Rotten, vicious times

A.N. Wilson recalls the worst decade of  recent history and the death throes of Old England

There was a distressing news story the other day about a man who did not declare his father’s death because he wanted, like a character in Gogol, to go on claiming his late parent’s benefits. The smell eventually alerted neighbours to what was going on. The person I pitied was the pathologist who performed the autopsy, eventually declaring that the man had died of natural causes. Presumably this verdict could only be reached after hours of prodding putrescent limbs and organs with a scalpel.

A similar feeling of pity arises when contemplating Dominic Sandbrook’s close scrutiny of Britain in the last five years of that terrible decade the 1970s. In the first chapter alone, one weeps for the young man, himself born in 1974 (ten days before the second General Election of the year which re-elected Harold Wilson) who has patiently watched so many episodes of The Likely Lads and Terry and June, read so many novels by Margaret Drabble, and waded through so many sociological texts informing him that ‘as late as 1973 a staggering 16 per cent of homes in the north of England still had outside toilets.