Britain is reliving the 1970s

Is Britain going back to the 1970s? Even under the Conservatives in 2022, the Financial Times was warning we were in danger of reliving that ‘relentlessly awful decade’. Since Starmer’s accession to power, the similarities have become only clearer.

Millionaire hotelier Rocco Forte drew the same comparison in the autumn, saying we’d ‘come full circle’ and that the new Labour government was ‘doing a lot based on socialism, but not a lot on common sense’. ‘They talk about growth, but everything they’re doing is anti-growth,’ he added. Broadsheet newspapers warn us that the return to ‘stagflation’ – that perilous mash-up of high inflation and stalling development – is taking us right back to the dismal era of Heath, Wilson and Callaghan. Dipping into accounts of the 1970s – Alwyn Turner’s Crisis, What Crisis? or Dominic Sandbrook’s masterly two-volume history, State of Emergency and Seasons in the Sun – you can see they have a point.