Discontentful reading: "Seasons in the Sun - The Battle for Britain" by Dominic Sandbrook

In the lengthening series, "wildly inappropriate reading", this short review concerns the second (actually the third, by my second) volume of Dominic Sandbrook's super-detailed history of the nineteen-seventies, here covering the years 1974-1979. Inappropriate, because the my surroundings, variously an Etihad business lounge in Abu Dhabi, unseasonably warm midwinter Sydney, and seasonably warm northern Queensland, seem a million miles from the bleak, grimy and seemingly terminally declining Britain of the seventies, described in this book. 

These were the years of all-powerful (or so it seemed) union bosses, the decline into  bizarre paranoia of a once hope-bringing prime minister (Wilson), the overwhelming of his successor, a politician who deserves better of the historical record (Callaghan), industrial decline, punk rock, strikes, more strikes and the famous Winter of Discontent, which sets the stage, though few, probably including the protagonists, realised to what extent, for a political and cultural sea-change beginning with the 1979 election of Margaret Thatcher's Conservatives. It is also the period when I personally went from being ten to fifteen years old, and therefore began to acquire some meaningful consciousness of what was going on. (Though, having read this, less than I thought.)  

I don't actually have too much to say about this book, not because there is not a lot to say, but because I have largely said it already, in the review of the preceding volume. Sandbrook writes masterly history, fusing conventional historical sources with germane and insightful references to popular culture, in particular, and justifiably in the context of the seventies, TV programmes such as the Morcombe and Wise Show and The Generation Game, whose audiences were so huge as to represent significant proportions of the population. Again and again, as with the previous volume, this book brought numerous moments of recognition ("yes! I remember that, even if I was only twelve"), as well as new information which had totally passed me by at the time and had somehow failed to impinge since, such as the genuinely weird role played in British government by Marcia Williams, Harold Wilson's advisor, subsequently Lady Falkender.   

Events there were aplenty. Strikes galore, of course, though, as I vaguely recall being mentioned at the time, not as many as in many other advanced industrial nations (though this was not ultimately the point), many shocking IRA attacks, both in Ireland and mainland Britain, a referendum on EU membership (newly topical, of course, but then surprisingly consensual), and a lot more. But more than one-off events, this is a story of things steadily going from bad to worse, of shockingly awful industrial relations (and correspondingly awful industrial products - British Leyland, anyone?) bought off only for a brief while at the expense of equally shocking inflation. The travails of Callaghan and his chancellor, Denis Healy, seem almost superhuman, and surprisingly even somewhat Thatcherite avant le coup, but ultimately doomed by their connection, indeed commitment, to the unions, whose members even thought were out of control.

So much for the conventional, and not wrong, narrative of the late seventies in Britain, but as Sandbrook points out repeatedly (as in the previous volume), it was also paradoxically true that many Britons continued to thrive, and enjoy a lifestyle which was a huge improvement over even one generation ago. Certainly, that is my recollection. All the doom and gloom related in this history, common experience for many people up and down the country, most acutely in old industrial occupations or in business, is not how this particular child lived the seventies, a member of the new middle classes, happily residing in a new sixties housing development, with parents in stable, white-collar, public sector jobs, benefiting from free schooling, free health care (both then at least locally as good as anywhere in the world) and living in a society which had not yet absorbed the me first ethic of Thatcher's reformed Britain. 

If there is one slight disappointment in this book, it is that there is rather less of the social side of the history than in the previous volume. Sandbrook focuses more heavily on the politics, the shenanigans of politicians and unions. Not that the subject isn't fascinating. In this period, we see the Labour movement in incipient crisis, torn between an increasingly assertive (though in hindsight utterly deluded) left, and the traditional, in fact rather conservative, right, championed by Callaghan and Healy, both of whom Sandbrook judges kindly. On the other hand, the self-proclaimed standard bearer of the hard left, Tony Benn, is on the receiving end of considerable sarcastic opprobrium, and, on the basis of his record, it is hard to dissent, even if we know the height of his fame, albeit from the comfort of opposition, is yet to come. It however remains how extraordinarily unrealistic the left's recipes for economic recovery look with hindsight. The plan, which was openly called the "siege economy", called for an island retrenchment behind punative tariff barriers, widespread nationalisation and what essentially it all adds up to a command economy of the sort comprehensively discredited elsewhere just over ten years later. If nothing else, somewhat ironically in current circumstances, the delusional plans of the Labour (and non-Labour) hard-left make it clear why they provided the principal opposition to the UK's membership of the then EEC, which promoted the antithesis of this world view. Sandbrook cheekily suggests that it was Benn's leadership of the no campaign which won the referendum so decisively for the yes camp. Where are the Benns of the world when we need them now? (Ironically transformed into equally unpalatable Home Counties Colonel Blimps, one supposes and trusts.)

As for the Conservatives, notwithstanding the upheaval to come, Mrs Thatcher led her party is manner which gave little inkling of governmental radicalism to come, belying her true nature as an instinctive political pragmatist at this stage. As Sandbrook repeatedly shows, her policies were not massively different from those - "pre-monetarist" - pursued in 1977-79 by Callaghan and Healy. Right up to her famous election, she remained far less personally popular than Callaghan and was not expected, even her own people, to last long. The rest, as they say, is history, though at present I don't know if Sandbrook intends to write it.

Recommendation? Rather as before; this is a long read, not arduous, but still long, and you have to be sufficiently interested in the period, perhaps, because, like me, you lived through it as a child and want to find out what was actually going on. However, with those conditions, yes, this is great narrative history with genuine insights to times which are so close and yet seem so impossibly remote.