A Far Larger Picture

Peter Hitchens writes:

A lot of people would be very happy to go back to the 1970s. The Tories should be careful about saying that Andrew Burnham will return us to those years. He can’t and won’t, but if people get the idea that he can and will, a lot will vote for it.

As someone who lived through that decade, I tire of Thatcherite hardliners going on about the three-day week, flying pickets, union barons and unburied bodies.

This is not because these things did not happen. They did. I reported a lot of it. It is because they are a tiny part of a far larger picture.

Other shocking features of the times were that almost everyone walked out of school into a job; that the streets were peaceful and patrolled by the police; that you could keep a family and house them on one income; that most of the things you ate and drank or used were grown or made in Britain; that if you got into university you weren’t forced into lifetime debt.

Broken families were much rarer, education better, drugs unusual. In many ways it was a pleasing, comfortable era. It wasn’t wrecked by wicked unions, though there were some stupid and foolish strikes. The real problems began in the 1960s, when the first great wall of inflation hit this country. Much of that was cooked up by the USA’s huge spending on war and welfare.

The slippery Harold Wilson also devalued the pound, slashing its value by 14 per cent but claiming falsely that ‘the pound in your pocket’ would not be affected. I remember him telling this lie on black-and-white TV. It was part of a great ruinous global earthquake, a lot of it caused by the huge costs of the stupid Vietnam War (nearly as stupid as our current wars in Ukraine and Iran). Some things we did made it worse, especially joining the Common Market and relaxing wise limits on debt. Yes, it was often dangerous and destructive to go on strike, and seldom did much good, but most of those who did so were only trying to win back some of what raging inflation had cost them.

Inflation was horrible for anybody on a small income or a fixed pension. At the start of it, when we still had our lovely old currency, the prices of things in shops and markets would have been recognisable to an Englishman of the 1660s. At the end, all prices were mad, as they have remained ever since.

I recall very clearly the day in 1973 when those relatively contented days ended for good. My wife (as she then wasn’t) and I had spent a beautiful early October day punting on the river in Cambridge, and took the train back to London, where we were staying for the weekend – to find that, while we had been lazing in the sun, war and misery had struck in the Middle East.

The Yom Kippur War, the fourth major Arab-Israeli conflict, had broken out at lunchtime that day and would lead, much as Donald Trump’s Iran adventure is leading now, to rocketing oil prices and the world we know. For me, the planet visibly darkened and I do not think it has ever fully recovered the light-hearted sunlit feel it had that long-ago afternoon.