The 1970s have made something of a comeback recently–in terms of interest, if not always reputation. This is partly because it was an unfashionable, “lost” decade, possessed of a depressing image in the shadows of its immediate neighbors and because the present economic crisis has made its difficulties relevant and brought them closer.Footnote ¹ The decade is ripe for revisionism, as well as for seeking lessons. And what ultimately emerges is not just an arc towards neoliberalism but a more fragmented picture, liberating in many respects–and which demands historians come to terms with the grim decline long associated with the decade.

Amid terrorists, strikers, streakers, scroungers, muggers, punks, and soccer hooligans, the 1970s were the apogee of decline. Not to mention unemployment, stagflation, energy rationing in 1974, three-day weeks, capitulations (by English soccer and cricket) to the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and Common Market. The dank, “declinist” colloquialisms (“cap-in-hand,” “sick man of Europe,” “winter of discontent,” “break-up of Britain”) piled up like uncollected rubbish. Political science keywords “ungovernable” and “overload” indicted governors, governed, and governance alike. Contemporaries mapped economic and cultural bankruptcy, and routinely wondered, Is Britain dying? Footnote ² This charged its meaning and reputation, as Turner puts it, as “a decade that could scarcely be mentioned without condemnation”(ix). For Forster and Harper it remains a “despised and misremembered” decade of “embarrassing kitsch and tastelessness … recalled only with uncomfortable humour and irony”(1). The sense of crisis was pervasive, as The Shock of the Global shows; whilst Beckett compares Britain to Weimar Germany–culturally lively but, only safe to enjoy nostalgically. He contends “the seventies,” as debating tools, are “two words that have won a million British political arguments”(1).

These books by journalists and academics offer a range of perspectives and approaches that capture the difficulties of the 1970s, of analyzing its complexities and distilling some essence from the pervasive feeling of failure. Most interest has come in journalistic and popular history oeuvres;Footnote ³ academic history has been warier.Footnote ⁴ Some of this tentativeness can be ascribed to the reflexive, autobiographical implications of such a recent period; part to waiting on the availability of original and official sources. Some historians' hesitancy was doubtless due to the sixties' appeal and unease that the familiar context of imperial Britain applied less than the domestic context (less India, more Indian restaurants).Footnote ⁵ Part was also a reticence at arbitrarily periodizing by decades and classifying them as eras. If strikes or soccer hooliganism typify the “seventies,” then the Wapping dispute (1986) and Heysel disaster (1985) are plausible end dates. Start dates for a “seventies era” were just as debatable since, as Harrison argues, “1970 does not mark a major break in British history”(XV).

This “decadology,” as Joe Moran has termed it, is part of popular and academic shorthand, a common fate of decades–something historians cannot just debunk, but have to account for. Naming an age around a reign, music, or politics is revealing, but unless there is a particular generational cohesiveness, a decade is a coinage whose currency can only be established ex post. The seventies’ image is adhesive across political stripes. Even to self-proclaimed iconoclast (then Trotskyist jobbing journalist) Christopher Hitchens, the “boring and constipated seventies” were a disappointment after 1968 and best escaped. They might be a victim of “epochalism” (Mike Savage's term), but there is no doubt that as an adjective, in popular memory and as a political invocation, the “seventies” has an unerringly, almost normatively, benighted reputation.Footnote ⁶

Often the 1970s get squashed–coopted into a “long sixties” of countercultural radicalism or cast as its unfortunate legacy moving more or less relentlessly toward its Thatcherite deliverance. For Geoff Eley, the decade was the storm center of a renarration of postwar national identity, destabilized by the 1960s and rendered more aggressively patriotic by the New Right.Footnote ⁷ Yet as Forster and Harper contend, “for a long time, the 1970s has been a sort of ‘Bermuda triangle' of historical analysis”(5)–the tumult of the 1970s, no less than its proximity, blighting it. It is taught less than adjacent decades. Even in recent, innovative rereadings of modern Britain–Edgerton's work on the state or Savage's tour de force of popular and sociological understandings of identity–the 1970s is stopped shy of. Yet palpably class (middle as well as working) was salient in the 1970s–rumors of its death greatly exaggerated.Footnote ⁸ Moran's nuanced interrogation of the emergent (consumerist-populism) and distant (declinist anxieties) discourses in the TV talent show Opportunity Knocks challenges “the simplifications of popular memory and political mythology” in tales of the decade.Footnote ⁹ Still, such simplifications require explication.

