Page 188 - Just another English family (Sep 2019)

fifty years there are considerable ideological shifts which mean that the concepts are increasingly challenged. The decade of the 1960s is regarded differently by different political persuasions. Some see the breaking of traditional values as a liberation which enables homosexuality, abortion and eventually sexual equality to be seen as a right, whilst others see the erosion of traditional values as the first steps towards all manner of disaster.
The 1970s is beset by economic difficulties triggered first of all by the rise in oil prices in the early 1970s. On New Year’s Day 1973, Britain formally joined the European Economic Community – then popularly known as the Common Market – which has never been fully embraced by the British people. Economic problems increasingly beset Britain with trade unions being regarded as a problem which needed to be solved.
In 1979 Margaret Thatcher elected as the first woman prime minister led a conservative government which certainly ruled and divided Britain. Unemployment climbed in the 1980s as attempts were made to make Britain more competitive in world markets. The 1980s was Thatcher’s decade, but her policies became increasingly unpopular with the introduction of the poll tax seen as symbolic of a party increasingly distant from the people. Remarkably, however, her Conservative successor, John Major, won an unexpected electoral victory, so that a paler version of Thatcher’s philosophy continued.
In 1997 Tony Blair led the Labour Party, now identified as New Labour, to a very convincing electoral victory. It is said that the computer age also came into its own in 1997. In May the Russian world chess champion, Garry Kasparov, was defeated by Deep Blue, a ‘supercomputer’ constructed by International Business Machines (IBM) in the United States. However, more importantly, a new avenue of global communications had also been developed, called the World Wide Web (www). Few really understood what was happening as global markets took hold. However, the Blair government was increasingly involved in wars, such as the invasion of Iraq, where the legitimacy of the inventions was being questioned.
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