The 1980s was the revolutionary decade of the twentieth century. To look back in 1990 at the Britain of ten years earlier was to look into another country. The changes were not superficial like the revolution in fashion & music that enlivened the 1960s; nor were they quite as unsettling & joyless as the troubles of the 1970s. & yet they were irreversible. By the end of the decade society as a whole was wealthier money was easier to borrow there was less social upheaval less uncertainty about the future. Perhaps the greatest transformation of the decade was that by 1990 the British lived in a new ideological universe where the defining conflict of the twentieth century between capitalism & socialism was over. Thatcherism took the politics out of politics & created vast differences between rich & poor but no expectation that the existence of such gross inequalities was a problem that society or government could solve
- because as Mrs Thatcher said ' There is no such thing as society.. .people must look to themselves first'. From the Falklands war & the miners' strike to Bobby Sands & the Guildford Four from Diana & the New Romantics to Live Aid & the 'big bang' from the Rubik's cube to the ZX Spectrum Mc Smith's brilliant narrative account uncovers the truth behind the decade that changed Britain forever.