If the 1970s fits into a well-rehearsed narrative of postwar British history, the decade itself has an orthodox internal chronology of escalating problems, culminating in the denouement of the 1978–1979 strike pandemic christened the “Winter of Discontent.” But change the focus, and Lynne Segal, feminist-socialist coauthor of Beyond the Fragments argues that the decade's pejorative associations simply “didn't apply.” Gay rights, antiracist and feminist movements flourished. “The 1970s,” Segal writes, “were the best decade for women before or since.”Footnote ¹⁰ Britons' reported well-being peaked in 1976 and, counter-intuitive as this seems, Avner Offer has shown how post-1950s affluence bred a series of discontents cautioned against a straightforward economic measure of quality of life.Footnote ¹¹ Trends in political culture towards postmaterialism (a term and concept of the 1970s, in Ronald Inglehart's work) were exacerbated, not expunged, by Britain's economic slowdown. In 1975/1976 in the midst of the highest inflation since the Napoleonic wars, legislation was enacted on equal pay, sexual discrimination, race relations, domestic violence, and consumer rights.Footnote ¹² The 1970s have to be understood as more than just a shift to a more individualistic market society. Economic conditions did not determine its politics or culture, and how these spheres related was part of the period's flux. The New Right always extended beyond monetarism and antitrade unionism to a critique of permissiveness, moral decline, and issues of race and nationalism. The difficulties social democracy and trade unions faced were partly because of their own liberal instincts. In short, the 1970s were more varied, and thus understanding its renarration, its afterlife, can help unlock its history.

This has to be part of the equation because the usual gloomy picture of the 1970s can easily be reread as a democratic liberation for women or Scottish nationalists or in punk's creative energies. A new reading of the seventies reframes the travails of trade unions, which loom so large in the imagery and memory of the seventies. As legend has it, unions determined general elections, and their leaders were depicted as neofeudal “Barons” by their foes or as media folk-devils in cases like Derek Robinson, “Red Robbo” of the Longbridge British Leyland car plant, responsible for 500 stoppages, management alleged, between 1977 and 1979.Footnote ¹³ But they commanded devotional, almost messianic (in Yorkshire miner's leader Arthur Scargill's case) loyalty among militants.Footnote ¹⁴ Critiques of the defensive, conservative, masculine aspects of 1970s industrial unionism–a sort of recalcitrant, rigidly traditional working-class culture–were as loud amongst the New Left and social democrats as on the New Right.Footnote ¹⁵ Beyond the workplace, unions were hard to evade, from the Strawbs' 1973 hit “Part of the Union” to Mike Leigh's satire on aspirant middle-class mores Abigail's Party, a famous BBC television success in 1977 whose audience and impact were boosted by an ITV strike when it was first broadcast.

But it's not difficult to upset the narrative norm of economist militancy, strike-addled or bullying, greedy (and thus inflationary) unions out for their own sectional self interests. The 1971 Upper Clyde ship workers “work-in” aimed to demonstrate workers' skill to offset the dock closure and accusations of being work-shy. Neither the saga of the Shrewsbury Two (strikers jailed for campaigning for building-site safety) nor the 1974 Ulster Workers' Council strike against the Sunningdale power sharing agreement readily fits this story of self-serving unions. The North-West London photo-processing plant, Grunwick, saw nothing less than a battle for the right to unionize, led by immigrant women. Women's experience–also recently shown in the film Made in Dagenham (dir. Nigel Cole, 2010) about the battle at Ford for equal pay–is revising union history. Tara Martin has argued that for many women activists, notably in public sector service unions, the “Winter of Discontent” proved a “rite of passage” in promoting their agendas on the left. This all modifies the overwhelmingly male tale (in its standard telling) of heavy industries and masculine modes of confrontation.Footnote ¹⁶

