I Wish I Were Eighty Again
Q ueueing for petrol, I plough on the radio and there are Abba, singing their latest hitting. Shortages on shop shelves are headline news, with warnings of a panic-buying Christmas. And national debt is heaven high. Just this isn't the 1970s; it's 2021. People who weren't built-in then have been calling this a render to that decade. At that place are similarities, of course: this retro-idea was sparked past the recent petrol queues, people as frantic to fill up to become to work every bit I remember back then. Elsewhere, flowing floral midi dresses are back, just similar the ones I wore; Aldi is selling rattan hanging egg chairs; and, every bit well as Abba, the charts have been topped past Elton John. Merely is this really a 1970s reprise?
No, nothing similar it; not history repeated, not even as farce – only a stylist'south pastiche, equally bold equally the wallpaper I'm posing in front of here. Folk memory preserves only the 1974 three-day week; the miners' strike blackouts, with no street lights and candle shortages; the embargo that quadrupled the price of oil. True, I did queue at the coal merchant's to fire up an aboriginal stove for lack of whatever other heat or light. But the decade shouldn't be divers past this, or by 1978-79's "winter of discontent" strikes, a brief but pungent time of rubbish uncollected and (a very few) bodies unburied past council gravediggers.
Almost 70s imagery is a deliberately manufactured extravaganza, with its garish wallpaper and avocado suites, an ignored time zone between the swinging 60s and glitzy greed-is-good, big bang, large hair 80s. Information technology'southward an image that obscures the radical social changes and great progressive leaps forward that took place then. Truthful, we all construct our own pick'northward'mix memorabilia and there's a gamble anyone my age volition pine for the decade when they were in their 20s. Merely that's not why I reject whatever comparison to Boris Johnson's Brexit-stricken regressive and corrupt era.
And then why does history tape the 70s as nothing but a time of strife, shortages, hyper-inflation and pass up? Well, it's because history is written by the victor. And that victor was Margaret Thatcher, whose 1979 election conquest sought to uproot, marketise and diminish the function of the postwar land. Her political tribe used all their media power to expunge inconvenient 70s memories that didn't fit her narrative, equally surely as Stalin purged Trotsky from the photographic tape. Information technology was a farewell to John Maynard Keynes's generous social autonomous land and hi to Friedrich Hayek's desire to let the market place rip; Thatcher kept his book The Road to Serfdom in her pocketbook to waggle at her cabinet.
I north 1970, I was travelling the country researching my book A Working Life. I took jobs at Unilever's lather factory in Port Sunlight, Merseyside; in a cake mill; as a hospital ward orderly; and I joined the Women's Royal Army Corps for a while. Working as a switch-cable operator in 1 of the xi Lucas motorcar parts factories in Birmingham (all at present closed), I watched a strike by our foremen and charge hands, who were trying to restore their differentials – the extra pay they received above those they supervised. Past the 2d day, 19,000 car workers were laid off, so just-in-time supply chains were fragile even and then. However, unions were simply striving non to fall behind a rate of inflation that later soared to about thirty%; the reality I saw was unrecognisable from the "grasping workers" vilified in the anti-union Tory press (Rupert Murdoch had bought the Dominicus the year earlier). Union membership peaked at 13m past 1979. Now less than half as many vest. Strong, 70s-way unions would never have let this current goose egg hours gig economic system destroy rights that had been difficult-earned back then.
Here's another crucial contrast. Expect at the relative ease with which Edward Heath's Conservative government took the country into Europe in 1973, a movement confirmed in Labour'south plebiscite two years later on a 67% to 33% vote. Yet at present we're out, a country adrift and wrenched apart by an begrudging Brexit.
For all the turmoil, U.k.'due south autonomous institutions never buckled. At present they come under greater threat from the prime government minister himself, who assails the powers of regulators, judges, scrutiny committees and all the checks and balances of our unwritten constitution. He sends in his civilisation warriors to spearhead "a war on woke". Only for my friends and me, "woke" began in 1970 with Germaine Greer'southward The Female Eunuch, an electrical daze of awakening. Spare Rib and Gay News heralded liberation for millions more than. Each new iteration of activism rolls those freedoms frontward, as #MeToo energises a new generation to break silence on sexual harassment by bosses. Dorsum then, I'k agape, we wearily fended off beware-the-stationery-cupboard lecherous gropings, regarding them as part of women'south working life.
