Tube strikes, rail strikes, uncollected rubbish, energy crisis, rampant inflation, recession, and burgeoning national debt. We seem to have been here before. For those of us over a certain age, the current experience of rising interest rates, rising prices, strikes or ‘industrial unrest’, as it used to be called when we still had industries, is eerily reminiscent of the 1970s. Those who experienced it were glad to see the noisome decade of three-day weeks, power-cuts, flared trousers, the Bay City Rollers, Red Diamond beer, Angel Delight and SpudUlike consigned to history’s dustbin.
Economists and cartoonists, however, have recently taken to comparing our current financial and political malaise to that of the 1970s. Of course, there are significant differences between then and now. The structure of the economy and the composition of the population has altered dramatically, but for those of us who still just about have the capacity to remember, those unsettled times seem to be returning. The portents aren’t good.
At the same time, those who lived through that difficult decade may also dimly recall that a stuttering economy was not, by itself, indicative of complete social and cultural collapse. Unsettling as those strange days were, they also possessed some redeeming features worth recalling. Not only do we face hard times analogous to the 1970s, but we do so with few of the cultural and political resources that made life bearable then, and which may be required again to extricate ourselves from our current predicament. While in economic terms we might be hurtling back towards the 1970s, we are doing it without the style, wit, and cultural innovativeness that defined that decade.
What, we might wonder, was attractive about British society and cultural life in the 1970s, but which is notably lacking today?
First, the mass media has been revolutionised, but not for the better. Television, both the BBC and ITV, was worth watching in the 1970s. This was before the era of satellite TV, multiple channels, and on-demand programming, but few would contend that the relative lack of choice denoted lack of quality. From documentaries and drama series to children’s programming, British television was innovative and iconic. Intelligent drama spanned the decade from the social commentary of Play for Today to the brilliance of Tinker, Taylor, Soldier, Spy. News and current affairs programmes were remarkably impartial, whilst investigative series, like Panorama and World in Action, demonstrated fine research coupled with fair-mindedness. Popular entertainment from Match of the Day to The Generation Game and That’s Life, would keep families glued to the set on Saturday and Sunday evenings, unintentionally reinforcing a sense of national cohesion.
Comedy was actually funny. Classic comedy in 1970s was often a function of the commitment to innovative commissioning by the national broadcaster. But TV comedy is worth singling out because it typified not only the nation’s humour in hard times, but also its touching modesty, self-deprecation, and sometimes its willingness to mock its own pretensions mercilessly. Okay, one might not wish to watch repeats of George and Mildred or Mind Your Language, but the classics remain: Steptoe and Son, Morecambe and Wise, Monty Python, Fawlty Towers, Porridge, Rising Damp and Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads?.
And what do we have now? Miranda and Mrs Brown’s Boy’s, if you’re lucky. Live at the Apollo and Nish Kumar, if you’re not. Indeed, a banal predictability characterises contemporary U.K. TV. From dating shows like Naked Attraction and Love Island, to reality TV like Big Brother, and poorly scripted dramas intent only on pushing a woke agenda, quality programming is not a term one associates with current British TV output.
Elsewhere, the decline in the standard and reputation of news and current affairs coverage is a more disturbing political change in the role of the media since the seventies. Back then, this domain was the preserve of intrepid, dispassionate journalism. Nowadays, it is characterised by overpaid, grandstanding presenters, who use their positions to push sanctimonious metro-elite values. In the 1970s you had Robin Day and Brian Walden. Today we have Emily Maitlis and Gary Lineker.
Private Eye was a brilliant satirical magazine in the 1970s. That must come as a surprise to anyone born in the twenty first century, but in its prime under the editorship of Richard Ingrams, and the likes of Peter Cook, Willie Rushton and Christopher Booker, as well as its resident ‘commo’ Paul Foot, the magazine was irreverent, rebellious, and relentlessly anti-establishment, as opposed to the sad mouthpiece of Remoaner orthodoxy that it is today.
