increase significantly. The middle classes widened
and so did middle-class culture. More young
people aspired to own a house rather than rent; by
1970 half of all houses were owner-occupied. In
1961 only 4 million Britons travelled abroad for
their holidays; in 1984 15 million did so. Washing
machines, televisions and cars were no longer the
preserve of the few. Women began to insist on
equal rights: the contraceptive pill gave them full
control over their sexuality. Despite continuing
hardships, especially in the north of England and
Northern Ireland, the 1960s and 1970s were years
of expanding horizons and growing freedom.
Among the dark areas were inner-city neglect,
unemployment, drugs and racial tension aggra-
vated by youth unemployment. Second- and
third-generation immigrants, nurtured on civil
rights and protest movements, were not as willing
to accept discrimination as their parents and
grandparents had been. The race riot in London’s
Notting Hill in 1958 was a foretaste of what was
to come: Bristol, Brixton, Liverpool (Toxteth) in
the summer of 1981 and Handsworth in 1985,
drew attention to the problems of densely popu-
lated, deprived city areas. In the 1970s and 1980s
a new phenomenon arose to threaten the strong
social cohesion of Britain, that of whole groups
becoming alienated from society, such as the
unskilled black and white youths, whose prospects
of employment had become remote and who now
sought expression in an alternative society while
relying on welfare handouts. To them the politi-
cians in Westminster were distant and unreal. But
youth unemployment in the 1970s and 1980s was
not just a British problem – it plagued Western
European countries. Although the existence of a
black economy should be taken into account, the
official statistics tell a shocking story of waste and
frustration.
Another black spot was Northern Ireland. The
partition of Ireland in 1920–1 after the bloody
civil war was never fully accepted by the south,
while the Protestant majority in the six counties
of Ulster in the North insisted on the mainte-
nance of union with Britain. The Catholic minor-
ity in Ulster was discriminated against and
deprived of political influence. A separate gov-
ernment and parliament at Stormont, under
Westminster’s ultimate authority, allowed dis-
criminatory practices to continue which would
not have been tolerated in the rest of Britain. The
Irish Republican Army, or IRA, which aims to
coerce the north into a unified Ireland, has suc-
cessfully resisted the Protestant-dominated Royal
Ulster Constabulary, or RUC. Economic decline
aggravated the conflict. IRA militancy was revived
by the Provisional IRA offshoot, and Protestant
militancy by the formation of the Ulster Defence
Association. In 1969 British troops were sent to
Ireland to reinforce the police, but the number of
bombings and sectarian killings rapidly increased.
With firearms on the street, calamitous mis-
takes were bound to occur. The worst was Bloody
Sunday, 30 January 1972, when British troops
opened fire on a banned Catholic civil-rights
march in Londonderry, killing sixteen. IRA ter-
rorists meanwhile carried out a series of vicious
murders: on 21 July 1973 twenty bombs indis-
criminately killed eleven people in Belfast; in
1979 Lord Mountbatten and eighteen soldiers
were the victims of attacks. By 1992 some 3,000
civilians and soldiers had lost their lives since
the ‘Troubles’ began. Catholic and Protestant
Church leaders have condemned the killing of
innocent people, but in vain. For a whole gener-
ation of youngsters violence became the norm.
The efforts of British governments to find a solu-
tion failed, even though the province was directly
subordinated to Westminster in March 1972,
under the day-to-day control of a secretary of
state for Northern Ireland.
Attempts to achieve cooperation between
London and Dublin made some progress, but they
did not end the cycle of violence. The first attempt
was the December 1973 Sunningdale agreement,
which proposed Catholic–Protestant power-
sharing in the province and the handing back of
control to a Northern Irish executive. But there
was a backlash from Protestant workers and the
agreement was buried. The middle ground of
Catholic–Protestant relations – represented, for
example, by the non-sectarian Alliance Party – has
remained too weak. Hopes of cooperation bet-
ween London and Dublin were revived by the
signing of the Anglo-Irish Agreement in Novem-
ber 1985, by Margaret Thatcher and Garret
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