We're a couple of weeks behind with this feature due to Easter, so I'll be posting another very shortly.
From the week before last, this brilliant letter from the New Statesman caught my eye:
Summers of love
Both Dominic Sandbrook’s essay on football in the Seventies (30 March) and the Red Riding series recently on TV paint a bleak and frankly inaccurate picture of life for most of us in that glorious decade.
With higher wages for the working classes, access to affordable housing, free health care, free higher education and low levels of crime, all in a much less unequal society, life then was superior to life as experienced by most of us today.
In 1976, I was a fully funded sociology undergraduate on a new parkland campus. I had a lovely girlfriend, a motorbike, hair down to my armpits, Neil Young on the stereo. And it was a glorious summer. Bleak? It was bloody marvellous!
John Robertson
Ayr, Ayrshire
I've written before of the way neoliberal ideologues have tried to rewrite history in regards to life in Britain in the 1970s- and Dominic Sandbrook is a prime culprit.
Sandbrook was the man who wrote:
"When he (Harold Wilson) retired in 1976, Britain was a dingy, miserable place"
Age of Dominic Sandbrook in 1976: Two. Wilson's Britain must have looked very 'dingy and miserable' from his pram.
He also famously wrote:
"Without Thatcher's controversial reforms, Britain might look a lot more like France today "
In other words it would look like a country which had a world class, affordable and publicly-owned public transport system, and which still maintained a manufacturing base.
What a terrible place Britain would be without 'Thatcher's reforms'!
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