All finished now - hugely enjoyable and interesting, though in a lot of ways quite 'orthodox' in its approach and conclusions. Would also have liked to read a bit more of some of the shadowy MI5/spycatcher-type stuff about the idea of destabilising a Labour government, though I guess Beckett would argue that wasn't particularly his remit. He was looking to talk to the public actors, big and small, of the period, and he did that pretty well.

Nice conclusion - even if he did rehash the false canard that the miners' strike in the 80s was an 'ill-timed summer strike' - in which, hey, he makes the same point I did a page or so back about how there were far more visible signs of national crisis in the 80s than there were in the 70s.

Also, it draws out just how change tends to be incremental and not always apparent at the time - like the similarities between Callaghan's 1976-79 period and the emergence of New Labour two decades later, and how it took a really long time for the Thatcherite project to be complete (you could even argue that its high watermark didn't come until, say, 2006). And made me think that we're in a similar place today - the effect of the 2008 financial collapse and the changes it will necessarily bring about might not be felt for 10-20 years at least.

E10 Rifle wrote:
Would also have liked to read a bit more of some of the shadowy MI5/spycatcher-type stuff about the idea of destabilising a Labour government, though I guess Beckett would argue that wasn't particularly his remit.

I liked that it *wasn't* there. I mean, most of that stuff is paranoid bollocks, isn't it?

What did you think, in the end, about the coverage of the labour movement? I was disappointed that there wasn't more from the militant shop stewards who (rightly or wrongly) define the era in the public mind.

From what I understand, some of it is paranoid bollocks, but certainly not all of it.

Anyway, the labour movement coverage was patchy on broad narratives (the chapter on the winter of discontent doesn't really get under the skin of what was going on in workplaces, though I guess part of his point was that it was ad-hoc and spontaneous and by no means some kind of organised far-left conspiracy, a narrative we're still sometimes spun about it today).

That said, he's stronger when he's focusing on the dynamics of individual and pivotal disputes - the sections on the Saltley Coke stramash in 1972 and the Grunwick dispute were excellent, partly because on those he did get a first-hand account from strikers.

Yeah, that was my feeling, too. Though I don't totally get why he considered those confrontations as the pivotal ones (as opposed to, say, the Winter of Discontent).

Well Grunwick retains a kind of iconic status among the trade union movement to this day, partly because of the then untraditional backgrounds of its key actors (Asian women), while Saltley was worth focusing on because I think it demonstrated just how confident organised labour was back then; that confidence is almost unimaginable today.

And also the book kind of corrects the impression that the winter of discontent was the only factor behind Thatcher's election win, which kind of backs up my own (admittedly sketchy, childlike and suburban) memories of life in early 1979 - ie I don't recall any sense of 'national crisis' being communicated to me (and I was an anxious child, with anxious parents - I'd have picked up something I reckon). We just got a few days off school, which was obviously great. More time to play football over the park and that.

It's a funny one though because I guess the winter of discontent didn't have some kind of single-spark starting point, other than the 5 per cent pay limit announcement a good couple of months before it all kicked off.

That was a completely unnecessary figure, that 5%. It was blurted out in an interview.

One shouldn't underestimate the effect of exaggeration of the Winter of Discontent, but wasn't the more significant thing about it that it seemed to embody much longer term dissatisfaction with union power (among opponents)?

One way of looking at Feb 1974 was that most of the votes went to parties who opposed union power. And that after Heath's industrial relations bill which had locked up trade unionists.

I've got a book on the 'Wilson Plot' somewhere. I read most of it quite a while ago. It depends what you want to believe but seeing the lengths that the security services have gone to (cf torture, miner's strike, stuff in Spycatcher), it seems quite plausible in the main.

And finding evidence for how much of a cunt Philip Larkin was, is not difficult at all.

For some people alas,the Seventies are always with us.

Unfortunately these "some people" are likely to be running the country in a couple of months' time.

Christ, I just can't quite work out whether this current crop of Tories are just phenomenally stupid or phenomenally unpleasant and dangerous. Probably both.

Is it just me or is there more than a whiff of panic in the Tory camp the last couple of weeks? No one seriously believes the unions are on their way back to having the kind of power they did in the 70s, do they?

Why make an accusation that no one is going to believe (and why have someone with all the credibility of William "14-pints-every-lunch-hour-when-I-were-a-lad" Hague deliver it?)

I guess it shows the power that decade still have on the imagination, but...yeeesh.

Kenneth Clarke was pushing it as well in an interview about the BA strike. He made an astonishing hash of it, linking the government's not exactly obvious softness on unions with party funding. A better feedline for a reply about Michael Ashcroft could hardly be imagined.

Unions had also "derailed Royal Mail privatisation". Again not really a sign the unions are wrecking popular policies.

Hague is very sharp in debating but pretty dumb politically.

Quite. You can accuse your opponents of living in the past, in their refusal to understand some facet of yer modern world, but in terms of putting genies back in lamps, it's just not a tenable accusation. People know that Brown doesn't actually want to turn the clock back 40 years because even if he wanted to, you can't.

I read somewhere that the Tories see this election as 1979, when actually its 1929. I think that's spot on. They're the stupidest, nastiest reactionary bunch of fucking cunts who've ever got close to power in decades.

Yeah, I guess if you're looking at a bunch of 40-50 somethings, they would have joined the Tory Party around 83-87, it's Thatcher's generation basically. Pretty tough sell for them to claim that they are not the "nasty old Tories" when they chose to join in the 80s and stuck in there through Hague, IDS and Howard.

The Tories are clearly running with this whole strategy now with the BA strike, trying to push the idea that Unite militants are driving the government's whole policy. To those who know anything of Unite's internal politics, and of New Labour's internal and external politics, this notion is so laughable and absurd it's remarkable that it's getting any coverage at all.

But then when no one covering this from the mainstream media seems to have the slightest understanding of the above, then it's perhaps less of a surprise. That's what happens when you sack all your industrial correspondents.

And fits the electioneering agendas of plenty of papers too of course.

Cameron had a go at calling on Brown for members of Unite to cross picket lines. Simon Hoggart (who I don't usually like much) humorously conjured an image of public schoolboys manning fire engines in the General Strike. Appropriately Brideshead.

Another, older book on the seventies:

www.amazon.co.uk/Writing-Wall-Britain-Se...1269439068&sr=8-

Anyone read this? I think I recall seeing it in threadbare public libraries in the nineties.

The Moral Maze tonight is discussing how absolute is the right to strike. I don't hold out huge hope for the programme. The advert for it I just heard had Michael Burke in his best funereal "lots of black South Africans have just been shot by the police" voice saying something like "uncomfortable echoes of the seventies" and he said some called it "the spring of discontent"- who? It also made the erroneous point that this time it's "services not manufacturing". 1978-9 seemed to be very much about services.

Might be worth catching though.

Who's on the panel? I suspect I won't be able to stomach it (and am out anyway) - take one for the team if you could please, Tubbs, and report back.

It's better than the start of it sounds actually. If you ignore Michael Burke's intro, the panellists are not brilliant but the "witnesses" are quite good- Billy Hayes and Francis Becket are interesting.

Patrick Minford seems to want the 1906 trade union act repealed. If Antonio Gramsci wants a cunt to go alongside Keith Joseph, he should listen to him.

The last chap who's written a book on "striking out strikes" is almost as bad as Minford.

As a rule, I don't go looking for cunts, but thanks anyway.