I joined the Guardian'southward women'southward page in 1977 when the peachy and funny writer Jill Tweedie broke every mould, challenging every assumption, including those of SCUM, the Social club for Cutting Up Men, pretty much a one-woman cause by Valerie Solanas. Jill never dodged the dilemma of "liberation" from men we loved and lived with: she had lost two children stolen abroad by an abusive married man. Her influence sometimes shocked her: a woman called her in the Guardian office one solar day from a public phone box, saying: "Right, I've left my husband. I'm in a caravan with my children, what do I do at present?" Feminism was e'er plagued by rifts: Jill and I were locked in at an angry meeting by radical feminists threatening not to release us until the Guardian backed abortion of all male foetuses. At present, I tear my hair out over the latest feminist arguments over trans issues.
How far have we come? Never far plenty. Of demands drawn up at the first National Women's Liberation Conference in 1970, there is still no equal pay or opportunity, no abortion on demand, or free 24-hour nurseries. Despite some land help, Britain still has some of the most expensive childcare in the developed world, costing parents more than their rent or mortgage, often for poorly trained staff paid a pittance.
The showtime women's refuge opened in 1971 – simply 80 women a twelvemonth are still murdered past a partner or ex-partner in England and Wales. When I worked in a Wimpy bar one-half a century ago, no single women were immune in after midnight: those who were unaccompanied were presumed to be prostitutes. Information technology could be hard to become served in a pub. Some things slide backwards: as I buy presents for my newest granddaughter, I detect the pinkification of "girls'" toys has got worse since my daughters were small: there were no pinkish space hoppers. Children are more than shut in now, parents too afraid to let them roam, more than broken-hearted nearly threats of every kind, from strangers to impure food. In that location were e'er a thousand ways to brand mothers miserable: in 1975, only 57% of women worked, with rightwing papers running a drumbeat of spurious enquiry on the damage done to children to brand working mothers guilty, often wheeling out John Bowlby'south "attachment theory". Now women's employment stands at 78%, simply with the absolute necessity of ii incomes to continue an insanely expensive roof over the family unit, total-time work and lack of childcare feels less similar liberation for many.
Newly married in 1970, aged 23 with a total-time chore, when I bought a washing auto I needed my married man'south signature on the hire buy agreement. The rampant misogyny and racism of "jokes" in 70s TV comedy has made some of those programmes unrepeatable. The "political-correctness-gone-mad" brigade should be fabricated to watch the revolting Benny Hill chasing bikini-clad immature girls, or the sitcom Listen Your Linguistic communication, with its riot of immigrant jokes in a night school form, to capeesh how Labour's Equal Opportunities Commission and Race Relations Lath in 1976 began the long, slow culture change. For all the Enoch Powellite anti-immigrant racism, it was a decade that saw more people immigrate than immigrate. As feminists, we thought Barbara Castle's 1970 Equal Pay Deed and the Sex Discrimination Act would fix everything, just here nosotros are, still fighting quondam battles. 3-quarters of mothers say they face discrimination at work for being pregnant, with shocking cases of sackings and demotions from the Pregnant Then Screwed campaign. Some glass ceilings shattered through that decade: the Old Bailey got its outset adult female judge in 1972 and now in that location are equal numbers, but yet but 28% of academy professors are women.
By the 70s, the worst brutalities of childbirth were catastrophe: Sheila Kitzinger had rebelled against enforced pubic hair shaving and giving nativity with legs strapped upwards in stirrups. I had my showtime 2 children in the 70s, and I worked as a ward orderly in a maternity ward in a run-downward infirmary, and it's hit that women had kinder care and attention then. A full week in hospital was a blessing for many, and health visitors were closer at hand for everyone. My daughters were turfed out within hours of their children being born and, compared with 2015, in that location are a third fewer wellness visitors, leaving them to struggle with incommunicable caseloads.
