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THE LATEST PROGRAMME |
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Three programmes telling the story of a strangely neglected but crucially important decade: the 1970s.
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Left: David Bowie who became famous for his music and sexuality.
Centre: Denis Healey who, as Chancellor of the Exchequer in 1976, negotiated with the IMF to ease the UK's massive debt.
Right: Jimmy Reid who led the famous and succesful sit-in by the workforce at the Clydeside shipyards in 1971.
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The Sixties have become a cult, the Eighties exert fascination as the decade of Thatcherism. But the 1970s were arguably more important than either. They saw the foundations of globalisation laid; they began with protests against the Vietnam War and ended with the elections of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan. This series uses archive, music, and exclusive interviews with the key decision-makers to flesh out what changed in the 1970s - socially, politically and economically.
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Cover of Germaine Greer's 'feminist' book The Female Eunuch, published in 1971.
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In the 1970s, Britain's economic crisis was manifest in the IMF humiliation, and the comparison with continental Europe was cruelly unfavourable. This created a political market space for "strong leadership" with clear, simple certainties. By the decade's end, Thatcher, alongside Reagan in the U.S., was in a position to bestride the world on a ticket of economic recovery and visible supremacy in the Cold War.
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The American economist Milton Friedman challenged the Keynesian orthodoxy with his monetarist theories.
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This political and economic story is of an internal crisis of confidence, followed by radical renewal. The social story is that growing individualism, introspection and renewal fed an affluence which further loosened up social mores, giving us a very un-conservative new conservatism.
Programme 1: "The Political Becomes Personal" explores how far the '70s marked the culmination of social liberalisation which began in the previous decade in areas like divorce, women's rights and gay rights.
Programme 2: "Monetarism Makes The World Go Round" tells the story of how and why the post-war economic consensus around Keynesian policies of tax and spend finally broke down in the 1970s.
Programme 3: "There is No Alternative" asks why a decade which at first seemed to favour the Left ended with a Prime Minister whose trade-mark was anti-Communism abroad and aggressively pro-business and anti-union domestic policies. Why were Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, both marginal figures earlier in the decade, in power by the end of it?
The presenter, Ian Hargreaves, is Professor of Journalism at the University of Wales in Cardiff and a former editor of The Independent and the New Statesman. He began the 1970s in a commune and ended the decade working for the Financial Times.
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Listen to programme 3
