You're listening to an Airwave Media podcast.

So one guy's told, you gotta put down that tumbler of whiskey,

you've just been elected the prime minister of the UK.

I was.

Another guy's told, you've got to stop singing so loudly,

or you'll never be Prime Minister.

I won't.

And it's all once upon a time in London, I guess.

I'm going to... Any way you look at it. The UK had a tough go of it in the 1970s. Its economy starts the decade,

not really growing, a percentage or two. Unemployment is high, and when I say inflation was high,

I mean it reaches 17% of the middle of the decade, 74, 25% the year after. The whole West was taking it on a chin, especially because the OPEC nations were deciding to restrict oil sales.

But as Andy Beckett, author of When the Lights Went Out, says, Britain's problems were the worst of the West.

Here's Beckett, all countries have their difficult errors, periods of national embarrassment,

of slipping confidence, of decline of crisis, both real and imagined.

But for Britain, since the Second World War, by common consent for decades now, the worst of times, came between the election of Edward Heath in 1970

and the election of Margaret Thatcher in 1979.

Crippling strikes, four different governments, in nine years.

You have to consider that Britain is finished.

Henry Kissinger tells Gerald Ford, the American president, in a meeting.

And nor was this just some American opinion. Sometimes at night, I think, says James Callahan.

If I were a young man, I would emigrate. These are strong words coming from the number two official

in government. Aside from economic stacks, there's the unmistakable voice when you place the needle on the record

...