In his penetrating book, The Seventies, Christopher Booker claims that this was,
"arguably the most important decade in the twentieth century". There is some truth in
Booker's statement, though few may have perceived it at the time. Gradually, it dawned
on people Britain that much of the wild optimism for mankind's future was misplaced, and the heady
promises made by scientists,
professionals, planners and technocrats of the sixties were illusory.
Politically, neither the British conservative party under Edward Heath nor Labour could grapple
with the economic difficulties which were complicated by the energy crisis (1973 on)
and relations with the trade unions. As political parties government after government faltered, people
seriously doubted Britain's will to be governed. "The ungovernability of Britain" was
a cry that echoed down
the seventies parties political British culture and society.
The emergence of Mrs Margaret Thatcher iron lady in politics 1970s world affairs
as political conservative party Prime Minister British
(1979) provided to some a necessary order as seventies culture British and society,
“the return to the old values, the home coming for
traditional virtues, or (to others) reaction, the imposition of the barbarities of a system
which the victors of 1945 had vowed would never again be tolerated in political dominant culture".
Minimum not maximum material expectations became the order of the day, be these expectations wage
settlements, public expenditure or level of government borrowing. Mrs Thatcher's emphasis on
self denial and the primacy of the individual, her contempt for huge bureaucracies and trade union power,
which stifled initiative and drained profits, impressed some people in British traditional political culture.
Moreover, her puritanical manner may
have reflected people's distaste for incidences of corruption in public life. Reginald Maudling, a
conservative political party British minister, was involved with the corrupt building transactions of John Poulson;
then there was the affair of the Liberal leader, Jeremy Thorpe, who was accused of conspiring to
murder a homosexual friend. One of Harold Wilson's personal recommendations for the Honours List,
Lord Kagan, was later imprisoned for fraud. Above all, perhaps, voting for Mrs Thatchcr was Britain's
reaffirmation in the law of Parliament after a decade of political instability of political parties functions
when, at times, parliamentary democracy did seem vulnerable in parties political traditional culture.
Sub consciously, this culture political factor may have been more important
to voters than their whole hearted belief in Mrs Thatcher Margaret radical right philosophy and
Margaret Thatcher leadership qualities in 1970s dominant political culture.
Flowers' report scandalized his scientific colleagues. However, his words were given an eerie ring of
truth in culture political beliefs when the nuclear power station reactor at
Three Mile Island in America developed a
serious radiation leak causing, "the most alarming accident in the history of civil
and power nuclear plant programs". By 1979 some incoming
conservative political party British politicians, who were torn between the self interested
claims of the nuclear, coal, oil
and electrical power lobbies, wondered, "Perhaps Tony Bern was right after all, perhaps only the
people of Britain can decide" (A. Sampson).
Racial disaffection had been smouldering in Britain political culture throughout the
informal components of culture seventies society and
presented a formidable social challenge for seventies British society and culture.
National Front provocation on the streets and disturbances at
the Notting Hill carnival in London (1976) alerted Britain people to potential trouble.
More in 1970s world politics affairs and political culture traditional were that
year Mark Bonham
Carter, Chairman of the Community Relations Commission, warned to
seventies British society and formal components of culture,
"The Black population are
British, and they take the phrase equality of opportunity for what it means in British culture components and
political dominant culture. I have no doubt we have not
kept pace with the expectations of British born Blacks." The 1976 Race Relations Act declared all forms
of discrimination illegal as more world affairs politics in the 1970s. A commission for Racial Equality with
powers of enforcing the Act was
set up. Some people argued that no law on earth could change attitudes. There was talk of a backlash from
disaffected and deprived whites who themselves might feel discriminated against.
In political parties history, in his play Class Enemy (1978) of seventies culture components,
Nigel Williams provides insight into inadequate whites who feel
threatened by blacks. One of the characters, Nipper, rants against immigrants: They rail against
blacks because they feel alienated from all Britain culture and society.
Blacks happen to be a convenient and accessible target in political traditional culture.
Feminism received a powerful impetus in 1970 components of British culture when Germaine Greer published her book The Female Eunuch.
