It’s often said that looking back imbues the past with a golden hue it doesn’t deserve. I’m always amazed at the number of people who romanticise the 1970s, that decade of bad taste, bad food, industrial strife and boredom. However, there has been one genuinely golden era in my lifetime; one that we will look back on in the same way our grandparents looked back on the long Edwardian summer of progress and prosperity ended by the First World War.
I refer, of course, to the decade from 1997 to 2008, from the New Labour landslide to the financial crash.
Like millions of others, I woke up on that May morning of ’97 feeling a mixture of joy, relief and hope. And it was not misplaced. For the following decade, nearly everything got better for nearly everyone — at least in this country. We were floating on a vast bubble of credit that was bound to burst sooner or later. But no one, apart from the trader-turned-philosopher Nassim Taleb seemed to see it. And ignorance was definitely bliss.
For those like me — fortysomething, starting a family, forging a career — it was a golden time. But we were not alone. Our parents’ generation were retiring on generous pensions and enjoying the new boom in luxury cruises. Couples from ordinary backgrounds were able to afford several voyages a year, something their own parents could never have imagined.
A massive redistribution of wealth from rich to poor was taking place but hardly anyone noticed. This, along with extra borrowing, was the secret of Gordon Brown’s “stealth taxes”. Instead of taking money directly out of people’s pay packets, the government took money out of the National Lottery fund or raised National Insurance or taxed pensions or petrol. Some grumbled but it didn’t feel like we were being unduly robbed to pay for all the benefits.
And there were a lot of them. Child poverty and pensioner poverty dropped exponentially. New hospitals and schools blossomed and were well funded and staffed by properly remunerated teachers. Universities and colleges received more cash. Gay civil partnerships were introduced, discriminatory legislation like Section 28 was repealed, and gay couples were allowed to adopt children. There were more women Labour MPs than ever before: the famous Blair’s Babes.
It wasn’t all about politics, though. Britain, long the butt of jokes about its awful food and drink, suddenly and unexpectedly became the gourmet capital of the world. Buying a decent cup of coffee on the high street, instead of gruesome “instant”, became easy. Shops were full of wonderful gewgaws and cheap throwaway fashions. American boxset dramas such as The Wire, The Sopranos and Six Feet Under ushered in a TV renaissance. There was no social media to afflict the mental health of so many adolescents; in fact there was no iPhone until 2007.
Museums and galleries, like the spectacular new Tate Modern, were all free. New cultural centres appeared across the country: in Newcastle alone there was the Sage Gateshead, the Baltic Centre and the Millennium Bridge. And who can forget millennium eve itself, which opens my novel about the era, When We Were Rich. That night my wife-to-be and I stood on the roof of our block of flats and watched the fireworks bloom as the new thousand years began.
It was a decade full of sporting glory, even before the 2012 London Olympics. Lennox Lewis beat Mike Tyson in 2002, Jonny Wilkinson won the rugby world cup for England in 2003, and Kelly Holmes became the first runner from these shores to win the 800m and 1,500m double in more than 80 years at the Athens Olympics in 2004. And don’t forget England’s Ashes victory in the greatest Test series of 2005.
Harry Potter made his debut in 1997 in the first instalment of JK Rowling’s world-conquering, record-breaking franchise that encouraged millions to read and spawned a series of box-office hits. Philip Pullman concluded his bestselling His Dark Materials trilogy with The Subtle Knife and The Amber Spyglass. Perhaps the most original literary debut of the decade was Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in Nighttime. In cinema, apart from Richard Curtis, we had James Bond, Bridget Jones, Slumdog Millionaire and Billy Elliot. The feel-good movie was in the ascendant and for good reason. People felt good.
Oh, it was very heaven to be alive. But did we realise it? A lot of the time we did not. Traditional British pessimism cannot be vanquished by excessive good fortune. What did we complain about? Climate change was becoming a concern but wasn’t yet seen as a global crisis. And of course there was 9/11, the 2003 Iraq war, and the 7/7 terrorist attacks on London’s public transport in 2005. Bad things undeniably happened yet they felt like the exceptions rather than the rule.
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Tim Lott's Writing Boot Camp to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.