The reputed power of unions, revisionists find, masked their defensiveness, typified by a vacuum between leaders and members and a powerlessness of limited policies and visions. Measures of industrial-relations problems like strike days had Britain mid-table in international rankings, and British management, which attracts distinctly less interest than unions, was hardly exemplary. The import of the “Winter of Discontent” in Colin Hay's analysis (which owes something to Habermas's mid-1970s concept of a “legitimation crisis”) was its rhetorical construction as a crisis that enabled a paradigm shift from current politics. The promulgation of an image of crises was a testament to the power of the tabloid media as much as of the emergent New Right to influence popular attitudes. The significance and legacy of the “Winter of Discontent” was its use thereafter by the media and politicians as an abridged summation of what was awry with the 1970s. Feeding off this imagery, no less than Thatcher, was Tony Blair's project to forge “New” Labour apart from the unions and statist “old” Labour of the 1970s. In the run up to the 1997 election, Blair promised, “We won't go back to the 1970s.”Footnote ¹⁷ This confers considerable agency to politics and the media. Harrison and Turner, on the other hand, see discontent with the 1970s emerging more organically from economic and other difficulties and reflected in popular culture.

So was the seventies’ reputation seared onto popular memory such that its image was more singular and definite after the event? If you didn't or couldn't remember the 1970s, you weren't allowed to forget it.Footnote ¹⁸ Still, this partial, partisan representation met a ready reception–it resonated with various political persuasions, and popularly as well. Was the overwhelming image of crises the common popular experience and perception of the seventies or a triumph of political will of the New Right and media? Unless the answer is unequivocally one of these options, then how and when this image of the seventies became hardwired into popular memory becomes a vital question. So too does understanding how the New Right and opinion-formers gave abstruse economic ideas currency as a popular political economy.Footnote ¹⁹ The debate raises questions about the image and reality of the 1970s, about the ordering and intimacy of interactions between economics, politics, public opinion, and culture (high and low)–and about the evidence, methods, and tools historians have to analyze this.

In Crisis? What Crisis? Turner contends that popular culture is as viable a source as any other for understanding the period. “Harold [Wilson] and Margaret [Thatcher] were important, but so too were George and Mildred,” the stars of an ITV sitcom (1976–1979) from which Turner reads much about class, suburbia, gender, and politics. This can be a pleasingly irreverent and evocative method, not only in its pop lyric chapter titles, but also in using Tom Robinson's lyrics from “Glad to be Gay” (banned by BBC Radio) to expose the hypocrisy of Mary Whitehouse's obscenity case against Gay News by highlighting the contents of Playboy and The Sun (xiii, 255). And it uses genuinely popular culture rather than the elite, youth, or more innovative varieties that historians are prone to substitute for it. But while TV soap operas and sitcoms, radio, film, sport, novels, and pop music are the book's standard fare, they serve as a sort of commentary on politics, illustrating what is ultimately a familiar story. Thus Crisis? What Crisis? is subdivided into three David Bowie-entitled parts, but chronologically these adhere to the Heath, Wilson, and Callaghan premierships. While part of Turner's mission is to describe how for his generation the 1970s were fun and to underplay the boredom that many contemporaries felt drove punks, Turner was not an uncritical fan, simply inverting the usual seventies blues. Although deeming it bereft of racist content or fascist contact, he notes Bowie's ill-judged, drug-and occult-driven dabbling in Nazi imagery (220–221).

My objection is not that Turner takes popular culture too seriously, but that its relationship to the wider society or politics is unspecified. This is despite the volume of thinking and writing on just such cultural forms, their reception, and relationship to popular attitudes that was characteristic of the 1970s in the output of, notably, Birmingham's Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) and affiliates such as Stuart Hall, Angela McRobbie, or Dick Hebdige.Footnote ²⁰ Turner's introduction suggests the radio phone-in was vital in democratizing media and opinion, but more often characters or plots in TV's top soap opera Coronation Street serve to reflect the travails of the middle class (in the demise of Ernie Bishop's photography business) or the authoritarian-matriarchal appeal of Thatcher (from behind the bar at the “Rover's Return”). Come the end of the decade, Turner deduces “all the indicators from popular culture” pointed to a Conservative victory. Such an intimate, politicized relationship with popular attitudes is assumed, not proven, and amounts to a post facto reading of the media to match political narratives. At one point he imagines a string of sitcom characters including George and Mildred (the exception being Citizen Smith of the Tooting Popular Front) trooping off to vote Conservative in 1979 (xiii, 127, 258).