The broader cultural scene, most notably in music and drama, was one of continuous evolution and radical innovation. At the start of the decade the Rolling Stones, the Beatles and Led Zeppelin were at their zenith, while newer artists from Roxy Music to Elton John were receiving recognition for their creative genius. The social tumults of the era, however, were also stirring genuinely insurgent cultural forces that were to burst forth towards the end of the 1970s in punk, perhaps the only good thing you can say to emerge from the 1970s comprehensive school system. What constitutes the leading edge of the zeitgeist now? Harry Styles pretending to be gay.
Turning to party politics, despite the oil shock of 1974, membership of the Common Market and the breakdown of industrial bargaining, 1970s politicians often demonstrated principled commitments and authentic accomplishment. In the 1970s the public shared a perception that those in political life, with some notable exceptions (Jeremy Thorpe springs to mind), had a sincere commitment to public service. They came from a variety of backgrounds – business, trade unions, teaching, the merchant navy, mining and the factory floor. Many had served with distinction in World War II. The likes of James Callaghan, Harold Wilson, Denis Healey, Barbara Castle, Merlyn Rees, Roy Mason and Peter Shore evinced a genuine concern for the political health of the country. Tony Benn gave up his peerage to pursue a political vocation. Michael Foot was an outstanding political journalist and parliamentarian. The Conservative Party boasted Margaret Thatcher, a trained chemist, as well as Geoffrey Howe and Keith Joseph, both accomplished lawyers and ex-Army officers. Even a political disaster, like Ted Heath, was a talented musician and yachtsman.
Once more it is hard to resist the comparison. In contrast to the 1970s, the current ruling class come from similar backgrounds – middle-class, university educated, with little prior career experience outside the law, journalism, or politics itself. Parliamentarians increasingly sound alike, think alike and act alike. Of course, the politicians of the 1970s made mistakes, but their decisions, whether right or wrong, were not driven by spin, opinion polls, and the learned helplessness and groupthink that typifies the current ineptocracy. The vacuous posturing over Brexit and its aftermath has led to national calamities on a grand scale – most obviously the fiscal disaster of Covid Lockdowns and two decades of net zero greenoid fantasy. In other words, the kind of policies that are leading us back down the rabbit hole that leads to 1970s style ‘industrial’ unrest.
The wider point perhaps is that political debate generally in the 1970s seemed to be over sober matters of policy, coloured by different political perspectives concerning the role of the state, social class and financial rectitude, rather than pronouns, rainbow-coloured crossings, going ‘carbon neutral’ or whether nursing mothers should be referred to as ‘chestfeeders’. Politics in the 1970s was a serious business; today it seems trivial and deluded.
Traversing the social landscape, we would find in the seventies the police still trying to prevent and solve crime. Back then, the police acted more like the Sweeney (the classic cop drama of the era) and less like the paramilitary wing of the Guardian. Today they twerk and tweet, preferring to police thought and language. In the 1970s much of the public thought the police did a decent job in difficult circumstances. Now they don’t. In the 1970s you could usually get a doctor’s appointment within 24 hours. You could even see an actual doctor in person. They even made house calls! Future generations are likely to look back and wonder how this was even possible. Universities were still worth going to in the 1970s. They were institutions where pluralism and free thought flourished. Today they are repositories of ideological conformity and student debt.
Significantly, Britons made things in the 1970s. They built ships, cars and aircraft. The U.K. had leading electronics companies and was home to the world’s largest chemical conglomerate. Britons pioneered early computing technology. Britain also had its own large-scale car industry. Yes, managerial failing and the militant unionism of Red Robbo undermined British Leyland, but this overlooks the fact that Britain still produced marques like MG, Jaguar and Land Rover. It’s easy to mock the Morris Maxi and Marina, but the Rover 3500 series or the Mini-Metro were pioneering projects that influenced car design the world over.
