Rejoice! Rejoice!: Britain in the 1980s

The Eighties may seem to many of us like yesterday, but in many ways the Britain of thirty years ago was a thoroughly foreign country. During the years when Thatcherism wiped out almost a quarter of Britain’s heavy industry through savagely monetarist policies, a naval Task Force also sailed to re-take an insular outpost in the South Atlantic. In the same decade as the extraordinary pitched battles of the miners’ strike, Boy George sweetly crooned “Karma Chameleon”. As the world faced the early days of panic over the AIDS virus, pop stars took to the stage for Live Aid.