An insular nation emerges from Turner and Beckett's accounts, but the edited volume, The Shock of the Global, takes on the familiar depictions of a troubled, orphan decade by contextualizing it as containing an emergent globalization. The shock was more a rupture with the immediate past, less the scale of the crisis itself. As Alan Taylor puts it, “today ‘globalization' is everywhere; in the 1970s it was mostly latent” (100). The core of this interpretation is international and economic but goes beyond the transition from managed economies (Keynesian corporatism and state socialism) to neoliberalism, to take in post-Bretton Woods currency markets, the liberalization of trade, China's market reforms under Deng Xiaoping, and the arch-diplomatic figure of Kissinger. And the volume's authors press their case for global impacts in more transnational veins: rock music, environmentalism, Islamic fundamentalism, the women's movement, Christian evangelicalism, human rights, and smallpox eradication. Political overload, terrorism, energy, millennialism, Left and Right critiques of statist corporatism, and stagflation are cadences recognizable to British commentators, underscoring how the challenges of the 1970s were not peculiarly British.

The authors also have an eye on the present crisis. As “the decade when autarky yielded to interdependence” (Ferguson, 20), the severity and propensity for crises was stoked, particularly as national sovereignty chafed with monetarist targets. The authors argue the economic and political crises of the 1980s were quantitatively greater than the 1970s but seemed less shocking, more part-and-parcel of neoliberal schema. Maier argues that 1973–1989 constituted a crisis of industrial society, the third global crisis of the century, and the first not to ferment a world war. He argues “a final lesson for social scientists and historians is not that crises are exceptional but that periods of relative equilibrium are” (47–48). Comparisons between today and the late 1970s reveal differences in content besides parallels in process, especially in their political construction. What seems absent in the current crisis are paradigm shifts from neoliberalism, despite the appearance that, in the guise of quantitative easing, Keynes was back in fashion. Whatever hints of a revival of seventies’ strikes or of the memes of its “austerity” lifestyles,Footnote ²¹ the mantra of “no return to the 1970s” and the economic orthodoxy of markets remains intact. The strongest parallel is with how the “noughties” era has become earmarked as a policy failure requiring stringency in public spending, just as blame during the 1970s was pinned on unions.

Ferguson unleashes a typically unabashed revisionist barrage of statistics. Deaths from terrorism and coup d'etats were lower than in the 1980s, and numbers living under democracy grew (having fallen in the 1960s) despite exceptions like Chile. In the UK and USA, unemployment, inflation, and growth were not consistently worse than the 1980s, and technological change, often the cusp of globalizing forces–from catalytic converters to video recorders and in-vitro fertilization–was unabated by stagflation. And he notes “Sunny Jim” Callaghan's infamous (media-concocted) soundbite, “Crisis? What Crisis?” was a rebuttal to a question about “mounting chaos” in January 1979, hinting that the crisis had not yet fully dawned (21). The question is then why such a sense of crisis was so current? Ferguson's answer is that for the 1970s’ generation of Anglophone academics (he uses Oxford historian A.J.P. Taylor as an exemplar) the impact of inflation, falling stocks and bonds, women's liberation, the power of unions, and youth culture bred a deep cultural pessimism. This can sound like Oxford gossip, but there is other evidence that the point has some traction. For example, the foreword to Labour MP Tam Dalyell's 1977 book Devolution: The End of Britain?, which (cast Northern Ireland as Britain's last colonial enclave and) predicted “yes” in answer to the book's title were a Scottish Assembly to come about, was written by Taylor's Oxford contemporary and rival, the right-wing historian, Hugh Trevor-Roper.

The Shock of the Global's global perspective is hardly comprehensive. By foregrounding political economy, the 1970s are essentially reduced to a familiar interpretation, as a prelude to the 1980s, heading fitfully yet inexorably toward globalized market liberalism. Were the Neocons, for instance, noticeably more global-minded than detentist? Few would use “autarky,” even relatively, to describe the global economy before the 1970s. Historians of capitalism or imperialism might be less impressed by the novelty of globalization. But there is much here to snap historians and others out of rather UK-centric explanations. Put another way, Britain might be seen as quite paradigmatic. If often used as illustrative of how the modern, industrial, imperial nation came about, then Britain's 1970s travails–the civil unrests of terrorism, multiculturalism, nationalism, and the role of the state, heritage, and myriad cultural contra-flows–might likewise illuminate the transition to a post-industrial society. Refuting Britain as exceptional then is precisely why local knowledge of it ought not to be ignored.