Where did it go? Sold off. Broken up. Shipped abroad. It wasn’t the case that Britain just wasn’t very good at making things anymore. We were. Neither was it true that manufacturing necessarily thrived under foreign ownership. All this was a product of political and economic choices. It did not need to happen.
In the 1970s Britain mined coal, drilled for oil, and was on the verge of energy self-sufficiency. Power cuts and energy rationing did occur in the early 1970s, but these were the result of industrial strife, rather than a self-sabotaging policy of net-zero.
Britain was still home to manufacturing and industrial centres that sustained stable and vibrant communities in South Wales, the north and across the Midlands. The offshoring of industrial capacity and the corresponding decline of these once thriving communities has resulted in a burgeoning national divide, both geographic and social, where wealth and capital are concentrated in a select few financial hubs like the City of London at the expense of everywhere else. In the 1970s an ordinary, hard-working citizen stood a reasonable chance of getting on the housing ladder, raising a family on a single income, and retiring on a decent pension. These once common expectations are now beyond the reach of most millennials who do not have access to a trust fund or the bank of mum and dad.
Britons once shared a feeling of social solidarity, regardless of their political differences. These days, as the gap between rich and poor widens by the day, there is a palpable sense of antagonism between an out-of-touch cosmopolitan ‘elite’ and the alienated ‘populist’ masses.
Are we looking back to the 1970s through a rose-tinted haze? Of course, there’s an element of nostalgia for a bygone era. There are things about the seventies that no-one would miss: monastic Sundays, racial prejudice, trade union militancy, brutalist architecture. Still less would one wish to re-visit the horrors of the Northern Ireland conflict in the 70s (for those interested, this is the place where a culture war inevitably ends).
The 1970s was a time of turmoil. But it was also a time of cultural dynamism, free-thought, serious political debate, semi-decent public services, and thriving communities with strong civic-attachments. Above all, a brief trip down memory lane shows that many attributes of the seventies that we have noted here also set the pre-conditions for the national renewal that succeeded it in the decade that followed. Pre-conditions which seem disconcertingly absent in the current era.
As we contemplate our leaner, meaner and greener futures, we can look back with the one thing which has not yet been criminalised – irony. In the words of the theme song to Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads?: ”Tomorrow’s almost over, today went by so fast/It’s the only thing to look forward to – the past.”
David Martin Jones is a Visiting Professor at the University of Buckingham. During that lost decade he unsuccessfully pursued sex and drugs and rock ‘n roll, called persons who choose to identify as women ‘chicks’, and prefaced most of his utterances with the soubriquet ‘man’. Michael Rainsborough is Professor of Strategic Theory at King’s College. He spent the 1970s disliking secondary school, wearing Doc Martins, and falling off skateboards.
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Nice article.
Excellent and well balanced article, I would just like to add another relatively positive aspect of the 70s:
Both the highly influential Marxism that was largely responsible for wrecking the economy (by promoting constant conflict and strikes) and the then still widely popular Christian faith at least offered up a sense of hope for the future.
In the former case through the deemed inevitable emergence of an eternal communist utopia, in terms of Christianity through a belief in survival after death (slightly complicated by the doctrine of hell, but there was at least a chance of ever-lasting bliss in heaven, being reunited with loved ones etc).
Today’s atheistic Green religion offers nothing but the prospect of a managed / enforced decline back to a pre medieval-style nasty brutish and short existence.
To look at this in a slightly more light-hearted manner, a glance at the portrayal of Neil in the early 80s Young Ones makes it truly astounding that his much ridiculed hippy-Green ideology did not just attain respectability and credibility but went on to control the entire political-economic agenda of not just the UK but most of the Western world.
And what is even more astonishing is the fact that it was the decidedly ‘square’ and non afghan-coated Margaret Thatcher that set that particular self-destructive ball rolling (with her launching of the politically convenient pseudo-scientific Climate Change theory onto the world stage in 1988).
