I found the whole ethos of the seventies as been a pretty good nightmare what with the frothy unreal property boom of Ted Heath and the consequent business collapse, the incessant strikes, the deterioration of sound money but above all there was a total change in the moral fabric of Britain.
It is hard to pinpoint one precise time or one single cause for this change in outlook. It may have been “The Lady Chatterley” trial which established the mores that anything goes in a free society. It may have been the rise of punk rock music in the later part of the decade, it may have been due to the general adoption of a form of liberal thinking whereby everyone was demanding and safeguarding their rights without any corresponding insistence on ones responsibilities to ones family or the rest of society.
This immoral stance, together with the corrosion of easy money and the and the greedy adolescent immature attitude of “ to hell with everyone else” became all pervasive in society.Typically at that time dozen men in a car plant’s spray unit would walk out and cause thousands upon thousands to be laid off. Similar disputes pervaded all the major industries of the land from shipbuilding to railways to coal etc. Each small faction would justify their reasons on television which abetted the fall in moral standards by never making any sound judgemental line all of which had a devastating effect on the economy which culminated in “the winter of discontent” with endless strikes, rubbish not collected and a total collapse of the economy. Television which had been started under Lord Reith’s benevolent educational and family entertainment ideals also sank lower and lower in quality with programmes that even a broad minded world travelled adult would feel ashamed to view. Amidst this total collapse in plain old fashioned decency, with the glorification and the indulgence of scruffy teenagers, our family like so many others in the country had to come to terms with being modern, and not “stick in the mud” and yet somehow or other, we were still desperately clinging on to what was the last remnants of the old order and proper values that was rapidly being swept away to be replaced by greed, egocentrism , and selfishness. To even dare to express a traditional decent point of view one was viewed as out of touch and not in sympathy with the young. Instead of being well dressed when going out with collar and tie and smart clothes, the new fashion was to ape a building site worker on the job in jeans and sloppy garb, regardless of how well off or well educated one was. All from the highest and wealthiest in the land fell over themselves to be scruffy, dirty, ill shaven and at the same time this sloppy mores permeated all sections of society. Jill felt very strongly that provided we both kept a firm loving household and a tight loving family unit all would be well. We lectured the children on the dangers of drugs on the value of hard work, good exams and a sound career at the end of their labours.But it was a slowly losing battle as one fought against the ignorant irreverential tidal wave of “modernism”. My view of the resulting process was exactly and neatly descibed 20 years later in the words of the Indian Ismael Merchant who produces the wonderful Merchant Ivory films mostly of Edwardian Britain.
“ Britain has stopped being a land where an Englishman’s word is his bond. It is no longer the seat of elegance, learning and good manners, and was now a ‘push button society dominated by greed and instant gratification. Today the Englishman’s word is not important any more----it’s finished. Who is England being inherited by? The lower class, not the upper class. The ruling class today is the lower class who only talk about making money in the City and football. What made a person civilised in the past was reading, writing and the art of conversation. Now all has changed and human relations are established with laptops and not with other human beings. A lot of people spend a whole day on a computor, then go home and spend all their evenings on the internet”. In other words complete utter bores whose restricted lifestyles cannot come to terms with the wonderful world all around them, where with ease of air travel today one can stomp the deserts of Mongolia, swelter through the Amazon, sail the Beagle Channel in far off Patagonia, or knock it up in a tinny in Mid Australia. No nowadays no one has any free time to think, and a so called great holiday abroad is the thrill of a week in a luxury hotel in the Caribean! What a travesty of experience and what narrow horizons have we sunk into. The great European cultured tradition of classic composers such as Motzart, Beethoven or Chopin are now totally neglected for punk pop and other upper class artisan or “C1” tastes.