Parallels with the USA do impress. The neuroses of the Watergate scandal, New York City's 1975 bailout, withdrawal from Vietnam, and the oil crisis fed what became known as President Carter's “malaise” speech in 1979 (like Callaghan's “Crisis? What Crisis?” he did not utter the word). As in Britain, when they did consider it, US historians had tended to lose the decade between its neighbors or to cast it as one in which, as one study caustically proposed, “it seemed like nothing happened.” And a recent revival of interest has focused on explaining why a legacy of 1960s liberalism culminated in the rise of the New Right by 1980.Footnote ²² Jeff Cowie has vividly depicted male workers' marginalization during the decade. Patriotic and moral appeals to “authentic” cultural values challenged the politics of economic rights; country singers and seventies' Elvis were working-class heroes; TV and film likewise indulged wealth, nostalgia, and “good old boy” values. If there was a narrative for workers, it was, as in Saturday Night Fever, escape. The “profundity in the nothingness of the decade” obscured not just the unraveling of the 1960s Great Society, but also of the New Deal order. In postindustrial America, cultural and political anxiety trumped economic security. This work has retained a national focus, but profitably mixed interest in culture (like debates about disco) with a sense of how the New Right grassroots used what had seemed to be Left/sixties’ tactics and languages (notably of “identity”) and mobilized both economic and moral issues and religious support.Footnote ²³ In Britain's “culture wars,” the New Right had less impetus (hardly united by Thatcher's “Victorian values,” not to mention Whitehouse's harder-line Christianity) and made less headway on social and cultural than economic agendas.Footnote ²⁴

Harrison's study is the latest installment of the New Oxford History of England, although in practice it covers the United Kingdom. A sense of the seventies is evoked by a prose peppered with piquant observations from diaries and memoirs, and the strains (not least, globalization) and paradoxes of the period are conveyed in Harrison's almost encyclopedic range. The seventies was the heyday of motorway and shopping center construction, alongside the boom in heritage. Environmental movements and global bestsellers like Fritz Schumacher's Small is Beautiful (1973) sat alongside the salience of debates about heavy industry. Trade unionists defending free collective bargaining shared an “unholy alliance” with Thatcher's opposition to state income policies (151). Thatcher's anxiousness to shed the 1970s corporatism of Conservatives, and iconoclasm towards the Church, aristocracy, and universities clearly impresses. On popular culture, Harrison is less adroit–punk is given short shrift; disco, which outsold it massively, none at all. This is a risk in aspiring to a panoptic survey, but the lack of interest in Pink Floyd, rastas, or New Wave is disappointing, and to ascribe this deficit to the “serious lack of intelligent books about popular music” (607–608) might surprise writers on punk like Greil Marcus and Jon Savage.Footnote ²⁵ Not that the hallowed texts of cultural studies, like Hebdige's, are more adept at tying their particular interests and more official histories together.

Amidst often forensic detail, Harrison offers rare analytical insights. He is curiously uninterested in previous interpretations or newer rereadings of the period. There are broad themes (the role of the media, declining cultural standards, professionalization) and motifs (the legacy of the Second World War, a shrinking international presence but globalizing pressures, private affluence and public economic concerns, timesaving technology and rising pace of private life, rapid social changes in family life and sexuality, political stability, and detachment between politicians' ambitions and popular concerns). But there is less sense of their respective weight or engagement with concepts like postcolonialism or postindustrialism (or any concept definite enough to shed a post-prefix). The combined effect means Harrison can tend to replicate the extant historiography.

Harrison then betrays little nostalgia or re-reckoning but more of the grim pessimism the 1970s produced. Harrison's previous volume ends by counterpoising the optimism at the close of the 1960s with how “there were as yet few signs of the gloom that was about to descend.”Footnote ²⁶ In Harrison's unease with modernity, noise and modern architecture, and an empathetic lament for the splintering of political authority and respect, some might detect a whiff of the cultural pessimism Ferguson insists afflicted academics of the 1970s. Harrison believes that in “Britain since 1970 it is particularly necessary to stress politicians' importance and achievement” as their “difficult and delicate art” was “more depreciated and misunderstood than for at least a century,” their critics “cynical, irresponsible and ignorant.” His point is that politicians deserve credit as a stabilizing force, but he also concludes, “in these years… politicians acquired the appearance of influence only by adjusting themselves to trends that emerged spontaneously from the people at large” (XVII, 549).

