When the lights went out: Britain in the seventies
Andy Beckett
Faber
524pp
£20
‘I have been hearing what was wrong with Britain and British politics in the seventies all my adult life,’ writes Guardian journalist Andy Beckett in When the lights went out: Britain in the seventies. ‘The seventies were grim. The seventies were a hangover from the sixties…Above all: we don’t want to go back to the seventies.’
Not sure the truth was quite so clear-cut, Beckett set out on a six-year long project, during which he must have clocked up some pretty hefty train fares, visiting the famous sites of the decade’s events and interviewing those who were at their centre.
‘When I started researching this book in 2003, the 70s often felt much more than three decades away,’ he recalls, citing the decline of old industries, the waning of trade unions and passing of the decade’s key figures. ‘Yet between 2005 and 2008 this began to change,’ he adds, particularly during the last year when Keynesianism has regained its credibility and words such as ‘state ownership’ and ‘bailout’ have been talked about as urgent necessities, not archaic anachronisms.
The result of Beckett’s labour of love is a thoroughly researched and deeply thoughtful snapshot of key moments in the 1970s, as well as a great deal of reflection that often questions the received wisdom about the decade. ‘It is the story of a search – my search – for the truth about an era, as much as the story of that era,’ he writes. ‘This book tries to select and scrutinize – for in single, sometimes forgotten events the essence of a time quite often lies – rather than painstakingly list and summarize.’
Unlike popular history books that offer sweeping surveys of all aspects of an era (for example, Andrew Marr’s History of Britain), Beckett focuses principally on the politics of the 1970s – both the inner workings of government and parties, as well as the political movements which sprung up around the country. The book begins with Edward Heath’s surprise election win in 1970 and ends with Margaret Thatcher’s 1979 victory. The chapters in between present snapshots of some of the decade’s most pivotal events, some already lodged in the British psyche (the Three-Day Week, the Winter of Discontent) and some less remembered (the Maplin airport plans, the Grunwick strikes).
Whether you look back on the 1970s as the good or bad old days, there is no question that it was a politically explosive decade. Beckett argues that one feature of the decade ‘was the frequency with which people who did not think of themselves as terribly political ended up in confrontational situations, through seeking to defend what they saw as their interests against an increasingly threatening outside world’.
One such group was, of course, the trade unions, who those on the right accuse of exerting a suffocating stranglehold on the rest of the country during the 70s. The unions loom large in Beckett’s book, and what is striking to those too young to remember the 70s is the power they exerted not only through strikes but in the wider political sphere. Jack Jones, the TGWU’s late and revered former general secretary, Beckett notes, was considered by the majority of the public to be more powerful than the prime minister.
In one of his many field trips, Beckett visits the TGWU Centre on the seafront at Eastborne, which opened in 1976 to provide union members with holidays and education. This ‘miniature workers’ utopia built on the site of a capitalist failure in a traditionally Tory resort town, in the middle of the traditionally Tory-dominated south of England,’ he takes as a potent symbol of ‘the unions’ advance in the seventies’.
Alongside the unions’ strengthening grip on British politics, Beckett charts the rise of some rather more socially progressive movements during the 1970s. In one amusing anecdote, he describes how, in 1971, the National Women’s Liberation Conference and the National Union of Mineworkers simultaneously held conferences in Skegness. When the feminist group heard that the miners had a striptease on the evening agenda, they did their very best to sabotage proceedings. A clash of worldviews if ever there was one.
The rise of the feminist movement – with magazines such as Spare Rib coming to prominence – is described by Beckett as an ‘irreverent new politics…focused on the everyday and the local’, not a million miles away from the kind of decentralised, everyday democracy advocated by many on the left today.
Another progressive force to gain momentum during the 70s was the gay rights movement, and Beckett (not surprisingly) pays a visit to the spot in London’s Highbury Fields where the first gay rights demonstration took place in 1970. Looking at a plaque commemorating ‘when 150 members of the Gay Liberation Front held a torchlight rally against police harassment’, Beckett realises that the politics this represented was ‘quite different from the seventies as experienced in Whitehall or Downing Street’.
‘For those active in this world, in its new politics of identity, individual experience and cultural allegiance rather than class, patriotism and economics, the decade was not a dead end but a maze of possibilities.’