From Elsewhere: A return to Britain of the 1970’s could be on the cards but in a far far worse way.
Britain’s decline is now so obvious that not only does it attract negative comment from the US government but there are increasingly those, myself included, who draw parallels with the 1970’s where Britain was broke and politics and economics was sclerotic and bound to the post-War consensus. That consensus was only broken by the election of the Conservatives under Margaret Thatcher and the breaking of that consensus has had both good and ill outcomes over the subsequent decades.
Dominic Sandbrook writing in the Sunday Times on the 26th December 2025 has also looked at the parallels between now and the 1970’s and counselled that although there are similarities between the Britain of the 1970’s and the Britain of today with regards to politics and the economy, we cannot expect history to repeat itself. Mr Sandbrook said:
“Half a century on, though, have the 1970s returned to haunt us? It takes no great insight to point out the parallels: a sclerotic economy, a pervasive loss of political confidence, strikers outside hospitals, a vague national sense that nothing works and everything is going wrong. Even the way foreign observers talk about Britain seems to have been ripped from the pages of some dog-eared journal from the Wilson and Callaghan years.
Britain, declared Elon Musk earlier this year, “is going full Stalin … Civil war is inevitable.” Reading those words, I was reminded of another controversial American observer 50 years ago. “Britain is a tragedy,” Henry Kissinger told his boss, President Gerald Ford, in January 1975. “It has sunk to begging, borrowing, stealing until North Sea oil comes in … That Britain has become such a scrounger is a disgrace.”
As a historian of Britain in the 1970s, I’m often asked if the past is about to repeat itself, and my answer is always a firm no. By definition, history can never repeat itself, since context is all and no two situations are exactly the same. But it would be a strange historian who denied that there are patterns and echoes across the years. And although many aspects of 21st-century life — the digital economy, social media and AI, to name but three — would have confused and bewildered most people in the Wilson years, I suspect they’d have found much to recognise in our nagging political and economic anxieties.”
You can read the entirety of Mr Sandbrook’s piece at the Sunday Times via the link below:
https://www.thetimes.com/article/028c1006-c2f6-4b73-85dd-197973de2ce4?shareToken=8299328c01f6f85f60e8884c458e5418
I recognise political and economic similarities between now and then. We have the same political class wedded to ideology in the case of the seventies it was the post-War consensus whereas today it’s an allegiance to ‘international law and norms’ and therefore unable to escape from their fixed paths in order to repair what damage has been done to the UK.
However, I reckon the future might be worse than the 1970’s as not only is there no economic miracle waiting in the wings as North Sea Oil was but we also have problems unimaginable to the average person in 1970s Britain. Problems such as sectarianism and its influence on politics, an unwanted, by the people, set of demographic changes along with contemporary problems of welfareism and deindustrialisation.
It’s a fools errand to predict exactly what will happen in Britain and its politics over the next few years but I will venture to say that it might be ‘interesting’ in all the wrong ways.
Will the Tories do what is currently unthinkable and tear up the current consensus rule book or will they be a party of managed decline and cleaving to trendy nostrums as they were in their last period of government? Will Reform find some credible policies that don’t fall into second order pitfalls? Will Starmer go the way of that other great managerialist, as Mr Sandbrook describes him, Edward Heath and make way for someone who can clean out the cesspit of the Labour Party and rebuild it just as Thatcher did for the Tories?
We can’t tell but it’s likely that we will not see an exact repeat of the seventies that decade where a lot was right but a lot else was wrong. What we might see is something different maybe worse maybe better we really cannot say.