ABSTRACT
Declinism had proved not only a poor guide to Britain’s economic trajectory, but politically disastrous in its effects on the anti-Thatcher forces. The significance of inflation was not well defined in contemporary economics; most strikingly there was no systematic relationship, positive or negative, between inflation and economic growth. One of the striking features of the mid-1970s was the way in which the stimulus to panic shifted away from inflation as its pace slowed down sharply from 1975. Rapid inflation was a heaven-sent opportunity for every newspaper columnist to reassert their hostility to trade unionism, a core element in most middle-class ideology since at least the late nineteenth century. The commentaries of the Economist and other specialist economic and financial journals focused mainly on the directly economic aspects of ‘the crisis’. The panic of the 1970s had a serious impact on British politics.
