From the ‘golden age’ to modern times

In folk memory, the post-war period until the early 1970s is widely known as a time of reasonable certainty and security: high levels of employment, a rising standard of living, credit-based consumerism, better housing, the expansion of numerous personal and sexual freedoms, a new era of female emancipation, and a self-conscious and confident youth culture. The decades were marked by a consensus of sorts, despite there being deep regional, religious, generational, gender and class divisions on various aspects of the reforming agenda. With respect to welfare, the economy, limited redistribution of resources, penal welfarism, and a measure of social justice there was broad public acceptance of the post-war settlement. Such ‘anti-social’ behaviour as might occur was attributed to maladjusted personalities, poverty, and problem families. In response, the deviant individual was to be reformed by a growing army of psychologically informed social workers. Of course, all this changed with the post-1960s transition to what is sometimes called Late Modernity, as it witnessed the shift from ‘a world whose accent was on assimilation and incorporation to one which separates and excludes’.

In the twenty years after 1973, says Eric Hobsbawm, society ‘lost its bearings and slid into instability and crisis; and yet, until the 1980s it was not clear how irretrievably the foundations of the Golden Age had crumbled’. Central to the crisis, he notes, was the Cultural Revolution with the rise of individualism, and the economic depression, which brought with it a restructuring of labour markets.