Faber & Faber

The 1970s are probably the most important and fascinating years in modern British political history. They encompass strikes that brought down governments, shock general election results, the rise of Margaret Thatcher and the fall of Edward Heath, the IMF crisis, the Winter of Discontent and the three-day week.

In When the Lights Went Out Andy Beckett looks at the decade afresh, and shows an era full of new possibilities as well as disasters and dead ends. In certain respects, things haven't changed too much - as the author explains in this Q & A ...

Q. Why did you decide to write this book?

I am 39 and became interested in politics in the 80s. People then were always talking about the 70s and what a terrible time it had been for Britain - strikes, power cuts, economic decline, political chaos. The 70s were always used as an excuse for whatever Margaret Thatcher's government was doing in the 80s, whether crushing the unions or making British working life tougher and more competitive.

During the 90s and into this century, this tendency to blame the 70s has become ever more entrenched in British politics - when Labour raised the top rate of tax last year it was instantly condemned by the Conservatives and most of the media as 70s-style class warfare. All this hostility to the 70s got me intrigued. Were things really that bad then? What did the 70s actually feel like? I decided to find out.

Q. You interviewed a lot of people for 'When the Lights Went Out'. Who did you find most interesting?

I saw Edward Heath just before he died. He was much self-critical than I expected about why his government from 1970 to 1974 ended up being destroyed by the three-day week and the miners' strikes. He also had a bit of an unexpected twinkle.

Denis Healey was good too: full of how he had saved the economy from decline as chancellor in the late seventies, long before Thatcher was elected, but also deliciously rude about Harold Wilson and Jim Callaghan, the two prime ministers he worked for. And he gave me a huge whisky before I got the train back to London.

I also talked to a lot of less famous people - former members of the Gay Liberation Front, ex-hippy activists, a few former truck drivers who effectively controlled Hull during the Winter of Discontent - because the 70s was a time when ordinary Britons got swept up into politics in far greater numbers than now. Some of them had their lives changed forever; others just went back to normal life after their political moment passed. But they made great interview subjects, as they were not interested in giving the polite version of what had they had done in the 70s.

Q. In May, it will be 30 years since Thatcher came to power. Do you think she rescued Britain from the dead-end of the 1970s?

No. By the time she was elected in 1979, some of the problems that had made the 70s such a stormy time - inflation, out-of-control government spending - were already beginning to be solved by the Callaghan government. And the 70s were not a political dead-end in Britain in other ways: it was a time full of new ideas about womens' rights, about race relations, about how politicians should respond to the new age of consumerism. One of Callaghan's senior advisors who I interviewed was even planning to privatize council housing in the late 70s.

Also, looking at Britain now, with our economic crisis, our fresh doubts about the free market, our reliance on Middle Eastern oil and our worries about terrorism and the environment, you wonder how many of the country's fundamental problems Thatcher really solved.

That said, she clearly did make Britain more of a confident, aggressive place. Nobody talks about national decline - at least, not yet - in the way that people did constantly in the 70s.

Q. What parallels do you see between the economic crises of that decade and the present situation?

Some of the early signs of the current crisis were very 70s: surging oil prices, high inflation, a bursting housing bubble, a return to mass unemployment. This year there have been more eeriely precise parallels: some British firms have put their employees on a three-day week to save their jobs, the Conservatives and the right-wing press have repeatedly warned that the government may need to call in the IMF and ask for a loan, as it infamously did in 1976.

The feeling of uncertainty and dread that everyone feels about the economy now is also very 70s. After the relative calm and prosperity of the last 15 years, we are again in a situation where paying attention to dry economic stories on the news seems like a good idea. The 70s were like that: tabloid front pages were full of pieces about companies going bust and the public sector borrowing requirement. But the banking dimension to the current crisis is new. There was a banking crisis in Britain in the early seventies, but not on the scale of the one now. We have Thatcher and New Labour's deregulation of the City of London to thank for that.

Q. Other than events in Westminster, the 1970s can be seen as a key time for emerging 'other' politics. Why do you think this was the case?

The 70s was the time in Britain when the 60s really happened for most people. Feminism, gay rights, the free festival movement, Rock Against Racism - such movements involved people all over Britain in the 70s, rather than a fashionable minority in London as they had in the 60s. This happened because a time of crisis like the 70s always energizes politically-minded people: they see the old order collapsing and they see an opportunity to create something in its place.

Also, by the 70s changes that had been going on in British society since the Second World War - mass immigration, more women working - had become so important that politics had to be reshaped to take account of them. White trade unionists who at the start of the 70s were not interested in or actively hostile to feminism and racial minorities were, by the late seventies, standing on picket lines to support striking Asian women workers in the famous dispute at Grunwick.

Q. Were the 1970s really that bad?

The seventies were not some utopia. Britain was more racist, sexist and homophobic than it is now. A lot of people found the dramatic politics of the time frightening rather than empowering. My book is not meant to be a simplistic polemic arguing that the 70s were actually a golden era - I want readers to get the texture of the period, the characters and the look of things, and the drama, not just a particular historical argument.

But the seventies were a time when people realized that politics mattered to their lives. Politics always does - who sets your taxes? - but often we don't realize. And some things about the seventies that seemed terrible at the time look less terrible now.

When unemployment reached a million during the Heath government, he basically changed his whole economic policy to deal with it. When Blair was prime minister unemployment was a million and a half and everyone thought that was a gratifyingly low number. If the current recession gets a lot worse, people may start to look back at the recessions of the seventies, and the struggles of politicians then to deal with them, with fresh eyes.