From the 1970s to the 2020s: déja vu all over again

Why do I feel I am reliving the 1970s? That was my first proper political decade after the warm-up excitement of being part of the 1968 generation at Oxford—student occupations, Vietnam, Paris, sex, drugs, Stones in the Park, rock’n roll.

The 1970s opened with a Balliol Boy prime minister—arrogant, a good speaker despite an odd accent, the darling of his party with a mission to take Britain into Europe.

Half a century later, we have another Balliol Boy prime minister —cocky, fluent, the darling of the new Ukipised Tory party with a mission to isolate Britain from Europe by all and any means.

We had energy shortages and had to use candles for light in the autumn and winter months. Now we have a petrol and diesel shortage. Drivers watch the sun going down as they wait in queues hoping for a few litres of fuel.

Then, the Gulf States and wicked Saudi Arabia were blamed. Today, it’s Europe—whose fuel tanker drivers are reluctant to work in a country where the government, press, and sadly, too many people in the street denigrate and disparage anyone with a European accent.

We had rising inflation and unemployment. Same today.

In the 1970s, rubbish piled high on streets in London. In the England of the 2020s there are empty shelves in supermarkets. Then as now, there was a run on sterling.

There were gruesome murders of 13 women. The Yorkshire Ripper, a rapist and killer, caused the biggest manhunt ever in British police history. Women in northern English towns were warned to stay indoors. Today, in south London, the police advise women to stay off the streets after two young women were raped and murdered, one of them by a serving police officer.

Travel to Europe was more awkward then. You could buy a paper passport in the Post Office for £1 if you didn’t have the thick black British passport that was too wide to fit into a shirt pocket. But you had to fill in a form about the amount of money you were taking out of Britain.

Now we have to go through expensive and pointless formalities to travel back and forth to my country—with forms filled in, swabs up my nose, and paying through the same nose to so-called Covid testing companies linked to the ruling Tory party and its MPs.

In the 1970s, a small group of devoted political fanatics helped bring Britain to its knees. They were militant trade union leaders, often former or active communists or Trotskyists. They knew in their bones that what Britain wanted was revolutionary change, to ditch old alliances and partnerships and reshape the nation, just as the Puritans sought to do after Britain’s revolutionary civil war of the mid-17th century.

They had good communication skills, fervent enthusiasm, and they didn’t care what happened to their country so long as it broke Britain’s economic and other treaty relations.

Today, the political fanatics — this time of the Right — have spent a decade or more bringing about a complete rupture with Britain’s friends, allies, and centuries-old trading partners just across the Straits of Dover in Europe.  They have disrupted trade, imposed a giant new bureaucracy on British businesses, and discouraged investment. Much as in the 1970s, overseas investors have looked at the ideologues with so much power in Britain and gone elsewhere with their FDI.

In the Labour Party of the 1970s, it was all but impossible to be pro-European. Now pro-Europeans in the Conservative Party are an extinct breed.

In the 1970s, tax rises hit middle England hard. Poverty increased. Today, tax rises are imposed on the poorest of workers as the Government refuses to contemplate any tax that might mean the wealthy pay a fair share. Poverty is again going up.

The dead were left unburied in the 1970s, as workers and the Government squabbled over pay. Today, ten million surgical procedures have been pushed back for years.

Doing the same as other modern nations in Europe was impossible in the 1970s, when the fanatical Left rejected social partnership models or the moderate social democracy that worked for European trade unions. Today, the fanatical Right refuses to learn from, let alone cooperate with, anyone in Europe about smarter ways of containing the pandemic.

The 1970s were not a great decade for British prime ministers. Harold Wilson, Edward Heath, and James Callaghan all lost office in the febrile decade when stability, continuity, common sense, and compromise were expunged from the British political lexicon.

Is the same happening now? Prime Minister Boris Johnson has lost two big by-elections and failed to win back seats in Scotland. Scottish independence would do far more damage to the United Kingdom than the IRA-led uprising in Northern Ireland in the 1970s. His party is not popular in local government elections. But Labour and other parties are not doing well, either.

The 1970s was an endless spinning wheel of politics, and when the wheel stopped, voters preferred Mrs Thatcher to endless confusion and chaos.

The 2020s are only just getting underway. No one knows how they will end.

Denis MacShane first stood for Parliament in 1974 and was the youngest ever president of the National Union of Journalists in 1978.

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