I know the 1970s were the malaise decade for a lot of places, but the situation in the UK always seemed... malaisier than anywhere else. What was going on then? I see clips of children's shows from 1970s UK and a lot of them are just creepy and not age-appropriate.
Nothing worked reliably due to constant industrial action. We had a low-level civil war due to the IRA, with bombings being almost routine. We felt like we would be the first to go if the cold war went hot, due to the strategic importance of the radar base at RAF Fylingdales and the USAF base at Greenham Common. The decade was underscored by a pervasive fear of total societal collapse.
Interesting to see the three day week being blamed on industrial action. The industrial action was caused by workers losing spending power because of insane oil price inflation shocks. The government used this to cut public sector pay.
The shocks were caused by Arab-led OPEC objecting to US support for Israel in the Yom Kippur war, and the US was just as affected.
For some reason all of this has been written out of mainstream history. Everyone over a certain age remembers the miners, but no one remembers the oil rationing - or if they do, they assume the miners were somehow responsible for that too.
Ever since it's been used to justify wage suppression on the basis that Rising Wages Cause Inflation - which is very much not what happened then, and isn't the main cause of inflation now.
Plus as already mentioned the blackouts. I remember we had a camping gas stove, candles and paraffin heater to get us through those nights, plus hot water bottles (with water from the stove) for going to bed, because the whole house was cold.
I was born in 1966 and have been noting how much the 2020s feel like the 1970s in the UK: pessimism, inflation, industrial action and a feeling of decline.
I did not live through the 70s, and I'm not British, but I have heard people say the same about the US now. That there is a sense of exhaustion comparable to the 1970s.
If I could put on my sociologist hat, I would say it's due to demographics. The 1970s were the "trough of disillusionment" for the baby boomers as their youthful idealism faded, and we're seeing something similar as the similarly large echo boom generation ages.
Literally "Airstrip One"? Today the situation seems better: although the SLBMs are yank and the base is scots, at least the boomers themselves are english.
Also everything was owned by the government as a result of nationalization following WWII to get everyone working again. And while I believe that a certain level of socialism is necessary, having, for instance, every major British car company owned by the State resulted for the most part in some really boring, really shoddy vehicles, generally painted some grim shade of poo brown. (see also, Yugo, Lada, Trabant, etc)
As a kid that grew up in the 80s in the UK and caught the tail end of the educational videos mentioned in the article - the government of the day did use brutal imagery to try to instil fear in kids back then.
I remember explicit imagery of burns from fireworks and … a really nasty “educational” video about a kid who tried to rescue a frisbee from an electricity substation that then dies of electrocution.
We had also had a couple of decades of low-effort brutalist city-centre architecture by then, and our dull, dark, drab, grey weather complements the dull, dark, drab grey concrete to make a dull, dark, drab grey life.
From what I recall, the economy was in the toilet at the time too, there were rolling blackouts, general strikes and all manner of things just falling apart.
> I remember explicit imagery of burns from fireworks and … a really nasty “educational” video about a kid who tried to rescue a frisbee from an electricity substation that then dies of electrocution.
JIMMY!!! It was called Play Safe [1].
I’m not British but these videos were parodied in How TV Ruined Your Life by Charlie Brooker (creator of Black Mirror) so now they hold a special place in my heart. Wish I had the nostalgia for them though, they seem wonderful!
> From what I recall, the economy was in the toilet at the time too, there were rolling blackouts, general strikes and all manner of things just falling apart.
That's right, except the bit about "general strikes". There were flying pickets: workers would travel across the country to support strikes by workers in other industries, rather like football fans. But to the best of my knowledge, the only General Strike in the UK happened in 1926.
I have seen industrial training films from the 60s/70s/80s and they are horrifyingly/hilariously brutal. The 'best' one had some having someone having their (fake!) arm graphically torn off by a spinning lathe. I guess it got the message across though.
(there was MAD of course, but being young I had confidence then that people, being basically good, would figure out how to avert the Big One. Maybe it would help if we could all dial in to some computer network and type directly with one another? Surely that would usher in world peace!)
IIRC there were studies done on the effects of lead on people living near busy traffic areas, such as the spaghetti junction near Birmingham. It might be difficult to separate the effects of the lead from the effects of living near Birmingham though. ;0)
