Alwyn W. Turner

Books on the 1970s tend to divide between serious history and fluffy pop culture nostalgia. Crisis? What Crisis? brings the two strands together in a survey of ‘the high politics and low culture of the times’. This political and social history of Britain in the ‘70s pays particular attention to how the events and issues of the decade were reflected in the films, sitcoms, soap operas, popular novels and pop music of the era.

Britain in the 1970s has often been characterised as a decade-long collective nervous breakdown: strikes, the Three-Day Week, power cuts, mass unemployment, runaway inflation and IRA bombs. All this and the Bay City Rollers. Turner’s book suggests that this common characterisation is something of a caricature. He cites research carried out in 2004 by the New Economics Foundation based not on GNP but on ‘the measure of domestic progress’ - including such factors as crime, family stability, pollution & inequality of income. The startling conclusion of the survey was that Britain was a happier country in 1976 than it had been in the 30 years since.

He also points out that the 1970s was something of a golden era for British television, popular fiction and pop music. Having grown up in ‘70s Britain myself I can attest to the truth of Turner’s assertion that it was a great time and place to be young and not in the least depressing or dreary. A time when left-field ideas entered the mainstream and challenging dramas by the likes of Harold Pinter, Dennis Potter and Alan Bennett were shown even on commercial television.

The ‘70s was the decade in which the post-war consensus of full employment and the welfare state began to fracture. Many contemporary expert commentators thought that strike-torn Britain was on the verge of a socialist revolution. This book suggests that if the experts had been watching more popular television they might have been less surprised when the revolution eventually came from the Right in the shape of Margaret Thatcher. There were very few left-wing characters in popular sitcoms, for example, but they were replete with proto-Thatcherites: Basil Fawlty, the seedy landlord Rigsby from Rising Damp and Alf Garnett (intended as a satire on bigoted and reactionary attitudes working class Tory Garnett inadvertently became the idol of the reactionary bigots he was created to lampoon).

The myth of the rebel was widespread in the popular culture of the period with rule breaking detectives on the box and rule breaking footballers on the pitch. It was instructive to be reminded by Turner that, when she became leader of the opposition in 1975, Mrs Thatcher tapped into this mythology. She was admired by many as a rebel against both the old Tory establishment and the perceived new establishment of trade union leaders and bureaucrats.

Given the prevalent disunity it’s no surprise that people took refuge in nostalgia with the spirit of the Blitz being evoked in comedies like Dad’s Army (repeats of which can still be seen pretty much every day on British television. And a good thing too - it’s wonderful). Perhaps paradoxically Thatcher’s radicalism drew on this nostalgic mood. She made a strong appeal to all those who wished to return to the - entirely mythical - united and law-abiding Britain before multiculturalism, counterculture, football hooliganism and the permissive society.

The idealism of the ‘60s had not completely disappeared by the start of the ‘70s. In fact, a number of radical and progressive movements such as gay liberation, feminism and environmentalism first entered mainstream consciousness during the decade. The environmental movement found fictional expression in the amiable sitcom The Good Life. Jack Gold’s groundbreaking television film of Quentin Crisp’s autobiography The Naked Civil Servant was a welcome departure from the usual cliched portrayals of gay men of the time. Glad To Be Gay, by the Tom Robinson Band, became a hit record despite being banned by the BBC and subsequently airbrushed out of history by the Guinness Book of British Hit Singles.

Robinson was active in Rock Against Racism an alliance of punks and politicos which did much to neutralise the emergent neo-fascist National Front. Altogether less honourably, Margaret Thatcher also played her part in sidelining the Front, by echoing much of its poisonous rhetoric with her odious talk of Britain being ‘swamped by people with a different culture’.

Turner’s book is wide-ranging and eminently readable. He stays on the right side of the history/nostalgia divide and skilfully weaves together the fact and fiction, the politics and pop culture. Still, reading it I couldn’t help thinking that no history is as ancient as that of the popular culture from the day before yesterday. Who or what were: George Roper, Meg Richardson, The Likely Lads, Margo Leadbetter, Jack Regan, Hughie Green, A Bouquet of Barbed Wire, Hilda Ogden, Upstairs, Downstairs, Kendo Nagasaki, Brentford Nylons and Blake’s 7? If you don’t know, you probably didn’t live in Britain in the 1970s.… (mehr)

I went up to uni in 1997, the year Radiohead released OK Computer, cinemas were showing The Full Monty, ‘Candle in the Wind 1997’ seemed to live permanently at Number 1, and Tony Blair became the first leftwing leader to have won an election in my lifetime. All things considered, it was a good time and a good place to be growing up and dealing with the perennial teenage concerns of artistic discovery, sexual frustration, and political disillusionment. Now, twenty years later, I'm still processing the slow-burning bewilderment of realising that my instincts about society and the wider world, which I thought represented a baseline universal common sense, are actually the products of a very specific environment.

