Book Review: Britain and Ireland: State of Emergency: The Way We Were: Britain,1970–1974

While surveying Britain in late 1973, Dominic Sandbrook observes that for the prime minister, Edward Heath, the post-war consensus and the welfare state ‘would never be glad confident morning again’. But just a page later Sandbrook fastens his attention on the song at number one in the charts, Slade's ‘Merry Xmas Everybody'. He tells us that its chorus urged listeners to ‘Look to the future/It's only just begun’. These two passages are emblematic of the period. The first confronts us with a nation in which the political status quo was unravelling, while Slade's refrain captures a mood of optimism and a readiness to explore possibilities exhibited by many of Heath's compatriots.

In tandem with his account of politics in Heath's Britain (which embraces, inter alia, sectarian strife in Northern Ireland), Sandbrook examines the ‘declinism’ that captured the imagination of many commentators at the time. He notes that they could find evidence of decline not just in the economy's dismal performance but also in the failures of the England football team, and in the tawdry outputs of the film industry (e.g. Confessions of a Window Cleaner). But alongside the spirit-sapping subject of decline, Sandbrook sets the eagerness with which many Britons explored the political and cultural opportunities open to them. For example, he examines the way in which the feminist movement gave expression to ‘ideas of liberation and self-realization’. He chronicles a set of developments that show the politics of emancipation and life politics to be features of the political scene in the 1970s. We can see the politics of emancipation at work in the Equal Pay Act 1970 and other anti-discrimination legislation, while life politics informed the widespread readiness of women to turn away from gender stereotypes. ¹ Sandbrook finds in these strands of feminist thought ‘a genuine sense of utopian excitement’. He finds a broadly similar outlook in more humdrum contexts. For example, it is on display in the enthusiasm that residents and commentators expressed for the new towns that sprang up in the 1970s. Thus we find the editor of Architectural Association Quarterly describing Milton Keynes as ‘the nearest thing we shall get to utopia’.

The two strands in Sandbrook's exposition provide some support for the conclusion that the country he describes was, for some at least, an example of a realistic utopia in the sense specified by John Rawls. For as Rawls puts it in his Lectures on the History of Political Philosophy, ² a realistic utopia exists in circumstances where people live out their lives in a framework that enables them to explore the bounds of practicable political possibility.