Dipping back to the Seventies The unions held the nation by the throat and were throttling it to death. Every news broadcast seemed to contain a report from a factory car park somewhere with hundreds of men raising their hands to approve yet another strike call in support of a 35 per cent pay rise. The union shop stewards - "Red Robbo" and his like - were the real power in the land, the hedge-funders of their day. They drove the economy into the ground and almost wrecked it. So it came as no great surprise that the 1975 referendum on whether to stay in the Common Market resulted in a "yes." It was the first time I voted and I was all for it - not because it would stop another war between the European nations, which was the motivation for Ted Heath's generation, but because we worried for our future outside the club. For the first time, we were travelling abroad in large numbers for reasons other than fighting (apart from the football hooligans). We had been to Germany and the Benelux countries and could see that other countries were better off than we were. Without Europe, we were sunk; or so we thought. Mind you, as I was at school and university in the mid-Seventies I did not really think about it much at all. We were young; we had fun and life was great whatever the economy was doing. Hard as I try, I cannot recall talking to my friends about the recession, for the simple reason that we always seemed to be in one. I thought double dip was an ice cream - or was that a double choc? We did not need to give the economic downturn a fancy name because we knew we were a basket case and saw little chance of any improvement. It affected how we thought of ourselves and how we looked. In 1975, the height of student fashion was a tank top, a tie-dyed Indian cotton shirt, brushed loons (Levi's if you could afford them) and desert boots. Hair was worn to the collar, if not to the waist. Side-burns or beards, if they could be grown, were obligatory. It still pains me to remember that I went up to receive my degree wearing a suit, gown, mortar board and, believe it or not, a pair of clogs. For many years afterwards, my Afghan coat lurked somewhere in my parents" house; it might still be there, for all I know. It is also extraordinary to think that less than 10 per cent of school-leavers went to university - and that was double what it was in the Fifties. But there were no fees, everything was paid for and, in contrast to young graduates today, we never doubted we would get a job at the end of it all. Well-paid holiday work was easy to come by, not least because we did not have to compete with Poles or Lithuanians for a job picking raspberries or delivering the Christmas post. For others, jobs in shops and cafes were real options, unlike today. And even if the economy was in a mess, unemployment was still low - under one million in the summer of 1975. Leisure tended to involve going to the pub or house parties or a bop. Restaurants were too expensive - this was before the boom in ethnic food. A curry came freeze-dried out of a pack (Vesta) and beer from a tin called a Party Seven (Watneys). Wine? You must be joking; and if we did have a bottle, it was invariably Hirondelle or Blue Nun. Attending a football match in the mid-Seventies was to risk either getting your head kicked in if you ended up in the wrong end of the ground, or contracting botulism if you ate one of the meat pies. The centres of our big cities, which have been transformed out of all recognition over the past 30 years, were squalid and dirty, especially when the bin men went on strike. Town halls and public buildings were black with the accumulated grime of a century of pollution, while the brutalist concrete architecture of the Sixties, erected just 10 years earlier, was already falling apart. The inner-city estates were becoming the crime-ridden hellholes they remain to this day. On top of all that, our country was in the throes of a terrorist war, with troops on the streets of Northern Ireland and bombs a frequent occurrence on the mainland. In 1974, IRA attacks killed dozens in Birmingham, Guildford and on an M62 coach. Bombs were far more prevalent then than they are today; and yet the response in civil liberties terms was much less draconian than it has been recently in the face of the jihadi threat. Yes, this may be the first double-dip recession since 1975; but the country looks infinitely better off, cleaner and brighter now than it did back then. The one big negative is that the decline of the old heavy industries has denied hundreds of thousands of young people the chance of a reasonably well-paid job without the need for much in the way of an education. But the reforms of the Thatcher governments in the Eighties, especially of union laws, transformed the country's economic prospects (not that the Left will ever give her credit for doing so). By the end of that decade, the cultural icon was no longer Robert Lindsay's urban revolutionary Citizen Smith but Harry Enfield's upwardly mobile, unashamedly rapacious Loadsamoney. Lately, interest in the Seventies has been rekindled by Dominic Sandbrook's BBC series, though it was disconcerting to discover that the presenter was actually born in 1974. He treats as history what for many of us watching is nostalgia. We lived through it - and I can tell Mr Sandbrook that Marc Bolan was never the godlike rock musician he gives him credit for being. Bowie, yes; Bolan, no. In fact, if there ever was a musical movement that captured the spirit of the times it was punk. Seen as an anti-establishment reaction to the pseudo-intellectual prog rock of Genesis and Pink Floyd, it was more than just counter-cultural. It was loud, crude, unhygienic, boorish, seedy and delivered with a snarl on its face. Just like the decade. I loved it - even the weather.