When the Lights Went Out - Andy Beckett



Seventies Britain feels like another country, and not just because I wasn't born until the very end of the decade. Andy Beckett rightly complains that it has been too easily caricatured as a decade of decline and perpetual crisis, even though by several measures Britain has never had it so good, either before or since. Nevertheless, it was a time of dramatic changes. When The Lights Went Out succeeds in its aim of painting a complex picture of the times.

Beckett's book is an unashamedly political history. If you're looking to find out about the career of Brian Clough or the transition from prog rock to punk you'll have to look elsewhere (sadly). But as a guide to the three-day week, entering the EEC, the IMF negotiations or the Grunwick strike, it is excellent. Social concerns do make an appearance at times but only insofar as they are political, as when Beckett convincingly argues that the Seventies, not the Sixties, were the real decade of progress in areas such as feminism and gay rights.

One of the big strengths of the book is the long list of interviews Beckett has managed to obtain, including many of the big hitters such as Ted Heath, Jack Jones, Arthur Scargill, Denis Healey and so on. Beckett weaves their stories cleverly into his text and his keen observation of their mannerisms adds value. It's just a shame that not everyone from the era is alive to be interviewed. On the downside Beckett wastes a lot of time musing about his own feelings as he travels around, though he doesn't let himself intrude on the text quite as annoyingly as, for example, Anna Funder did in Stasiland.

When The Lights Went Out is undoubtedly a Guardian writer's eye view of the 70s, but Beckett does his best to be even-handed, with Heath coming out rather better than Harold Wilson's tired second administration. The unions, too, are portrayed in a balanced way, with the faults on both sides described in each of the industrial disputes we encounter. But there is no hiding that the unions have become drunk with power by the end of the decade. You have to cringe when they then proceed to shoot themselves in the foot with the Winter of Discontent, directly leading to their comeuppance in the form of Mrs Thatcher.

Mrs T inevitably hangs like a shadow over the second half of the book (yes, I was surprised she can cast one too). It's interesting though how marginal her wing of the party seemed before she got into power, even after she became leader. Even more interesting is the revelation (for me) that there was a modest amount of continuity between the 1980s and the Callaghan government. Callaghan declared that the post-war Keynesian consensus was dead as far back as his maiden speech as leader, and by Labour standards he was a social conservative. Nevertheless, at the end of the book you still are left wondering what might have happened had Labour still been in power when the North Sea oil started flowing in earnest.


When the Lights Went Out: What Really Happened to Britain in the Seventies
by Andy Beckett
First published in 2009

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