Has anyone (other than NHH who recommended it to me) read this book by Andy Beckett about the alleged decade of gloom? A good read thus far, and certainly of interest to those who commented relatively favourably on the period in that thread we had about the subject a few years ago. Tubby Isaacs for one would dig, I think.
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When the lights went out: Britain in the Seventies
Sounds like it would be good. I'm particularly interested in the (relative) radicalisation of Labour in 1973 or so. Very under discussed subject. -
When the lights went out: Britain in the Seventies
This comes out in paperback on Feb 4. I've just pre-ordered a copy for £4.99.Comment
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When the lights went out: Britain in the Seventies
Meanwhile, I have used the awesome power of kindle to download it automatically! Bwahahahahaha!
Look forward to reading it.
(edit: this kindle thing could end up costing me a lot of money. It makes impulse buying terrifyingly simple).Comment
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When the lights went out: Britain in the Seventies
You got one for krismas?Comment
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When the lights went out: Britain in the Seventies
Indeed-y do. Courtesy of the GLW. Who has since spent much of the last week looking over my shoulder while I'm using it and yelling "stop buying things!"Comment
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When the lights went out: Britain in the Seventies
So tell me all about it, now.Comment
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When the lights went out: Britain in the Seventies
My lovely wife is ecstatic about hers. I want to use my genius level IT skills to figure out if there's any way of downloading from it but she won't let me near the thing. If there were I'd buy myself one in a second. Have you checked out the small print AG? Someone told me that you weren't actually buying books, you were leasing them to read but that's not the way the agreement reads to me. However lawyer-speak makes my eyes glaze over so I could be wrong.Comment
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When the lights went out: Britain in the Seventies
I'm patiently waiting for Amazon to deal me the Francis Wheen book on the same subject.Comment
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When the lights went out: Britain in the Seventies
What do you want to know, TT?
The downloading of content is frighteningly, frighteningly easy. Out-of-copy-right books (e.g. long dead people...Dostoyeksy, etc) are about a quid each. in-print fiction and non-fiction is probably about 40% off. Some trade books are 60 or 70% off.
Reading takes a bit of getting used to. The screen is very easy to read, but what's odd is that a screen only holds between a third and a half of the text of a paper page. There's no scrolling like you're reading on a computer - it's strict pagination, with page forward and page back buttons for navigation. Once you get used to it, I think it works pretty well. I think one improvement would be backlighting so you could read when it's dark, but that would probably just be one more part that could fail.
For more complicated stuff you have to use the "mouse" (a button that moves in four directions and can be pushed in like a left-click on a regular mouse. Searching means using the keypad, which is flat-out terrible.
Re: content. AdC, my understanding is that you own, not rent. But I'm not really one for the small print. And you certainly can download content to more than one device but I think it has to be registered in the same name for that to work.Comment
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When the lights went out: Britain in the Seventies
All that, certainly.
The best thing for me, though, would be being able to rent books.
And to read in the dark.
I'll have to have a go on someone's, sometime.Comment
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When the lights went out: Britain in the Seventies
Rent books? Maybe someone will think of that one day, make rental free, and call it a library.
Do you ever come into the City? Anyone can join their libraries and they are excellent, will order new books very quickly for a pound.Comment
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When the lights went out: Britain in the Seventies
Yeah, I meant that libraries should get into this Kindle lark, yeah.
I'm planning a trip to the newly reopened John Harvard down the road from work, soon.Comment
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When the lights went out: Britain in the Seventies
Ah right.
Sarcasm's cheap but it's made me remember how great libraries are.Comment
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When the lights went out: Britain in the Seventies
Actually, I'm really starting to dig this. That is, both the book and the kindle.
My quick reaction to the book is that it's pretty good. Though some of the stuff in the intro of the "but look at how low unemployment was - why did everyone think we were in trouble?" variety strikes me as either irritatingly naive or economically illiterate.