Her view of suppressed woman existing in slavish submission to man was by no means novel. However,
her book, "of high literary quality and deep scholarship which made some disturbing points"
(Arthur Marwick in British Society since 1945), made an impact on many British women and men. Magazines,
such as the British Cosmopolitan and Spare Rib, both founded in 1972 were among the leaders
in raising the controversial issues of abortion, rape, contraception and nuclear power plant programs and
power nuclear station.
The Sex Discrimination Act (1975) was positive recognition of women's equal rights on pay,
employment, education and provision of housing and services.
There was a strong resurgence of women's literature in society seventies British culture components for women British. Arthur Marwick
suggests "If, when it is possible, to identify social and creative trends in writing, one such
trend stressed the women's viewpoint." These reflections are seen in Beryl Bainbridge's Sweet
William (1975) and Fay Weidon's Praxa (1978) though Fay Weldon took the conventional line that the
nature of British woman was incompatible with feminist extremism.
A symptom of a quieter mood was the upsurge of interest in the arts in culture British. "The concert halls were still full, the theatres busy. The queues outside the art galleries longer than ever not so much in honour of the masterpieces of our own time, as because the appetite
for the music, the plays and art works of the past had never been greater" (The Seventies).
Perhaps the extraordinary success of Richard Adams' allegorical novel, Watership Down
(enjoyed by adult and child alike),
provides an enduring reflection of the 1970 people acknowledging the consequences of their own
wanton actions; and their quest to return to simpler values. Moreover, the story is a longing
for a British society and culture which provides security without repression, and a world fit for children to grow
up in joy and for the old to die in dignity.
Finally the rise of Mrs iron lady Margaret Thatcher as British prime minister
in British world politics and history of political parties,
thatcher's policies and leadership qualities in 1979 contributed to some a necessary order
as seventies British culture components and society and considered as British prime minister
Margaret Thatcher achievements to return to more old importance
and traditional and British conservative qualities and excellence of functions of political parties.
Extract from “Living Through History: Britain In The 1970s”,
written by Michael Hodges. B.T. Batsford Ltd London, 1989.
On the eve of the tenth anniversary of Earth Day in April of 1980, the editorial page of the New York Times weighed the past triumphs and future prospects of the American environmental movement. “The first Earth Day in 1970,” said the editorial, “surprised its organizers by attracting millions to teach-ins and clean-ups. Over the decade, this aroused political force produced a revolution in national attitudes and an explosion of new laws and regulations. But now the movement is colliding with problems that seem more urgent. Energy, inflation and recession have become the main political concerns, and efforts to reduce pollution or strip-mine damage are seen, often unfairly, as interfering with the nation’s welfare.” The editorial went on to ask, “Have the gains been worth the billions spent?” It concluded that the analytic tool that might answer this question, cost-benefit analysis, was “still too primitive to provide definitive answers.” This was just the type of question that business leaders like Richard L. Lesher, president of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, had long been encouraging. Interviewed for a news story that day, Lesher told the Times that in the 1970s there had been “a general agreement by all parties on the need to clean up the air and water.” But there had also been disputes over the “timetables and costs” of the clean up. “The environmentalists tried to move a little too far and too fast and did not have a proper concern for some of the trade-offs.” As a result, he argued, there were “too many regulations.” Looking ahead to the 1980s, Lesher said that the nation must “balance environmental needs, inflation and other national priorities.”1
By 1980, claims that excessive environmental regulation hurt the economy circulated widely in the nation’s political discourse. In popular culture, political cartoons lampooned government regulation as an out-of-control force which stifled the free operations of the market. Bumper stickers blamed environmentalists for job losses with slogans such as “Hungry? Eat an environmentalist for dinner” and “I’ve Never Met an Unemployed Environmentalist.” A flurry of corporate advertisements attacked regulation as a source of the nation’s economic strains. Some declared “overregulation” a threat to the American standard of living. Business leaders, meanwhile, hinted that regulation was akin to “creeping socialism,” a largely invisible, but no less real, threat to economic and personal freedoms. Echoing such sentiments, one corporate ad depicted a frowning Statute of Liberty strung by a hangman’s noose labeled regulation. Calls for reform of the so-called “new social regulation”—implemented under dozens of new environmental, health, and safety laws beginning in the late 1960s—also resonated in policy-making circles, then teeming with talk of “regulatory reform.” Kicked off in 1978 by airline price deregulation and initially targeting old-line “economic regulation” by federal