A corking landmark of the decade was Harold Wilson'southward Open Academy. With its commencement students starting in 1971, it offered second chances, specially to women, and is now Uk's biggest university by far. Women's new freedom and opportunity helped triple divorce rates in the 70s: better kid benefits fabricated escape easier. But the penalty for unmarried parenthood is higher now, with 49% of children in alone-parent families living below the poverty line, according to the Child Poverty Action group. We accept more things at present, but many more children are left exterior the consumer society.
Now, culture is on a climate pocketknife-edge, but then world-catastrophe fear focused on nuclear war. Alert at extinct species and ecology pollution was rife, but business organization could be gently laughed at in the Surbiton of 70s sitcom The Practiced Life. I was keenly enlightened, because my father, a millenarian by nature, founded an sick-blighted agricultural district in Monmouthshire in the 70s, designed to exist cocky-sustaining. He used to wag a finger at me and my city ways, warning I'd come crawling to their door begging for cabbages when my unsustainable lifestyle caught up with me. The venture collapsed in 1979.
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For a family on the left, with a relaxed attitude to sex, I don't think there was whatsoever greater gap betwixt my parents and me than between me and my children and they and my grandchildren. I went on an anti-Vietnam war demo with my father, and pro-Eu membership and climate protests with my grandchildren. But I run across how each generation has a greater sensitivity on race, gender and privilege, which I find encouraging. Here's the greatest generational difference: we boomers had it all in the 70s – free university, plentiful good jobs with pensions, inexpensive homes to buy, but none of those are at that place for millennials.
D on't exist tricked past faux parallels between the 70s and now. Look at the hard economic facts: in the 70s, Great britain reached its most equal betoken e'er in pay and wealth. In a century-long trajectory, super-taxes and inheritance taxes had gradually eroded the mega-incomes of the rich to pay for a growing welfare state with pensions, benefits and the NHS. That's how my generation was taught O-level social history: every bit a story of unstoppable progress from reforming factory acts, working and voting rights to a social security safety net. To understand the 70s, recall that the unions' struggle was well-nigh holding on to that progress confronting a tidal wave of inflation.
In 1979, that boxing was lost and everything went into reverse. The slump of 1980-81 caused by an farthermost thrift budget tipped millions, especially the young, into unemployment, which rose above xi%. Later on, deregulating the City blew the lid off top earnings, so the income and wealth gap widened astronomically. The victors' history tells a story of militant strikers making outrageous demands, designed to justify Thatcher's crushing of the unions and the deep inequality that has endured e'er since equally a result.
As I write, the number of people falling into poverty is growing rapidly, after universal credit cuts. Last calendar month's budget cemented the fact that pay – stagnant for the past decade – volition keep to exist so through the side by side.
I can run into why some look dorsum now, imagining the 2020s – full of political, economic and environmental doom – as a reprise of those times. Wait how many of that era's icons retain their cultural ascendancy. I've simply read John le Carré's posthumous bestseller Silverview, and I urge his 1974 classic Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy on my older grandchildren equally the best evocation of a cold war that framed our thinking and fears. Debbie Harry, even so magnificent when she goes to Glastonbury, Led Zeppelin's Robert Institute dorsum in the charts, ditto Nile Rodgers of Chic – 70s icons have been revived or never went away. Dorsum then, the Great britain could win Eurovision song contests, also, just a repeat of that feat seems unlikely at present that anybody hates us.
Style? The flowery dress I'm wearing for this photoshoot reminds me of Laura Ashley in her heyday, though her clothes strove to exist more authentic Victorian country print copies, with mutton chop shoulders, and I even had one with a hurry. Yeah, I had an egg chair, simply – equally Aldi shoppers will find – they're more for posing than comfort. And I did have one room with wallpaper that looked like fried eggs. Are these lurids really back in vogue? Not with me.
Only do refuse the rightwing trashing of the 70s as a time of "decline" and "failure", the Austin Allegro of decades. Thatcherites needed to invent that history to disguise their social vandalism and promote the myth of her glittering capitalist renaissance. Have it from me, and from all the social statistics: the 70s were a proficient time to be alive.
Source: https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2021/nov/20/are-the-2020s-really-like-living-back-in-the-1970s-i-wish-
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