State of Emergency

For those of us who were not around to experience the 1970s first-hand, it is perhaps easy to imagine them as a period of Bri-Nylon-clad stasis. In many popular representations of the 1970s, the decade is depicted as safe, stable and unexciting, overshadowed by the dynamism inherent in the gradually relaxing morals of the 1960s or the avaricious consumerism of the 1980s. Dominic Sandbrook’s State of Emergency, however, paints the 1970s in a variety of very different shades. In the latest instalment in his ongoing series of post-war social histories, Sandbrook takes as his subject the entirety of British life in the early 1970s, from discussions between cabinet ministers to the everyday activities and opinions of ordinary people. Rather than contributing to the portrait of a static decade, Sandbrook writes of the 1970s as both a terminus and a point of departure, describing the mood of a nation as marked by an overwhelming feeling of ending but equally suffused with the energy of rapid change. Throughout the book Sandbrook repeatedly illustrates how Britain and the British ‘felt uneasily poised between two worlds’ (p. 27), as the nation experienced the death of the consensus which had bound post-war British society together in its pursuit of a New Jerusalem. In doing so, he reveals just how unstable and unsafe the Britain of the 1970s truly was

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