commissions, the deregulatory cause soon cast its broad net around environmental, health, and safety programs as well.2
Both the political agenda and the terms of debate in environmental policy had shifted dramatically since the first Earth Day in 1970. Then, the focus had been on how the federal government could best intervene to remedy industry failures to reduce pollution. A decade later the agenda included calls for greater scrutiny of EPA rulemaking, potential market-based alternatives to “command-and-control” regulations, and other policies aimed at reducing the costs of industry’s accumulating regulatory burdens. With talk of major pollution incidents and an “environmental crisis” dominating the environmental agenda in 1970, industry complaints about the excessive costs of environmental regulation elicited little public sympathy. But as these claims rippled continuously through the major media during the periods of stagnant growth and high inflation (or “stagflation”) of the 1970s, industry found an increasingly receptive audience. David Vogel and other scholars have documented the broader “political resurgence of business” in the late 1970s after an earlier period of retrenchment and defeat, often at the hands of the new consumer and environmental movements. The focus here is on more specific questions: First, how, by 1980, did otherwise popular environmental protections become rhetorically linked—in policymaking circles and public opinion—to a host of economic problems, including energy shortages, soaring inflation, and high unemployment? And second, why was an intensified use of the “cost-benefit analysis” of economists the chief policy proposal for striking a new “balance” between the environment and the economy?
The answers are not immediately obvious. For one thing, evidence that environmental regulation contributed significantly to the nation’s economic problems—or even to those of specific industries—was exceedingly thin. Few claims linking environmental rules to economic hardships withstood serious scrutiny. When steel companies claimed that pollution controls had cost thousands of jobs and forced numerous mill closures, for instance, subsequent studies showed that actual job losses were few and that most jeopardized mills were uncompetitive and inefficient older plants already facing shutdowns.3 When chemical firms complained that escalating pollution-control costs threatened the industry’s very existence in the late 1970s, the industry’s own trade journal published figures showing that pollution-control spending was actually trending downward, from more than $800 million in 1976 to around $550 million in 1978.4 And when conservative economist Murray Weidenbaum famously estimated that federal regulation of all kinds cost $100 billion annually, the Congressional Research Service dismissed the study as being of “suspect and of doubtful validity” because of its dubious use of data, double counting, inaccurate addition, and a failure to estimate the
benefits of regulation.5 Meanwhile, contemporary estimates of the aggregate costs and benefits of environmental regulation often found a favorable benefit/cost ratio. A study released on Earth Day 1980 by the Carter administration’s Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ)—launching a salvo at administration inflation-fighters and industry—estimated that air-pollution controls alone provided benefits of some $21.4 billion in 1978 in the form of improved public health and reduced damage to property, crops, vegetation, and wildlife, a figure several times the estimated annual costs.6 On the whole, as David Vogel has noted, there was “no evidence that government regulation of business contributed significantly to the nation’s economic difficulties during the 1970s.”7 Despite such thin evidential grounding, narratives linking environmental regulation to economic distress had moved to the center of the nation’s political discourse by 1980.
The ascendance of these ideas, this paper will argue, owed much to a decade-long campaign by major corporations. To be sure, other trends were at play: the continued growth and increasing complexity of the regulatory programs themselves, criticism of the inefficiency of “command-and-control” regulation by economists, a broader resurgence of faith in “the market,” and new skepticism of government intervention during this period of economic stagnation. But business played a key role in creating the popular perception of inevitable tradeoffs between environmental and economic goals, while vigorously promoting stringent “regulatory review” using cost-benefit analysis to better balance these tradeoffs. Pushing these ideas, affected industries increasingly operated as a unified political front against the tide of new environmental laws and regulations—a major shift from 1970.
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1970s economic political cartoon, Western industrial
nations resented the large price per crude oil barrel
rises of 1973 in this political cartoon analysis, but oil producers
were reflecting the market value of their commodity.
