One of the problems with claims that our situation is “just like the 1970s,” is that very few adults of the period are still around to share the memory. Those of us who were children at the time have only memories distorted through the lens of childhood innocence. I, for example, have a memory of the lights going off during the “three-day-week,” together with cloudier memories of petrol shortages in the autumn of 1973. But we children had little appreciation of the hardships that these events caused our parents – being unable to cook dinner, not being able to drive to work, etc. The inflation which followed was even less tangible to a child who had few things to spend pocket money on back then. It is only later in life that I came to appreciate just how much effort my mother had to put into feeding two kids with ingredients which seemed to go up in price week to week and month to month.
What I “remember” of the 1970s is actually very limited. Most of what I think of as “my memories” have, in fact, been generated by various retrospective media coverage of the period which provide the framework into which my scraps of memory have been slotted. And the younger someone is, the more their view of the 1970s will have been shaped by media rather than memory. And so, it has been all too easy for today’s lazy news coverage to frame our current woes through the lens of an imaginary 1970s.
The crisis now unfolding, however, is entirely different to the 1970s in one crucial respect… The 1970s crisis was largely artificial. When all is said and done, the oil shock was nothing more than the emerging OPEC cartel asserting its newfound leverage following the peak of continental US oil production…
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