People at the top of a slide don't notice their height, they look at which direction they're heading in. (But perhaps I'm reacting too quickly...still only on chapter 5)
Anyways, the kindle - now that I've got used to the fact that a "page" only holds 150-160 words and not the 450-500 of most print books, I'm finding I can actually read much more quickly. My eyes don't wander on a page, and I'm finding that I can comprehend an entire kindle page in two "chunks" (or sometimes even just one), which I find allows me to speed through text without losing comprehension. I think the large font, which is very easy on the eye, has a lot to do with it, too. It would be irritating as shit on a printed page, but it really works on the kindle.Comment
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When the lights went out: Britain in the Seventies
Well the point he was making was a reference to something Blair said, at neoliberalism's height, in 2005, about how low unemployment at that point was. How many people said we were headed for a fall at that point, even though we were? No one with any power or influence, that's for sure. I don't remember many people calling The Economist or the Wall Street Journal "economically illiterate" in 2005.Though some of the stuff in the intro of the "but look at how low unemployment was - why did everyone think we were in trouble?" variety strikes me as either irritatingly naive or economically illiterate.
I think you have to understand the context here AG - over here, we are absolutely inundated with subtle and not so subtle propaganda about how uniformly dreadful or grey the Seventies were, and how everything that followed under Thatcher/Major/Blair was "necessary". This helps to poison the already piss-poor standard of political debate in Britain because even now any talk about serious wealth redistribution, or fairer taxation, or greater employment rights, is so often mindlessly drowned out with this mantra of "that'll be like going back to the Seventies, the Worst Decade Ever". Beckett's not a revolutionary, but I'm finding his book an informative and sober corrective to a damaging establishment consensus that has sprung up around a very interesting period in our history.Comment
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When the lights went out: Britain in the Seventies
Like Nishlord I am waiting for Wheen's book on the era to come out so I've avoided Beckett's so far for fear of crossover.
What is going on with it, anyone know?Comment
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When the lights went out: Britain in the Seventies
E10 - like I said, I should probably suspend judgement until after I've read the book. But it does seem to me that there was a big difference between 1972 (say, just before the Miners strike) and 2005. The latter was a general financial crash - if Britain was going down, so was everyone else, everyone was in the same boat. In 1972, it wasn't like that - what was so very visible was Britain's *relative* decline. Germany and France and Holland and whoever else you want to name were very obviously heading in the other direction. The problems weren't of a general financial crisis nature - they were very specifically British problems, related to British policy decisions (and the very heavy legacy of the Industrial Revolution and the Empire)
To some extent, this probably was an issue of militant labour, but also quite clearly (as I think the Heath chapters point out) it was that management practices were brutally outdated and the managerial class as a whole was blinkered and insular. Sometimes that managerial class was in the private sector - other times it was in the public sector. The "white heat of technology" hadn't even really singed the economy - plant and equipment were old, outdated and not especially productive.
My memories of my first trip to the UK (in '78) are, to a large extent, about how *shabby* it was. This was not without its charms, of course (even then, I understood that the Beano was seriously old-school and liked it partly for that reason), but I never thought "wow, this is a country that's really on the up". The decay was palpable.
(Also, punks scared the shit out of me. But that's a different issue altogether).Comment
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When the lights went out: Britain in the Seventies
You might be right AG, but that's why one of the interesting developments in the 70s was workplace democracy. People got the notion that the managerial class was failing them, but didn't then see why the managerial class's solution - sack the workforce and give the managerial class another crack - was either sensible or equitable. The idea of interrogating how companies made decisoin and how companies were owned grew, spawing the boom in worker co-ops which the government encouraged especially when Benn was SoS at Trade and Industry.Comment
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When the lights went out: Britain in the Seventies
Back in November, the woman two desks over from me told me that her husband bought her one of these. I said "A what?" and she told me again. "Come see it." So I walked over to her desk fully expecting to be shown Barbie's boyfriend. I thought she'd said "A Ken doll." Twice.Comment
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When the lights went out: Britain in the Seventies
The decline relative to the rest of Western Europe was over a longer period than the seventies, to be fair. You can equally take the end of the war as a starting point.
