gamble, Andrew, The Spectre at the Feast: Capitalist Crisis and the Politics of Recession (Basingstoke, 2009)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Black, Lawrence and Pemberton, Hugh, “The 'Winter of Discontent' in British Politics,” Political Quarterly 80 (2009): 553–61CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Hay, Colin, “Chronicles of a Death Foretold: The Winter of Discontent and Construction of the Crisis of British Keynesianism,” Parliamentary Affairs 63 (2010): 446–70CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

2. Nairn, Tom, The Break-up of Britain: Crisis and Neo-nationalism (London, 1977)Google Scholar; Kramnick, Issac, ed., Is Britain Dying? Perspectives on the Current Crisis (Ithaca, NY, 1979)Google Scholar.

3. See also Wheen, Francis, Strange Days Indeed: The Golden Age of Paranoia (London, 2009)Google Scholar; Haslam, Dave, Young Hearts Run Free: The Real Story of the 1970s (London, 2010)Google Scholar; Sounes, Howard, Seventies: Sights, Sounds and Ideas of a Brilliant Decade (London, 2006)Google Scholar; Garnett, Mark, From Anger to Apathy: The Story of Politics, Society and Popular Culture in Britain Since 1975 (London, 2008)Google Scholar; Sandbrook, Dominic, State of Emergency: The way We Were, Britain 1970–74 (London, 2010)Google Scholar; and, although not only about Britain, Lutyens, Dominic and Hislop, Kirsty, 70s Style and Design (London, 2009)Google Scholar; de Groot, Gerard, The Seventies Unplugged (London, 2010)Google Scholar.

4. See Tiratsoo, Nick, “You've Never Had it so Bad?” Britain in the 1970s” in From Blitz to Blair, ed. Tiratsoo, Nick (London, 1997)Google Scholar; Lowe, Rodney, “Life Begins in the Seventies?” Journal of Contemporary History 42 (2008): 161–69CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Black, Lawrence, Pemberton, Hugh and Thane, Pat, eds., Reassessing Seventies Britain (Manchester, 2013)Google Scholar.

5. Buettner, Elizabeth, “Going for an Indian: South Asian Restaurants and the Limits of Multiculturalism in Britain,” Journal of Modern History 80 (2008): 865–901 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

6. Moran, Joe, “Decoding the Decade,” The Guardian (November 14, 2009)Google Scholar and “‘Stand Up and be Counted': Hughie Green, the 1970s and Popular Memory’”, History Workshop Journal 70 (Autumn 2010): 172–198 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Hitchens, Christopher, Hitch 22 (New York, 2010), 143, 148Google Scholar; Savage, Mike, “Against Epochalism: An Analysis of Conceptions of Change in British Sociology,” Cultural Sociology 3 (2009): 217–38CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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8. Edgerton, David, Warfare State: Britain 1920–70 (Cambridge, 2005)Google Scholar; Savage, Mike, Identities and Social Change in Britain since 1940: The Politics of Method (Oxford, 2010)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. The anxious middle class do not command historians' attention as much as the embattled working class–another predilection that short-changes the 1970s, see King, Roger, Nugent, Neill, eds., Respectable Rebels: Middle-class Campaigns in Britain in the 1970s (London, 1979)Google Scholar.

9. Moran, “Stand Up and be Counted”, 175, 194–95.

10. “The 1970s get a Bad Press,” Times Higher Education (October 1, 2009)Google Scholar; Segal, Lynne, Rowbotham, Sheila, Wainwright, Hilary, Beyond the Fragments (London, 1979)Google Scholar and Segal, Lynne, “Jam Today: Feminist Impacts and Transformations in the 1970s” in Black, Pemberton, Thane, Reassessing Seventies Britain Google Scholar.

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14. While not syndicalist, many activists were culturally and emotionally mobilized by the idea of trade unionism. The Pentonville Five and more built up heroic lore. The 1970s were strewn with relics like industrial relations experts, artifacts like corporatism, and distinctive trade union terminology, rituals, practices–flying and secondary pickets, composite motions, work-to-rule, demarcation, go-slows, closed shops, lockouts, scabs–were everyday parlance.

15. Depicted in Samuel, Raphael, The Lost World of British Communism (London, 2006), 210–12Google Scholar; Marquand, David, “Inquest on a Movement: Labour's Defeat and its Consequences,” Encounter (July 1979): 13–17 Google Scholar.

16. Martin, Tara, “The Beginning of Labor's End? Britain's 'Winter of Discontent' and Working-Class Women's Activism,” International Labor and Working-Class History 75 (Spring 2009): 49–67 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

17. Tiratsoo, “Never Had it so Bad?”; Hay, Colin, “Narrating Crisis: The Discursive Construction of the ‘Winter of Discontent,'” Sociology 30 (1996): 253–77CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Thomas, James, “‘Bound in by History': The Winter of Discontent in British Politics, 1979–2004,” Media, Culture and Society 29 (2007): 263–83CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

18. Akin to the sixties idiom “if you remember the '60s, you weren't there.”

19. See Renewal: A Journal of Social Democracy 17 (2009), issue 4 (ed. Jackson, Ben) on the New RightGoogle Scholar.

20. See Dworkin, Denis, Cultural Marxism in Postwar Britain: History, the New Left and the origins of Cultural Studies (Durham, NC, 1997)Google Scholar.

21. Or analogies between Brown's and Callaghan's fudged election calls in 2007 and 1978 respectively.

22. Carroll, Peter, It Seemed like Nothing Happened: America in the 1970s (New Brunswick, 1990)Google Scholar.

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24. Curran, James, Gaber, Ivor, Petley, James, Culture Wars (Edinburgh, 2005)Google Scholar.

25. Marcus, Greil, Lipstick Traces (Cambridge, MA, 1989)Google Scholar; Savage, Jon, England's Dreaming (London, 1991)Google Scholar.

26. Harrison, Brian, Seeking a Role: The United Kingdom, 1951–70 (Oxford, 2009), 546Google Scholar.

27. Cohen, Stanley, Folk Devils and Moral Panics (London, 1972)Google Scholar; Eric Hobsbawm, “The Forward March of Labour Halted?” Marxism Today (September 1978).

28. Hitchens, Hitch 22, 177–78, 203 all but confesses.

29. Beckett, Andy, “Aunt Twackie's Bazaar,” London Review of Books (August 19, 2010), 30–31 Google Scholar; Fletcher, Winston, Powers of Persuasion (Oxford, 2008), 96–98, 298Google Scholar.

30. Rodgers, Daniel T., Age of Fracture (Cambridge, MA, 2011)Google Scholar.