Fascinating and thought-provoking article thanks.
Somehow it even seems cheery. But, as the authors say, the attributes and qualities which were present in the 1970s to enable us to move beyond the bag bits seem missing today. Perhaps they are merely buried, and still latently alive in sufficient people to enable a general regeneration. Can’t say I’m entirely convinced though.
Having said that, I can dimly recall the 70s and things seemed to me to be very, very bad indeed. As I recall, there was even talk of military takeover, so inept did our governments appear.
Re music – people regard Johnny Rotten with almost patronising amusement nowadays, as some kind of harmless pantomime villain. But that’s not how I recall it at the time (although I was too young to see the Pistols llve). He was regarded as almost a devil incarnate, as indeed he just about was. It seemed very serious at the time.
The Pistols made their first TV appearance in September 1976.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=94DNV6oM8HU
Rewatching this many times over the years (I never tire of it), it seems to me that this was a wake up call, from Lydon’s opening ‘Get off your arse’ onwards. The anger is palpable, and dare I say genuine. And in retrospect it seems a turning point – someone waking up and saying: ‘Enough. This is shit and has to stop’.
Today in our society we haven’t yet got to the ‘anger’ stage. Maybe it will appear over the coming months. What I am sure of is that until anger against our elites emerges then we haven’t even begun to climb out of the mess we are in, but on still on the downward path.
Meanwhile, contemporary German punk bands (not so contemporary, actually, it’s more fun punk dinosaurs unfortunately left over from the 1980s) sanitize their live repertoire to exclude songs containing fatshaming and misogyny — it’s the completely politically correct anarchy nowadays. Unruly, rebellious and everything nicely ordered and prefiltered to avoid rubbing the Green establishment in the wrong way.
Shome progress, I guess.
Punk was a decidedly double-edged sword.
On the one hand it promoted a hugely positive (and in the case of the Pistol’s ‘God Save the Queen’ hugely courageous) think-for-yourself / anti-authoritarian attitude;
On the other the sneery, narcissistic, Great Rock and Roll Swindle side easily fed into the more selfish and greedy aspects of Thatcherism. Also The Clash’s frequent romanticisation of political violence and marxism in general (White Riot, Guns of Brixton, Sandinista etc) fuelled hatred and conflict
Regardless of any ideological drawbacks the music was almost uniformly excellent.
The revolution which never cometh has been sold by the counter culture establishment to each subsequent generation as solution to the problems of society and state until they actually took over power and found that they preferred COVID. I’ve fallen for that by that time, ie, in my early 20s. The younger clima warriors are still falling for a rebranded version of it: Nowadays, it’s not a political revolution anymore but one supposed to get rid of the rather inert parts of mankind which stop the left-leaning eltite from brining us the net zero utopia as quick as they’d like to.
I agree it’s the same basic revolutionary / power-seizing agenda in different guises (conventional marxism, political environmentalism etc). Also that young people are particularly prone to being swept up in these seemingly radical movements, including via the alternative music and fashion scene (though not so much of that recently).
Hopefully when the Green threat is seen off (and there are hugely positive signs in that direction, once one Net Zero prop such as the fracking ban is removed the whole rotten pile might collapse) there won’t be any more anti-democratic / totalitarian variations available – and we can get back to building a free, prosperous and secure future for all.
I never really regarded The Great Rock and Roll Swindle as the Pistols as such. The Clash were great fun, but not to be taken that seriously – for me ‘political’ bands never really are. Dylan’s early protest stuff is very powerful, but again doesn’t stand much scrutiny, and I do wonder how seriously he took it even at the time, and the extent to which he was just role playing.
John Lydon is as relevant today as he was in the ’70’s and if you get the chance to seem him – GO! Mr Lydon has lost none of his vitriol and his music has matured. You are sure of witnessing a great gig.
One of the disadvantages of living here down in the far south west is lack of bands visiting (or maybe I don’t look hard enough).