I agree with AG that a relative decline affecting only Britain (1972) was very different to a general decline affecting everyone (2005).Comment
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When the lights went out: Britain in the Seventies
Antonio Gramsci wrote:
Yeah, my Grandad worked in the old Hadfield's steel works in Sheffield (Meadowhall is built over it now) during it's final days - finally being made redundant in around 1981. The writing was on the wall for many years according to him, it didn't come as a great surprise.E10 - like I said, I should probably suspend judgement until after I've read the book. But it does seem to me that there was a big difference between 1972 (say, just before the Miners strike) and 2005. The latter was a general financial crash - if Britain was going down, so was everyone else, everyone was in the same boat. In 1972, it wasn't like that - what was so very visible was Britain's *relative* decline. Germany and France and Holland and whoever else you want to name were very obviously heading in the other direction. The problems weren't of a general financial crisis nature - they were very specifically British problems, related to British policy decisions (and the very heavy legacy of the Industrial Revolution and the Empire)
To some extent, this probably was an issue of militant labour, but also quite clearly (as I think the Heath chapters point out) it was that management practices were brutally outdated and the managerial class as a whole was blinkered and insular. Sometimes that managerial class was in the private sector - other times it was in the public sector. The "white heat of technology" hadn't even really singed the economy - plant and equipment were old, outdated and not especially productive.
My memories of my first trip to the UK (in '78) are, to a large extent, about how *shabby* it was. This was not without its charms, of course (even then, I understood that the Beano was seriously old-school and liked it partly for that reason), but I never thought "wow, this is a country that's really on the up". The decay was palpable.
(Also, punks scared the shit out of me. But that's a different issue altogether).
For anybody who wasn't around in the seventies (I was born in 1980), you first see the decade through the popular culture it produced, and at first glance with Glam, outrageous interior design (will green and orange ever be considered compatible again?) and Jason King's wardrobe it looked like a riotously colourful time.
It's not until you see old news footage of the seemingly endless industrial action that you realise in reality nearly everything was in various shades of beige. The duffle coats, the flared trousers and the rows of Austin's and Ford's parked on the roadside.Comment
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When the lights went out: Britain in the Seventies
Hadfield's was a big battle point in the steel strike. Which is barely remembered these days...Comment
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When the lights went out: Britain in the Seventies
Tubbs - agreed about the length of the decline vis-a-vis Europe. Until the early 60s, though, the fact that much of Europe was a smouldering wreck kept the sense of decline at bay.
NHH - yes, I think that's a pretty fair observation. But the co-ops weren't exactly viable economically, were they? (genuine question - I assume not because they didn't survive, but there could be a history I don't know much about).Comment
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When the lights went out: Britain in the Seventies
Aye. The Boer war or World War I.The decline relative to the rest of Western Europe was over a longer period than the seventies, to be fair. You can equally take the end of the war as a starting point.
I guess the things that interest me about the Seventies, which is why I got the book, are that sense of flux, of possibility, and the rise of some of the ideas NHH is talking about (add feminism to the mix, which became a serious practical force in the Seventies much more than the Sixties). The sense of confidence in organised labour, which doesn't really exist, when you scratch the surface, even in the most militant sections of the TU movement now. Looking at it in very broad-brush terms, you could say that the Seventies was perhaps the only decade of the 20th century when the British establishment and what you might want to call ruling/owning classes felt seriously threatened.
Sure, times were tough, but tougher than the 80s when the crises that affected people at the bottom might have been more sharply felt? Why are we not told that Britain was in crisis in the spangly, thrusting 80s, when it ticked all the crisis boxes? Riots in cities? Tick, several times. Mass unemployment? Tick. Brutal industrial confrontations involving state violence? Tick. Big social and crime problems? Tick. Seemingly intractable terrorism problem? Tick. Yeah, we "needed" the Eighties...Comment
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