I took jobs at Unilever’s soap factory in Port Sunlight, Merseyside in a cake factory as a hospital ward orderly and I joined the Women’s Royal Army Corps for a while. I n 1970, I was travelling the country researching my book A Working Life. It was a goodbye to John Maynard Keynes’s generous social democratic state and hello to Friedrich Hayek’s desire to let the market rip Thatcher kept his book The Road to Serfdom in her handbag to waggle at her cabinet. Her political tribe used all their media power to expunge inconvenient 70s memories that didn’t fit her narrative, as surely as Stalin purged Trotsky from the photographic record. And that victor was Margaret Thatcher, whose 1979 election conquest sought to uproot, marketise and diminish the role of the postwar state. So why does history record the 70s as nothing but a time of strife, shortages, hyper-inflation and decline? Well, it’s because history is written by the victor. Radical feminists locked me in at an angry meeting, demanding the Guardian back abortion of all male foetuses But that’s not why I reject any comparison to Boris Johnson’s Brexit-stricken regressive and corrupt era. True, we all construct our own pick’n’mix memorabilia and there’s a risk anyone my age will pine for the decade when they were in their 20s. It’s an image that obscures the radical social changes and great progressive leaps forward that took place then. Most 70s imagery is a deliberately manufactured caricature, with its garish wallpaper and avocado suites, an ignored time zone between the swinging 60s and glitzy greed-is-good, big bang, big hair 80s. But the decade shouldn’t be defined by this, or by 1978-79’s “winter of discontent” strikes, a brief but pungent time of rubbish uncollected and (a very few) bodies unburied by council gravediggers. True, I did queue at the coal merchant’s to fire up an ancient stove for lack of any other heat or light. Folk memory preserves only the 1974 three-day week the miners’ strike blackouts, with no street lights and candle shortages the embargo that quadrupled the price of oil. No, nothing like it not history repeated, not even as farce – just a stylist’s pastiche, as bold as the wallpaper I’m posing in front of here.
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