The Pistols did play in Plymouth a couple of times in 1976/7, but I was far too young to go. I recall reading about it in the local newspapers. As I remember, one article said that of the series of punk bands playing that evening the Pistols were unique in that not one member of the band had the slightest musical talent (these were the Matlock days). That was garbage of course – all four were, in their own ways, as they were later to prove, talented musicians.
So newspapers spouted lazy rubbish back then as well.
Great article. The chief difference and biggest elephant in the room today is social media and groupthink. People have catastrophically lost the ability to think critically for themselves and Twitter and Facebook have become a genuine real life Kryptonite for the masses. Amoral parasitic psychopaths use it to push their agendas, censoring dissent as they go, and most people would rather sit back, turn their brain off, let everyone else do their thinking for them for a quiet life, pretending that it must be for the common good. At the same time viewing anyone who steps out of the herd as an eccentric danger to everyone else. Like the ever more powerful school bully. Everyone stands there watching their classmate having the shit kicked out of them but nobody wants to stick their head out.
Until all social media is dissolved in a vat of acid, things will not change.
But this is social media. And I’ve leant masses about the covid and vaccine scams via social media that I would never have been aware of in a pre-internet age.
It’s not though, it’s an alternative news site – or scratch that, news site. I’m talking about Twitter and Facebook where politicians seem to think ‘society’ happens..
Twitter and Facebook, yes evil organisations that need to be stopped. I didn’t interpret those organisations as comprising all of social media though. There’s a lot of social media where there’s a lot of good stuff coming out, and even through the cracks on those sites.
You have put your finger on it.Its not so much global warming, which is bollox ,its all about Global Norming via Social media creating a “one world” world.
ITS SCARY HOW MANY TRANSNATIONAL ORGANISATIONS IMPACT OUR NATIONAL GOVERMENTS AND GOVERNENCE…Such organisations were far fewer and seemed to have a lot less clout back then.
Its the rise of the billionaires from anywhere that are screwing up our somewheres with the aid of the “blobs” in many nations .
I really do not think this will end well for us and hopefully them !!!!
1970s TV was amazing. They had Open University programmes, arty films, language courses, blockbuster series like The Ascent of Man.
I remember watching War and Peace: BBC – about 26 episodes, with Anthony Hopkins as Andre. Amazing series ….. head and shoulders above the recent dumbed-down remake.
‘In Search of the Dark Ages’
Mainly 1981 I know, but started in 1979. Watching it now you can’t help be struck by the flares, beards, and. box-shpe cars.
This wonderful production was one of the defining moments of my life – it led me to Tolstoy and the anti-state / anti-power / anti violence positions he increasingly adopted over his lifetime (though I disagree with his proto-environmentalism and poverty promoting asceticism).
I suppose the inconveniences can be minimised in memory if the new things were of greater interest at the time. I recall:
Power cuts which led to my eye sight deteriorating from working under poor lighting
Parafin tilly lamps hanging in underground station tunnels
cuts and cancellations in everything run by the state – a bit like now but with no monile phones to find out what was happening or to tell the boss or family where you were
£50 to have a phone connected and a months long wait
Inflation over 25% in 1975
Interest rates on mortgages – can’t remember the rate but it was painful
Politicians blaming inflation o everything but themselves expanding the money supply – that hasn’t changed
People were much more worried about nuclear war then than they are now. They should probably be more worried now, than they were then.
Limestone buildings in London were black with soot.
Train carriages without lengthwise corridors were still quite common.
Many people had telephone “party lines”, shared with somebody else in the street. If they were on a call, you had to wait till they had finished.
I remember discussions, which seem pretty odd now, about whether inflation was “cost push” or “demand pull”.
I had a great time! The music was better, we were all slimmer (because the food was boring) and I didn’t get the feeling my government was trying to kill me. I even enjoyed making candles during the blackouts. No social media to spread alarm and journalists rooted out the bad stuff and asked questions.