This propensity to be bound by the seventies’ reputation is not unique to Harrison. Feminism, Habermas, Inglehart, sociology's interest in soccer hooliganism, CCCS work on race, media, subcultures, and theory, give a sense of new ideas circulating. Yet other than the economists, authoritarians, and libertarians of the New Right, all these seventies studies convey little of these new ideas and debates. The idea of “moral panic” popularized in the work of Stanley Cohen is absent, a perplexing omission given how it seems to knit together punk, inflation, and the period's crisis mentality. So, too, missing is Eric Hobsbawm's Forward March of Labour Halted?–now quite a period piece, albeit a prescient one, but then hotly debated among intellectuals and activists as the conventional wisdoms of Marxism and social democracy fractured.Footnote ²⁷

A journalist at The Guardian, Andy Beckett's focus is on politics. He is less concerned than Turner with decoding political indicators by sifting through popular culture because, he argues, politics was “obviously connected to everyday life” in strikes and power cuts (5–6). Beckett aims to capture not just top-level politics, but the dramas and alternatives of feminism, gay liberation, Trotskyism, antiracism, and the libertarian National Association for Freedom (NAFF) and not just the gray entropies of decline. Beckett's skill is in embedding the reader in the mindset, scenery, and the granular of the seventies. He interviews the founders of Rock against Racism, the architects of Milton Keynes, IMF officials, and all sides of the Grunwick dispute. He relates how Hull was brought to a standstill by striking road haulers, with food rationed and the city dubbed “Stalingrad” in the press. Beckett also has an eye for paradoxes, such as the militant class-warrior in Thatcher, whose memory was marked by Saltley Gates (the Birmingham Coke depot closed by Yorkshire pickets from the National Union of Mineworkers in 1972) as much as Scargill's. Her election victory in 1979 settled little and was part of an ongoing struggle, as initially the regime's authority was fragile and industrial conflict and economic problems intensified.

Beckett's other trope is visiting the remnants of 1970s sites. He visits Maplin Sands in Essex, the putative site for a new London airport (“Heathrograd” to skeptics), which became embroiled in debates about the environment and public spending and was killed off by the oil crisis. He visits Colville Houses in Notting Hill, a key locus of gay liberation and later of 1970s' squatting. But only in Scottish oil towns or on Belfast's Shankhill and Falls Roads does Beckett find faint residues of the 1970s, not erased, but exiled to memory. Hull's Transport and General Workers' Union HQ, Bevin House, had become a casino and restaurant, renamed Elba House. At Saltley he finds “poky new houses and dual carriageways” with the depot itself just “rusty brown rubble.” Evocative as this can be, Beckett's prose can tip into nostalgia. Beckett laments the loss of a politics “rawer and more honest” than during the “endless tranquilizing boom of the Blair era,” with Unions denuded and politics “shrunken … compared with the seventies” (5, 84, 520, 523).

Still, culture is hard to keep out of the seventies picture, and while at pains to depict its diversity, Beckett assumes a close relationship between culture and politics. He spots an authoritarian drift in police dramas like The Sweeney that spoke to the violence of picket lines and terrorism, and of disillusionment with liberalism. Sweeney's protagonists, Regan and Carter, appeared “like Hayek in a laddish brown leather jacket.” They were much the model for a recent BBC seventies retro-drama hit, Life on Mars, that reveled in gender and police roles sans “political correctness” and a criminal nostalgia current in the 2000s. He finds a related disenchantment in novels by Muriel Spark, Doris Lessing, and Margaret Drabble (whose 1977 The Ice Age is a favorite of historians seeking evidence of disaffection with modern England). Beckett lists those who turned to vote Conservative in 1979: former leftist MPs, journalists, writers, and trade unionists.Footnote ²⁸ One might add to the list the archetypal leftist academic, sociologist Howard Kirk, subject of Malcolm Bradbury's novel The History Man (1975) set in 1972, whose defection was appended to the 1981 BBC TV adaptation. Like Turner, Beckett argues such “straws in the wind” pointed to how “British popular culture was becoming more hospitable again to right-wing conservatism” (179, 286–287). Elsewhere he has noted that however much power cuts and strikes paint an austere visual of cultural life, the 1970s was typified by an abundance of fashions and designs. Being mocked as of questionable taste at least signified distinctive styles. Clutter and uncertainty were hallmarks of Abigail's Party. Winston Fletcher's verdict on British advertising was that these years saw “more creativity, more innovations” and top decade when Campaign awarded the century's 100 best ads; they saw the making of cultural studies as a discipline, and of style gurus like Peter York. Such consumerism, choice, and individuality Beckett predictably equates with a rightward lean in politics and suggested “the visual culture of the 1970s was ahead of the political curve.”Footnote ²⁹