My own feelings about the mindset of that environment are, as it happens, perfectly captured by an anecdote that Alwyn Turner borrows from David Baddiel.

In 1990 the comedian David Baddiel went to a screening of John McNaughton’s harrowing, low-budget film Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer, which had been made in 1986 but but still hadn’t been passed for general release. During a panel discussion that followed the showing, an audience member began railing against the extreme violence in the movie, about which, she said, she had received no warning. At which point another member of the audience interrupted her: ‘For fuck’s sake, what did you expect?’ he called out. ‘It’s not called Henry the Elephant, is it?’ Baddiel was convulsed with fits of laughter, and later reflected: ‘I think it was at that point that the eighties fell away for me, or at least that seriousness fell away for me, seriousness as in that adolescent, or post-adolescent, concern about everything. I was never going to be intense again.’

The 90s were a time when no one really took anything seriously. This was its greatest strength – self-importance, national crises, personal anxiety and gender disagreements were all found to dissolve under the application of an intelligent irony – but also, perhaps, the decade's most unfortunate legacy: my generation had the sense that things were slowly but steadily getting better without our direct involvement, resulting in a political disengagement whose consequences are now becoming distressingly obvious.

The complacency came from an eerie sense of accord – or at least impasse – in both culture and politics. There was no equivalent, in Britain, of the culture wars that were so convulsing the US during the 90s. Both left and right broadly agreed on the inevitability of a certain social liberalisation – equal opportunities for women, access to birth control, the normalisation of homosexuality were all things that were not seriously opposed except by a few religious leaders whose irrelevance felt increasingly obvious. The political parties had come together in an indistinguishable middle-ground (commentators afterwards talked about ‘Blajorism’); unlike, say, France, where the Communist Party and the National Front still contributed hugely to public debate, there was very little support in the UK for parties on the political extremes.

This was, of course, in many ways a problem. Labour were voted in by a population desperate for an alternative to the sleaze-ridden Tory ‘nasty party’. What they got was a slick rebranding of the same basic economic, and even social, policies – what's more, in dumping John Major for Tony Blair they had swapped a working-class boy who'd left school at sixteen for a middle-class career politician educated at boarding school and Oxford.

Turner clearly sympathises with Major, presented here as basically a decent politician trying to lead a party of squabbling bastards. Blair, meanwhile, is seen as a ‘political salesman’, who ‘presented [the public] a mirror, rather than becoming an architect of change’.

At one point in the mid-nineties, it seemed that a new Tory MP was caught shagging his secretary or getting taken up the arse on Clapham Common every other week: seeing these cases summarised one after the other here gives them a decidedly comic effect, like flicking through a Viz strip. Some of the details seemed very British: after culture minister David Mellor was forced to resign, an actress having sold her story of their affair to the tabloids, European partners were completely bemused. ‘An affair with an actress?’ puzzled the former French culture minister, Jack Lang. ‘Why else does one become minister of culture?’

Alan Clark, meanwhile, went right through disgrace and out the other side into grudging respect, when it turned out that he had not only slept with the wife of a South African judge, but also both of her daughters. ‘I still think he's super,’ said his own wife. ‘I know he's an S-H-one-T, but that's it.…Quite frankly, if you bed people that I call “below-stairs class”, they go to the papers, don't they?’

When Labour finally got in, though, they weren't much better on the sleaze front. Most infamously, Peter Mandelson had to resign from the Cabinet in disgrace, only to be reappointed some months later to a different Cabinet position, from which he then had to resign in disgrace over a second, separate incident. (Somehow, the fuckers got away with appointing him to yet a third Cabinet post.) Labour's ties to big business always played a role; the party, Turner suggests, had ‘a dangerous attraction to affluence’.

I've already written too much elsewhere about the whole ‘new lad’ phenomenon; Turner, who is extremely good on the subject, pinpoints it as ‘a slightly muddled, slightly disappointing compromise, a way of helping to negotiate a transitional period’ as the British patriarchy resignedly surrendered its more obnoxious privileges. Martin Deeson, Loaded's first editor, described his readership as men who were ‘slagged off by feminists but egalitarian by inclination’ – the general attitude appeared to be that men welcomed the prospect of having more women as ministers, leaders and CEOs as long as some of them occasionally allowed themselves to be photographed in their knickers, in a spirit of communal relations.