Somehow the Green Goddesses, overflowing bins and power cuts didn’t cause panic; we just blamed the unions and got through it. The house was cold anyway – any homework done in my bedroom required that I wrap self in an eiderdown because only the living-room had a gas fire.
It feels much more ominous now, somehow.
It feels much more ominous now, somehow.
Yes, it does. Hard to see a way through from where we are. Nevermind, just keep going.
We’ve got a load of wood. stacked up for the winter, and plenty of coal in.
I was a teenager in the ’70s and it was a happy time. We were independent, resilient, optimistic “free-range” youngsters.
I’m sure it wasn’t so happy for my parents, who obviously had to struggle with the economic problems the country was experiencing, but if they were worried about it they never transferred that worry to me.
And the music was great ….. although the fashions were dreadful!
I liked flares and still wear them. Not bell bottoms, I hasten to add, but flares. Yes there were some appalling fashion faux-pas’ but then today’s skinny jeans with low crotches are not exactly doing it for me either! Every decade, or generation, has its own fashion horrors. I was also a teen in the 1970s and loved it, not having the cares of a parent or adult. It was a much simpler time. We even sent letters to girlfriends and getting one back was a big event, to be read in private and usually about how one’s girlfriend fancied David Cassidy or Marc Bolan, not spotty old me!! The music was just fab. I think I identified 1973 as being a year where so many great albums were made and such inventive stuff too. I wasn’t a punk, more a latent hippy-type as I liked Genesis, Yes, Led Zep etc but I did go to punk concerts where my cosy prog-rock ideals were put on the rack!
You haven’t mentioned one of the biggest differences: in the 70s the population was overwhelmingly indigenous to the British Isles.
At my Comprehensive in the industrial West Riding there was one non-white -a non-observant Sikh whose father was a GP – in my year until the 6th form when a larger catchment area meant he was joined by a girl with a Nigerian father and English mother.
But another dim recollection of mine from the 70s was that there was great concern about the level of immigration – we were ‘being taken over by an alien force etc. etc.’ Society felt threatened by immigration back then as well.
And the hassle that black footballers used to get was an absolute disgrace, not just in retrospect but, to anyone with half a brain and ounce of humanity, at the time.
More generally, anyone today remember the football crowd violence?
But (something the authors don’t really bring out in the is article) it was a very fractious time – different societal groupings just yearning to have a go at each other. With the return of serious inflation I can see that coming back.
Cars were slower, pubs were fuller, hair was longer, people were freer, music was more inventive, mobile phones were absent, TV was simpler….all in all, a time of optimism. Maybe the spectacles are rose-tinted and I’ve forgotten the frustration of it all but when I’m older and greyer than I am now, it will be nice to take a trip down memory lane once in a while…
I remember – some fondly, others with horror;
I still predominately listen to the music from the 70’s and 80’s. Not that I’m living in the past – just paying for it. : >)
Another thing that hasn’t been mentioned here.
One of my old school teachers from those days is today doing a very long jail sentence for you-know-what (never went near me I hasten to add). Probably he’ll never get out alive.
And the level of violence of some of our school teachers against us was, in hindsight, absolutely shocking. As was the aptitude of many of them for actually teaching. I can recall many incidents where they should have been prosecuted for common assault. Made worse that it was done against minors.
Seeing the schooling of my own children, all that seems unthinkable today.
Yes, you’re right. One of my teachers threw his desk across the classroom at a boy who wasn’t paying attention not to mention being caned or whacked by a hairbrush or whatever the weapon of choice was. A science teacher was found to be fiddling with boys but was found out by the headmaster who sacked him on the spot – I must have been attuned to this because I didn’t like him one bit. I very much doubt police were involved Some of my teachers were definitely traumatised by the war – it showed in their faces and their actions. I guess nowadays this sort of behaviour is non-existent but somehow I got through all that relatively unscathed, apart from a random beating here and there, so I was lucky.
