Back to the future: what the turmoil of the 1970s can teach us today

Britain in the late 1970s was gripped by dark visions of socialist dystopias or racist authoritarian states. The old order was dying and the new was struggling to be born.

By Phil Tinline

A woman pushing a pram past derelict houses, Manchester, 1977. On the door behind her is an anti-National Front poster reading 'Don't be fooled, National Front is a Nazi front'. (Photo by John Bulmer/Getty Images)

British politics is in flux. Moderates are struggling. Radicals are confident. The public is divided; democratic institutions are under strain. The status quo seems on the verge of breakdown. Welcome to 1979.

Forty years later, our body politic presents some of the same symptoms that destabilised Britain at the end of the 1970s, as the Keynesian postwar settlement unravelled. Both 1979 and 2019 represent a moment in which one political orthodoxy is dying but the next is still struggling to be born. Today, while we wait to see what emerges from our long national stalemate, the Callaghan era and its fears of the near-future – expressed in essays, lectures and novels, to a soundtrack by the Clash and Joy Division and Siouxsie and the Banshees – might have something to tell us.