I think it's not unfair to claim that people my age were more puzzled than outraged by the idea that men and women were anything other than equal – it seemed anachronistic, something for an older generation. It was naïve, but then we grew up in a state headed by a queen and overseen by a female PM; as Cool Britannia kicked in and the right-on politics of the 80s started feeling increasingly silly, the sense was that men and women liked each other, fancied each other, and considered ourselves to be fundamentally on the same side. And in typical 90s style, nothing was really serious anyway, everything mediated through a wicked sense of humour. Imagine our surprise as internet culture enveloped us in our early twenties, and we found the conversation dominated by people our age for whom basic truths were the loci of vicious disputes, characterised by entrenched political opposites and what looked like gender warfare. It was, and is, confusing, dispiriting and toxic.

Just as peak ’60s came in 1969, when the Sixties dream was already rotting, so too peak ’90s, which I'm calling 1997, was also the year when everything was falling apart. In August, Princess Diana went flying into a pillar under the Pont de l'Alma at 100 km/hr, and suddenly the country was caught up in a hysterical outpouring of mass emotion – tears in the streets, memorial fountains, acres of soft toys and flowers. The British public were full of unaccustomed feelings, and anyone getting in the way was going down.

A Sardinian tourist was…spotted taking a teddy-bear [from the displays of condolences] and was arrested after members of the public gave chase; he was given a seven-day sentence, later reduced to a £100 fine, and on his way out of court was punched in the face by a 43-year-old man who later explained: ‘I did it for Britain.’

Newspapers, in fact, were caught on the hoof somewhat, having made a fortune from promoting the idea that Diana was someone to be leered at or sneered at. In the US, the National Enquirer backpedalled with impressive alacrity:

We apologise for the Princess Diana page one headline DI GOES SEX MAD, which is still on the stands at some locations. It is currently being replaced with a special 72-page tribute issue: A FAREWELL TO THE PRINCESS WE ALL LOVED.

In describing all this, Turner is acute enough to take note of ‘the confusion of a generation that found its sense of irony had become out of date overnight’. Perhaps Tony Blair is emblematic of that shift, too – with his constant assurances that ‘I'm a pretty decent guy’, he was a black hole of irony, a walking grinning embodiment of shiny surface with no substance underneath. ‘It's the signals that matter, not the policy,’ he actually said. When he realised that this didn't impress anyone – as Turner puts it – ‘Blair's interest seemed to wander away from the home front and onto the world stage’. And with what consequences. The decade in that sense really ended when the towers came down in 2001, at which point the ironic detachment of the 90s ended, we all grew up, and Tony, squinting into the middle distance, glimpsed his chance to leave a lasting legacy.… (mehr)

Margaret Thatcher’s association with a decade of British politics remains a feat unique in modern times – no other politician had the longevity or personality to dominate a decade quite as she did. As such, though it’s structured to cover a single decade much as Turner’s other books are, it’s an admirably coherent account and an entertaining gallop through what remains a controversial decade.

Turner’s approach is similar to that of Dominic Sandbrook’s, though his use of longer timescales means he’s not quite as thorough. His political history is logically structured; one section for each of Thatcher’s three terms in office. The effect of the policies is reflected through both reportage and popular culture, often using the most incongruous of shows or books to illustrate his point. This use of pop culture gives Turner’s narrative colour and brings reactions to this most controversial of administrations to life. Given the left wing nature of many in the creative arts this means that the book won’t be to the taste of too many Thatcher supporters – Turner’s often highly critical of the government and its policies and creditably wary of the dangers of a government with effective carte blanche to ignore any opposition. The theoretical point of Parliamentary democracy is to provide checks and balances to ensure properly considered legislation; the regimes of both Thatcher and Blair illustrate the dangers of what happens when one side dominates so strongly. Mind you, the factionalised Labour party don’t come off much better; nor does the mildly tragic figure of David Owen. The question of what might have happened if the internal politics of the Labour party had been less vitriolic is raised but never quite states the logical conclusion that the Tory domination of the 80s was down to the SDP splitting the anti-Thatcher vote to no good effect, by their very existence ensuring the dominance of an ideology alien to them. So Thatcherism: Blame David Owen. At least we got some great music, literature and TV out of it.… (mehr)