The product of an Arts and Humanities Research Council project on 1970s British cinema, Forster and Harper's study takes culture as a whole, seeking to move beyond clichés of the period and to integrate high-, middle-, and lowbrow. Foster and Harper overlap with Turner's useful index of TV and films, but they display a more explicit commitment to “giving attention to forms which are the result of creative endeavour or political strife” and to exploring 1970s culture as “characterized by unusually permeable membranes between different cultural forms” (7–8). Their coverage includes Marxist theory (John Berger, Raymond Williams) and the initiatives of Welfare State International–a mix of New Ageism, situationism and Marcuse's ideas–in Burnley. Newspaper ownership, feminist magazines, representations of race, subcultural practice, self-sufficiency (not just the BBC's take on it, The Good Life), and modernist architecture offer plenty to engage the proverbially trendy History Man. More popularly, the authors discuss horror films, camp comedy, the pop magazine Smash Hits, and the Wombles (not the modern anarchists, but semi-animated puppets, read for debates about the environment, Europe, nationalism, pop, and subcultures).

An infectious enthusiasm can overwhelm these case studies. Not all are as deft at teasing out the significance that, notably, Jo Turney finds in domestic décor for wider matters of gender and sexuality. The volume's coverage is eclectic (Scotland and novels are notably absent), but perhaps that is the point. Forster and Harper hold that if it were possible to distill some cultural zeitgeist then “it would be particularly difficult to define it for such a varied and fragmented period as the 1970s.” They eschew any singular, linear relationship to the wider society, arguing there was a “profound disjunction between economic provision and levels of artistic production.” Rather, “the seeming chaos led to a sort of over-stimulus in artistic production” that involved a “restless push against old boundaries.” In sum, this “leads to art which may be messy and inconsistent, but whose vitality is beyond doubt” like 1970s’ Britain and like, it seems, the relationship between culture and politics. Culture then doesn't point in a single, clear (or necessarily political) direction. Foster and Harper argue that “many art forms” in the 1970s “exhibit a sense of fracture” and challenge a range of assumed meanings and relationships (8–9). Rather than the intimacy Beckett and Turner suppose, this fragmentation allows for a variegated culture–retro, forgotten, modern, and future markers. It allows for the weighty alternative culture to Thatcherism, but also for the welter of commentary on the apolitical nature of culture and consumerism in the 1980s.

Indeterminate as this argument seems, the ambiguities of this period are important. In the sense that they throw assumed relationships into relief and question uniformly malign narratives of a period that for many saw liberation and power not just crisis and decline. Relating economics, politics, and culture is complex when disorder and fragmentation seem the essence of what a recent commentary on the United States since the 1970s has termed an Age of Fracture.Footnote ³⁰ Together, these studies show a decisive, divisive period, unduly forsaken and unworthy of the reflex “moral panic” it can still induce today. A decade's character is as intangible and potent as concepts like national identity, and none more so than the seventies' Britain. As much as any prospect of the real seventies stepping into the light and clarifying whether there was a “crisis” or whether its creative tensions offset its ignominious press, these persistent associations merit inquiry–if not to enlighten its wretched reputation, then because its wretchedness can enlighten. How the seventies became a cliché serves to illustrate how decades acquire particular narratives, why these adhere, endure (or not), and how historians handle this. Illuminating the seventies then can illuminate much more than the subject itself.