Back to the future?

With the economy in recession, the close attentions of the IMF, taxation rising to punitive levels and a general sense of our having lived beyond our means, reminders of the 1970s are all around us at present. Last week, both the death of the union leader Jack Jones and Alistair Darling’s extraordinary budget in their different ways took us back to the atmosphere of 30 years ago. Andy Beckett’s history of the political engagement of those years comes at a highly opportune time. He rightly focuses not on the familiar popular culture — there is no mention of flared trousers, the Osmonds, platform shoes or space-hoppers — but on the much stranger political landscape of the time. Some of it appears to be returning; and yet in the retelling, the decade seems so peculiar that you can hardly believe it ever took place at all.

Much of the history is, inevitably, concerned with Left-wing politics, both within institutions and on the street. The range of attitudes in what was supposed to be a single movement is wonderfully caught by Beckett in a vignette from 1971. The second National Women’s Liberation Conference was taking place in Skegness that October, and would give birth to the most famous of English feminist journals, Spare Rib. By coincidence, however, the National Union of Mineworkers was holding its annual conference in the same place. They were in the process of being radicalised by a young Arthur Scargill, and about to score one of their greatest triumphs over Heath’s government. Nevertheless, it seemed quite unexceptional to them to include, as part of the conference entertainment, a troupe of strippers. When the feminists next door got wind of it, ‘we zapped that and had discussions with the miners … I don’t think they were very happy about it.’