Promised You a Miracle: UK 80-82 by Andy Beckett review – how today’s Britain was born in the early 80s

We are the product not just of Thatcherism but the ideas of those who opposed it. ‘It’s all gone wrong,’ Margaret Thatcher said in 1981. But then came the Falklands and everything changed

Andy Beckett’s proposition, in the second of his stimulating excursions into recent British history, is that the first three years of the 1980s made Britain the place it is. A profound change “as wide ranging and abrupt as any since the second world war” came over the country in those years, he writes. “And we are still living with the consequences – happily or otherwise.”

At first sight, this looks like a humdrum piece of conventional wisdom. We know, surely, that the big before-and-after division of the 70 years since 1945 arrived with Margaret Thatcher and her “-ism”: when the stuttering harmony of the postwar settlement (the last days of which Beckett evoked in his previous book, When the Lights Went Out) was brutally ended by the destruction of organised labour and the unleashing of creative greed, exemplified by the miners’ strike and shouty boys in red braces, with the great leader’s combative visage, as perfected by Spitting Image, suspended over this turbulent landscape like an all-seeing, all-knowing raptor.

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