When the Lights Went Out: Britain in the Seventies

By Andy Beckett

Book Overview

No Synopsis Available.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 057122136X
• ISBN13: 9780571221363
• Release Date: January 2009
• Publisher: Faber and Faber
• Length: 576 Pages
• Weight: 2.05 lbs.
• Dimensions: 9.5" x 1.9" x 6.3"

Customer Reviews

Fine study of 1970s Britain

This is an excellent study of the 1970s. It shows, among many other things, how the ruling class brought Thatcher to power. Thatcher was `very concerned about the abuse of trade union power'. The governments of the '70s failed the nation in many ways. For example, as Beckett writes, "In 2008 the economist John Hawksworth of the accountants PriceWaterhouseCoopers calculated that, had Britain's tax revenues from North Sea gas and oil been invested rather than spent, they would now be worth £450 billion, and would give the British government control of one of the world's largest sovereign wealth funds." The Financial Times wrote approvingly in 1975 of Jack Jones and his role in promoting the Social Contract, "Jones ... with the social contract, has emerged as a national statesman ... confounding his critics who had dismissed him as a negative man of the Left." Of course, the FT loved the Contract because it cut workers' wages!