I must have been attuned to this because I didn’t like him one bit.
Yes, that’s how I related to the teacher now doing time for fiddling. Gave me the creeps. A horrible man who I didn’t relate to in any way.
Then again, looking back it is clear that those sorts of adults always went for emotionally vulnerable children, who they appear to have had an aptitude for seeking out. I don’t consider myself as being emotionally vulnerable, and thus maybe wasn’t so likely to be conned by them.
I hadn’t thought of war traumatisation – but looking back I can’t think it affected many of my lot much. When I was a child the adults were nearly all shaped by the war, one way or another. Aside from rationing, GIs running off with the local women (here in the SW), etc., Plymouth and Exeter had the shit bombed out of them, and the landscape scars were very much still there in the 70s.
I wonder how much war traumatisation, or at least the memory of the war, affected that decade? Wouldn’t like to posit an answer.
Having said all this, there are some teachers who I do remember with respect, and I admit that I was far from being an ideal pupil.
Did I get through it unscathed? Well I guess I did, and have always retained a healthy distrust of authority – which has served me especially well over the last couple of years.
If only we could have retained all the good things about the 70’s life would be so much better now. The good things highlighted in this piece are all gone now probably never to return. The loss of our manufacturing undustry due to bad management and strikes (think what happened to British Leyland and others). There were things that started then that we pay the price for now. For example the attitude of British workers to their employing company where so many lost the value of the importance of doing a good job and the loss of realisation that their success relied on the success of their company. Compare that attitude to that of japanese workers and to a lesser extent those in Germany this is a big reason we lost out to those countries in almost every respect and particularly in manufacturing industry. What we need now is politicians and business managers who can restore our pride in being British and what with the right general attitude we can achieve. We also need to realise that some industry causes polution so when we legislate it out of business apparently to appear to be more eco friendly, all we are doing is exporting our polution to other countries which become more successful than us and in so many cases discharge more pollution than we would. It would be so much better if we retained those industries and concentrate on using our scientists to reduce the pollution they cause, which would result in a nett reduction of the level of pollution rather than just exporting it and making the world more polluted than it was.
One big difference between manufacturing in the UK and the US on the one hand, and in Germany and Japan on the other, was the UK and US’s loss of their machine tool industries because they were shielded from market forces by military contracts, as highlighted by economist Seymour Melman and others. The work ethic perhaps stayed stronger in the US than it did in the UK.
Manufacturing might actually return to the UK, if the Net Zeroists get their way and ban long-distance shipping.
Of course we were still good at making things in the Seventies……things that no-one wanted to buy at a price that no-one wanted to pay……with the honourable exception of the Hillman Hunter, a massive, if unlikely, export success….in Iran. But the Shah bought our tanks as well and look what happened next……
Every advanced manufacturing nation offshored its manufacturing subsequently…..and thereby enhanced the living standards of huge swathes of the rest of the world….whilst retaining standards of living at home.
In the Sixties, the U.S. was the place to be for living standards, supermarket shelves groaning with produce unavailable in Britain.
In the Seventies, U.S. Big Macs trounced Britain’s Wimpey hamburgers.
By now, Europe, and, in particular, London, is the place to be.
But our leaders since 1990 have gradually stuffed all that up……
Major, Blair, Brown, Cameron/Clegg, May, Bunter (and the Gumby Brothers Whitty, Vallance and Van Tam)…..
And we voted for them in our millions….
Democracy: the least worst system of government.
I preferred Wimpey. They had table service and proper tableware![🙂](https://s.w.org/images/core/emoji/15.0.3/svg/1f642.svg)
And the staff had those terrific paper sidehats very similar to those worn by the Royal Hussars.
I’m delighted that someone preferred Wimpey. I had my first Big Mac in 1976, driving across the U.S. (inevitably in a VW) washed down with a cool Bud……
Each to their own.