The 1970s have a bit of a bad name, usually being remembered for flares, the banality of prog rock, glam rock and disco music, and beige and brown boringly dominating the colour palette.
Then there was also the industrial conflict with the 1973-1974 three-day week after strikes by miners led to the attempt to conserve coal supplies. Tory Prime Minister, Ted Heath, called an election for February 1974, dubbed “Who governs Britain?” The answer was not him as Labour won.
If folk do not remember the sight of people going round supermarkets with candles attached to their shopping trollies because of the power blackouts or the burning braziers of the national firefighters’ strikes in the winter of 1977-1978, then they might recall the rubbish bags piling up in the streets during the 1978-1979 “Winter of Discontent”.
Culturally, Scotland's own contribution to the 1970s came most obviously in the form of the “tartan teen sensations from Edinburgh”, namely The Bay City Rollers. They were top of the hit parade with Shang-a-Lang, Bye, Bye, Baby, Give a Little Love and I Only Want to Be with You.
With one remaining original member, The Bay City Rollers released a new single for the first time earlier this month and a musical at The Pavillion Theatre in Glasgow, called Rollers Forever has begun a two-week run.
Scotland’s contribution to the industrial strife in 1970s came in the form of unofficial strikes. In Glasgow, firefighters in late 1973 went on unofficial strike for ten days over pensionable pay, with the army being called in to break the strike.
Again in Glasgow, dustbin drivers in January 1975 undertook a 13-week unofficial strike over pay parity. On 19 March 1975, the army was again called in, this time to clear 70,000 tonnes of rubbish swamping the streets.
And, of course, before that there was the Upper Clyde Shipbuilders (UCS) work-in of 1971-1972, led by Jimmy Reid and Jimmy Airlie, which humbled the aforementioned Ted Heath Tory Government by forcing a U-turn on shipyard closures.
We are now half a century on from being midway through what seems a decidedly dreadful decade.
But, in fact, all this hides something much more important. Despite the ending of the post-war economic growth in the mid-1970s, this decade was the most equal decade ever in Britain in term of class (but not gender or race).
A higher proportion of wealth generated by economic activity, called the wage share, went to labour rather than capital than ever before. And wage inequality between the best and worst paid was at its lowest ever too.
From 1970 to 1974, the wage share rose from 59% to just over 64%, before falling back to 59% in 1979. The top one per cent’s share of wages fell from just under 10% in the late 1960s to just over 5% in the mid-1970s before rising continuously thereafter.
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This is why, when launching his Socialist Labour Party in 1996, miners’ union leader, Arthur Scargill, proclaimed: “When someone says we never want to go back to the 1970s, we say: we do, the quicker the better!”
There are two principal factors that account for the 1970s being so economically equal.
The first is that some 82% of workers’ wages and conditions were covered by collective bargaining agreements. The second was that unions were often strong, with union density – the proportion of workers in unions – being well over 50%.
These two came together in the form of collective bargaining agreements being national collective bargaining agreements. This meant wages were taken out of as a factor in competition between workers in different companies. There was the no race to the bottom.
Now, there is almost no national bargaining left in the private sector. It has been decentralised to the firm level or abolished completely. By 2024, union density had fallen to 22%, with the coverage of collective bargaining being under 30% of workers.
But there’s also another reason why the 1970s was the last decade of equality.
From the post-war Clement Attlee Labour government of 1945-1950 through to the 1964-1970 Harold Wilson Labour government, Labour was a broadly social democratic party. It was far from perfect, but it did generally support unions, collective bargaining, full employment and state intervention in the economy.
Though Labour fought both general elections in 1974 with pledges to “bring about a fundamental and irreversible shift in the balance of wealth and power in favour of working people and their families”, the opposite happened. It took the first small steps to begin dismantling the post-war social democratic settlement.
After 1974, the first cuts were made in the NHS since it was founded in 1948. Chancellor of the Exchequer, Denis Healey, flew to the International Monetary Fund (IMF) in New York, seeking a bailout in 1976. The terms for that bailout came in the form of making cuts in public expenditure.
Just as importantly, Labour had negotiated what it called a Social Contract with the unions. In return for repealing of the Tory Industrial Relations Act 1971 and measures to control the cost of living, the unions agreed to moderate their wage terms in pursuit of the control of inflation. This hit the rocks in the form of the Winter of Discontent.
In essence, Labour in office sought to manage the crisis of capitalism by making workers put up with more than their fair share of misery. The 1973 oil crisis, which saw the price of crude quadruple, had triggered a global recession.
The decade ended badly when many of the minority parties in parliament, primarily the Liberals and SNP, voted for a no-confidence motion in the Labour government tabled by the leader of the opposition, Margaret Thatcher, on 28 March 1979. Though the vote was won by just one vote, it precipitated a general election.
We all know what happened next. Thatcher entered Downing Street on 4 May 1979, quoting St Francis of Assisi on bringing about harmony, truth, faith and hope and delivering the opposite for the most. Returning to rampant inequality was the result.
Fast forward nearly 50 years and take the case of Scotland for example. Figures released earlier this month by the Scottish Government showed during 2020-2022, the wealthiest 2% of Scottish households possessed more wealth than the poorest 50% combined.
Professor Gregor Gall is a research associate at the University of Glasgow
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