News, current affairs, and cultural issues from the 1980s
Nearly forty years ago, an LGBT bookshop in London was raided by customs officials leading to a court case against nine directors and staff who faced over a hundred charges. This proved to be a landmark case, largely forgotten now. It advanced gay rights while also raising questions about censorship by the authorities. Key issues…
In the early 1980s, Glasgow University’s student union closed down its Gay Society. The explanation was that as the legal age of consent for same sex relations at that time was 21 – they couldn’t have a society encouraging men or women under 21 to have relationships with their own sex. They would be breaking…
In the early 1980s, I studied and worked in Liverpool at a time when there was stratospheric levels of unemployment, dire poverty, and faced with no prospects – men and women turned to sex work. In the Toxteth district, it was a daily fact of life to see women on the streets in both daylight…
In the 1970s and 1980s, youth unemployment skyrocketed among young Boomers born at the end of the 1950s and early 1960s – “late” Boomers if you want. Hundreds of thousands of young people were leaving school and months later had not found any work. The Labour government of Prime Minister James Callaghan in the late…
June 1985 witnessed a vicious pitched battle between riot police and what were described as ‘New Age Travellers’ in the shadow of Stonehenge. An extraordinary level of violence was used by police against people who had turned up for a free festival at the ancient site. These festivals had been going on throughout the 1970s…
Nearly forty years ago, a police officer was hacked to death during a night of violence in north London. Police Constable Keith Blakelock stumbled during a riot on the Broadwater Farm estate and never stood up again. His neck was hacked at with a machete and knives with one report suggesting he lost fingers as…
Doctor Who was a 20th century TV success story that soared but then crashed as historian Tony McMahon discovers
1985 saw two double agents exposed. KGB agent Oleg Gordievsky and US Navy officer John Walker were not what they seemed. Tony McMahon reports
Corporal punishment was a constant feature of 1970s schools reducing children to a terrorised state as TV historian Tony McMahon remembers
Night clubs in the 1980s and 1990s were often subjected to police raids for various reasons as TV historian Tony McMahon recalls
