When the Lights Went Out: Britain in the Seventies [Paperback]

On page 2 the author writes "I was born in 1969". As someone who took a keen interest in current affairs throughout the 1970s, I prepared myself to spot lots of mistakes from a writer who was only a child. However, the nearest I came to spotting one (not that I was particularly looking for them) was the omission from the index of Ian Paisley, who has a single mention (page 96).
This book turned out to be a thoroughly and scrupulously researched history of that derided decade, mostly political but also touching on matters like pop festivals. It is a detailed analysis, with the benefit of hindsight, from the beginning of the Heath era to the beginning of the Thatcher one. Beckett's list of sources, including books, articles, and TV and radio broadcasts from the time, runs to no less than 25 pages, and the book took 5 years to write. He personally interviewed several major players of the era, including Ted Heath, Denis Healey, Jack Jones (recently deceased), and Arthur Scargill. These interviews, with fascinating descriptions of the characters 30 years on, are particularly delightful. So any idea that someone who had just turned 10 by the end of the decade is unsuited to write such a book must be rejected.
The book is in 4 parts, entitled Optimism, Shocks, New Possibilities, and The Reckoning. The chapter titles are sometimes obscure until the reader has read several pages; "The Great White Ghost" refers to Heath, "Margaret and the Austrians" refers to Thatcher's espousal of the so-called Austrian school of monetarism, while "William the Terrible", which completely mystified me until almost the end of the chapter, refers to the US Treasury Secretary in 1976.
Several events of the decade are described and discussed in great detail, such as the Saltley coke depot dispute of 1972, when Scargill came to prominence, and the Grunwick dispute of 1977-78. Beckett's research into the latter revealed a previously unknown fact, namely the location of the HQ of the self-styled National Association for Freedom which did much to break the strike.
At a time (2009) when everyone is obsessed by the economic crisis, it is interesting to recall that there was just as much obsession at times like the 3-day week (1974), the sterling crisis (1976), and the so-called Winter of Discontent (1979). In fact there have probably been few years in the past 50 when it has not been felt that there was a "crisis" of one kind or another; the British take almost a perverse delight in them (it seems to me).
I could not detect any political bias on the author's part, except perhaps right at the end when he opines that Callaghan was very unlucky and Thatcher very lucky during most of her term in office.
For someone such as myself it was great to re-live that decade, and to be reminded of some almost-forgotten events, and for younger readers this is a highly instructive and insightful book into our recent history; I can vouch for its authenticity.

If The Sixties meant we'd never had it so good (as the Prime Minister told us) then The Seventies were where we paid for our pleasures. But memories of coal strikes, inflation and rotting rubbish in the street on the one hand, and flared trousers and T-Rex on the other don't really count as history - just as memory (and in some case, bad memories). Having had my memory of the period awakened by watching The Red Riding Trilogy I was pleased to read this wide-ranging and thoughtful history of the period. Like all good recent history it resorts the memory of those who lived through it, it adds some perspective to events, and it challenges their inevitability. I had forgotten whole sections of these events and misordered others.

Andy Beckett doesn't just give us the politics: Harold Wilson in his Gannex mac, Grocer Heath's almost tragic mismatch between personality and belief, Sunny Jim Callaghan and a perhaps not yet quite Iron Lady, but certainly galvanised. He also takes us through social change like the rise of Women's Lib and Gay Lib and of environmentalism. Yet at the end of it all one wonders what it was that snapped Britain out of that left-wing consensus into (within a few years) a right-wing semi-consensus. Was it North Sea Oil? Was it just a "changing of the guard"? Or is all politics and economics simply a tidal sea in which trends wash in and wash out.

A very enjoyable and thought-provoking book.

It's difficult to believe that Andy Beckett was a child during the period he writes about so effectively. The social history of the Seventies has been well documented. This is not an addition to that canon, despite the cover hinting that it might be.
This is a fascinating book of political history with voices in the pages that have already passed from us. Beckett was insightful enough to realise that age might not necessarily prevent effective reflection and a sizeable chunk of the book is bolstered by the reflections of the late Sir Edward Heath - Beckett must have been one of the last people to interview Ted.

As I write this, the trade unionist Jack Jones has just passed away. Within these pages is an account of how Heath and Jones first met during the Spanish Civil War - Ted the observer, Jack the soldier. It's interesting to reflect on how the respect formed at that time possibly informed political and union negotiations thirty five years later.

I was delighted to discover well-written, insightful accounts of events that my in-laws had been involved with - events barely chronicled elsewhere but recognised by Beckett as being pivotal at the time.

This book was a long time in the writing and it shows - there are no woolly passages, no reverting to cliches. Andy Beckett diligently sought out the right people to speak to, revisited the scenes of events in an attempt to understand what happened years ago and to provide their modern context.

I loved this book. I can't imagine me writing that about many books of political history but it is true of this one. Beckett has rescued the era from populist culture and - just in time - provided an effective record of the power of the unions during the period, the mechanisms by which some of the most surprising election results ever were recorded - and just how the end of the decade ushered in eleven years of Thatcherism (or 21 if you count the influence Thatcher had on Tony Blair).

Deserves to become the standard political history reference on the period. It's that good.