On all sides these days, one hears the whine that we are sliding back into the Seventies. There are obvious parallels. A tanking, gaffe-prone Labour government. Moany Nationalists. Ceaseless mobs and demonstrations.
A sense that our leaders simply do not know what they are doing and, across a host of public services or when trying to contact anyone from your bank to Sky TV, a Britain where less and less seems to work.
Born in 1966, I remember the Seventies vividly. It’s an oddly unloved decade, wedged between the swinging Sixties and the brash 1980s. You look at old family snaps and shudder. Pudding-bowl haircuts. Swirly carpets and busy wallpaper. Menfolk got up for a wedding like a terrible Irish showband.
I have a wincing recollection of a pair of very tight, flared pink jeans. Much brown corduroy. The quiet, sapping fear of the school day, taught by people who could physically attack you. A Glasgow of black, sooty tenement-canyons. Pitiable Great War amputees selling packs of razor blades on Dumbarton Road.
Tiny old women on Clyde Street, bandy- legged from Edwardian rickets.
But not that many cars. I used daily to cross Queen Victoria Drive to fetch the evening papers – by its junction with Anniesland Road and just downhill from the blind summit of the railway bridge.
As a very careful little boy: 10p, I remember, secured the Evening Times, the Evening Citizen and – depending on the season – an ice-lolly or a Pink Panther bar. Today, when I approach the same crossing on the odd memory-lane visit, so thunderous is the traffic I feel I am taking my life in my hands.
The weird industrial food of the era. Boil-in-the-bag cod in shrimp sauce. Gristly ‘chopsteaks,’ made from unmentionable bits of cow. Boxed Vesta curry-kits and spaghetti out a tin. Most of these horrors passed me by: Mammy was a resourceful cook who preferred to whip up a meal with fresh produce.
A striking image of rubbish piling up in Glasgow after a strike by dustcart drivers in 1975
A Glasgow Corporation bus in 1973 – when roads were much quieter
But this was also the era of Space Hoppers, Curly-Wurlies, Yorkie bars and Bagpuss.
Not all power-cuts, donkey-jacketed strikers huddled around braziers, policemen in Village People moustaches and Denis Healey turning back from Heathrow.
T here was a dark underbelly, yes. Popular TV shows and even commercials were marked by sexism, even casual racism, that would be unthinkable today.
I was astonished once to read that, as late as 1971, no woman was allowed into a Wimpy burger bar after midnight – as any out at such an hour was surely a prostitute.
It’s important to remember how close, in the 1970s, we still were to the Second World War.
When I began school it was only 25 years since VE Day and practically everyone over 45 or so had, in some field or other, served in it.
We were still an extraordinarily resigned and biddable people. Daily patronised in finger-wagging ‘Public Information Films,’ on everything from burst pipes to what not to feed pigs.
We were warned as children not to go about thoughtlessly throwing our soft little bodies in the path of cars: it would be years before it occurred to the authorities it might be more effective to scold motorists.
Thatcherism was not inevitable, writes John MacLeod – a dose of luck and a vacuum created by inept opponents helped
Pickets outside the Grunwick plant in Willesden, London
And we put up with absurdities – petrol shortages in 1973 and again in 1979; Edward Heath’s ‘Three Day Week’ – that would surely invite massive civil unrest today.
Though, remembering how tamely we, the sheeple, accepted all those grotesque restrictions during Covid, you wonder.
But Andrew Marr made another important point in his 2011 biography of our late Queen – that, while the Seventies were an uncomfortable time for Britain’s politicians, it was a pretty happy period for most ordinary people.
Wages went up. Living standards rose. We ate much more meat. Parents could actually afford those Space Hoppers and pogo-sticks.
Yes, we watched Chancellors flail, governments fall, and word of the latest IRA atrocity. But on the new colour TV that, by 1976, most British households boasted.
Blue Nun and Black Tower cooling in the fridge; a Hostess trolley, for the fashionable little dinner parties. We took avidly to package holidays overseas – four million of us in 1971, nine million by 1973, more than 13 million by 1981.
With consequences near at home. Scotland still boasted six bustling pleasure steamers in 1969. By 1982, there was only the Waverley: the market had evaporated.
Yes, many household names in broadcasting and entertainment have since been unmasked as predators, and it was still an awful time to be gay: it would be 1980 before male homosexuality was decriminalised in Scotland.
But swinging through it all was the increasingly confident handbag of the Grocer’s Daughter – and, by 1980, she was Prime Minister.
I know of women – by no means all of her political creed – who wept for joy the day in 1975 one of their own became Conservative Party leader.
A fter all, till that year – take a bow, Angela Rippon – women weren’t even allowed to read the news. Obtain credit without the signature of their husband or their Dad – and were generally paid less than a man for doing the same job.
And, as late as the 1979 election, Scotland returned just one woman to Parliament – the late Dame Judith Hart.
Thatcherism was by no means inevitable. There was a good dash of luck and – like Trump, or Farage – vast political space was carved out for her by the ineptitude of her opponents.
But it was disconcerting to hear David Cameron’s strident Seventies-bashing as, in April 2013, he paid the departed Baroness tribute in the House of Commons.
‘Successive governments had failed to deal with what was beginning to be called “the British disease.”
‘Appalling industrial relations. Poor productivity. Persistently high inflation.
‘Though it seems absurd today, the state had got so big it owned our airports and airline, the phones in our houses, and trucks on our roads. It even owned a removal company.
‘The air was thick with defeatism,’ the Prime Minister ballooned. ‘There was a sense that the role of government was simply to manage decline.’
Part of the story, yes – but by no means the whole story.
Things were still prized in the Seventies – like freedom of speech – we now increasingly set at naught.
We did not doomscroll on our devices. Children largely played out of doors. Enjoyed considerable freedom, and read voraciously. We even had our own intelligent magazines, like Look and Learn.
The monarchy in the Seventies enjoyed unprecedented popularity – and ugly attitudes were fast fading.
In 1968, London dockers had marched for Enoch Powell.
A decade later, they were rooting for the Grunwick strikers – largely women from South Asia.
Some decade. For all the Crimplene, corduroy and brown, let’s raise a drop of Black Tower to it.
