Neil Warner in Phenomenal World:
The threat of a return to the 1970s has long been a rhetorical feature of the British establishment. From the New Labour government’s Third Way reforms, to Jeremy Corbyn’s ambitious manifestos, and through to the current Labour Government’s rather modest spending increases, any prospects of redistributive taxation and spending, resurrection of trade union power, more worker-friendly policies, or state direction of industrial policy have been relentlessly attacked as a return to that dreaded decade.
The accusations are peculiar because, on the face of it, recent years have been very different from the 1970s. Trade-union power and militancy in the UK remain far weaker than before, the state no longer controls capital flows as it did prior to 1979, and competing ideological systems no longer overlap with geopolitics as they did during the Cold War.
Talk about going back to the 1970s, then, isn’t prompted by any real prospect of returning to those years or the conditions that underpinned them. Rather the 1970s have come to stand as a kind of shorthand for catastrophe—a catastrophe that Labour governments are particularly prone to. It was in the 1970s—as few in Britain are allowed to forget—that the overwhelming power and intransigence of the unions paralyzed British life, crippled the economy, and fuelled uncontrollable inflation, while state control and ownership stifled innovation and created inefficiency. On both the left and the right, the crisis of the 1970s is perceived to have laid the ground for Thatcher’s rise; facing the spiralling crisis, the 1974–79 Labour Government—led first by Harold Wilson, then by Jim Callaghan—is either portrayed as having been helpless in the face of the economic crisis and union power, or as having advanced its own strand of neoliberal reform now seen as mostly indiscernible from Thatcherism.
More here.
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