1970s Britain

At first glance, there could be few countries more diverse than Britain and Italy: one the cradle of democracy, a model for most other parliamentary systems; the other a young nation and the essence of political instability. Yet despite the differences, from the mid 1970s London and Rome shared a common destiny of struggle against the crisis which eventually led them to a new “renaissance” by the early 1980s. Drawing on a wide range of sources, this volume fills an important historiographical gap, casting new light on the unexplored relations between Britain and Italy during the Cold War.
The “Italian case” concerned all the major Western powers: Italy was generally perceived as the great “sick man of Europe”, and her very democratic solidity appeared to be challenged, while also seemingly threatening the stability of the continent and the East-West balance of power. Yet there was another “sick man” in the Old Continent: in those years, Britain was to face a severe economic and monetary crisis which weakened her international stance and forced her to play the double role of “doctor” of the Italian disease while being a “patient” herself. It is a tale of two crises, and two ways out of them.

It was with high hopes that Prime Minister Edward Heath took the UK into the European Economic Community (EEC) on 1 January 1973. It was a moment that signalled an acceptance of Britain’s role as a European, rather than global power, and drastically altered the Community. However, within twelve months it was clear that the UK’s relationship with its European partners was in trouble. Most historians argue that the UK’s challenges during the first year of membership were caused by poor timing, as Britain’s entry coincided with the Year of Europe Affair and October Yom Kippur War. But, is this a sufficient explanation?

This paper will explore Britain’s adjustment to Community membership during the year 1973, with a specific focus on Britain’s budgetary contributions. It will examine attempts to reduce the impact of Britain’s budgetary contributions on the balance of payments through the modification of existing Community policies, such as the Common Agricultural Policy. In doing so, this paper will evaluate the strategies that Britain’s politicians and diplomats adopted for negotiating in the Community. It will explore the perception of British diplomacy held by the French government and the European Commission. It will ask what impact Britain’s adversarial political culture had on the ability of its diplomats to adjust to the Community’s way of conducting political business.

Ultimately, this paper will argue that the combination of unsustainable terms of membership and a strong institutional attachment to the ‘Westminster model’ contributed to Britain’s difficult transition to Community membership. It will offer conclusions about the nature of the UK’s relationship with European integration, particularly in the context of Britain’s characterisation as the awkward partner. For entry did not settle Britain into Europe, and the high hopes for Community membership held by Britain’s political elite were left largely unfulfilled.

The summer of 1976 is an under-cited moment of significance in the history of race and immigration in post-war England. A series of major incidents appeared to highlight lasting racial fractures in English society, often exacerbated by the provocative editorial decisions of the press. This article, focused particularly on events in the Lancashire town of Blackburn, analyses some of the ways in which constructions of a “crisis of race relations” were developed in local and national newspapers during this tumultuous summer.

Although we still find ourselves in ‘Corona limbo’ as we conclude this introduction in May 2021, not entirely sure if art and performance festivals will fully recover, or the new hybrid blended, face-to-face and virtual, forms they will take, after the 2020–2021 lockdowns, the pause button hit by Covid-19 makes it possible for us to look at the last half-century of modern arts and performance festivals and take stock of this phenomenon. Modern festivals, by which we mean the arts and performance festivals that started in the 1960s, are intricately connected to the new forms of global pilgrimage that had emerged with the hippie trail a decade earlier (Gemie and Ireland 2017; Nita and Gemie 2020). As new global cultural forms of travel, dwelling and festivity, festivals have transformed contemporary cultures, representing the most important type of cultural event of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. With huge festivals like Burning Man spreading outside of their fields—or in this case an enormous playa—and taking root across the globe—through offspring festivals and new social media festival communities, it appears that festivals have already moved on from their original festival-pilgrimage model, to novel cultural forms. Rooted in the more territorialised 1960s communes and intentional communities, festivals are becoming new communal forms of communication and organisation, where people experiment with different models of communication, during workshops, retreats and, increasingly post-Covid, online groups. Present-day festivals are no longer just annual events rooted in place like Glastonbury Festival, they are new global forms of social organisation that are transforming local cultures, being part of both local and global economies and politics.

Presented at: V&A Research Institute, January 2015; University of Edinburgh, January 2015; University of York, October 2014; ‘Exhibition Catalogues as Experimental Spaces’, AAH Annual Conference, Royal College of Art, April 2014.

An earlier version appeared as https://doi.org/10.17658/issn.2058-5462/issue-14/sbibby.