SOCIETY: When the Lights Went Out: Britain in the Seventies. By Andy Beckett. Faber and Faber, 576pp, £20.
POST-WAR BRITAIN is suddenly the place (and time) to be. Two years ago, David Kynaston's magnificent Austerity Britainconjured up such a vivid picture of the bleak late-1940s that the reader felt compelled to don mittens before opening the volume. Meanwhile, Dominic Sandbrook's equally compelling two-volume study of the 1960s – Never Had it so Good and White Heat– sold in numbers more usually associated with chick lit. Last month, Prof Richard Vinen offered us a paving slab entitled Thatcher's Britain: The Politics and Social Upheaval of the 1980s.
It seems extraordinary that, to this point, the strike-ridden, velvet-flared, glam-rocking 1970s have been somewhat ignored in the rush to anatomise the decades. After all, as Andy Beckett, a feature writer for the Guardian, points out in this terrific corrective, those years have exerted an extraordinary influence on successive generations. "By 2000, as far as such things can be measured," he writes, "the seventies had even overtaken the sixties as the British nostalgia market's favourite."
Since Beckett's manuscript made it to the publishers, the urge to summon up the spirit of the 1970s has become ever more irresistible. Barely a day goes by without some feature writer comparing the current recession with the near-apocalyptic economic meltdowns that struck Britain in 1974 (the three-day week) and 1979 (the winter of discontent). Indeed, Beckett wrote one himself recently in the Guardian.
So this is a timely volume. Happily, the author proves up to the task. Whereas Kynaston, Sandbrook and Vinen offered historians’ perspectives, Beckett’s book is unmistakably the work of a professional journalist. Studded with personal experiences and lucidly described interviews, the book manages to fashion gripping narratives from the least promising incidents.
Most readers who lived through the Grunwick dispute, a divisive conflict at a photographic processing laboratory in north-west London, will remember it as an interminable morass of ill-will and bad anoraks. Beckett has tracked down such participants as the admirable Jayaben Desai, whose sacking triggered the dispute, and the unrepentant John Gouriet, a right-wing campaigner who helped break the strike , and, by weaving their testimony into his own propulsive prose, provides a beautifully economic summation of the state of Britain in 1976 and 1977. The unions’ unexpected acceptance of Ms Desai demonstrates improving attitudes towards women and Asian immigrants. The activities of Gouriet, founder of the National Association for Freedom, reveal the terror certain far-right activists felt at – as they saw it – Britain’s decline into mob rule. Gouriet, a credible model for Geoffrey Palmer’s character in the contemporaneous The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin, doesn’t actually say “Bit of a cock-up on the catering front”, but one can imagine those words coming out of his mouth.
Beckett constructs similarly remarkable yarns around the even more rancorous trade dispute at the Saltley coke depot during the 1972 miners’ strike, Edward Heath’s misconceived efforts to build an airport off Southend and the strangely underreported engineering miracles that facilitated the drilling of North Sea oil.
Domestic readers may find the treatment of Northern Ireland a tad simplistic, but Beckett’s fair-mindedness and clarity cannot be questioned. James Callaghan’s revelation that, when he arrived at the Home Office in 1967, the same bureaucratic backwater that regulated British Summer Time and London taxi licensing dealt with Northern Ireland speaks loudly of the British government’s complacency towards its dysfunctional Irish exclave.
When the Lights Went Outis, then, a good read of the most thumping stripe. But what's it really about? Such volumes tend to have a mildly revisionist agenda. Sandbrook and Kynaston are both keen debunkers of myths from their chosen eras: the former suggests that the 1960s only swung for a select few; the latter argues that life was grimmer in Clement Atlee's Britain than it was during the war years.
The standard narrative of the British 1970s is a sombre one. Edward Heath wins a surprise election for the Conservatives in 1970. He has many grand proto-Thatcherite ideas, but, unable to placate the unions, he ends up rationing electricity and, during the second of two miners strikes, loses the February 1974 election to an increasingly uninterested Harold Wilson. Things get worse. James Callaghan takes over and the unions, accustomed to having their own way with the Labour Party, throw a fit when Sunny Jim attempts to introduce pay restraint. Everyone goes on strike. Rubbish piles up in Leicester Square. Then, for good or ill, Mrs Thatcher arrives in 1979 to batter the country with her handbag. Oh, and punk rock happened, too.
Beckett largely ignores punk (and, indeed, all culture, popular or otherwise), but the rest of the accepted myth remains firmly in place. He does find space to point out that, whatever the Conservatives’ “Labour Isn’t Working” campaign may have claimed, unemployment remained comparatively low until the Thatcher years. He also suggests that many of the Tories’ monetarist ideas were already being pressed on the Treasury by Callaghan’s government. In an afterword, noting Thatcher’s early failures, he even goes so far as to argue that the “long seventies” didn’t really end until the Iron Lady’s second term.
Yet the body of the book does re-enforce the popular impression of an era characterised by failed aspirations, governmental incompetence and economic decline. When the Lights Went Out,is, thus, a useful item to have around in the current climate. Read this excellent book and you'll realise that, however bad things are now, they could be a lot worse.
Donald Clarke writes about film for The Irish Times
