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when TRADE UNIONS were very powerful. In 1979
the Labour government lost a general election after
a 'WINTER OF DISCONTENT' when there were many
STRIKES.
The Eighties
During the 1980s, the UK and the US had RIGHT-
WING governments led by Margaret THATCHER and
Ronald REAGAN. They encouraged people to be
successful in business, and reduced the amount of
help given to poor people. The aim was to make
people more SELF-SUFFICIENT and less dependent on
the state. The eighties was a time when a lot of
people became very concerned with making money,
and they did not care much about poorer people.
Leaders of large corporations received increasingly
large salaries while the wages of their workers grew
much more slowly. Young people working on the
stock market or in banks earned huge sums of money.
In their homes, people typically had WALLPAPER, bed
covers, curtains etc all in the same pattern; or they
chose a MINIMALIST style in black and white with very
simple furniture. It was in the eighties that it first
became fashionable to CONVERT old warehouses in
city centres into flats for people to live in. The eighties
was also the decade when President GORBACHEV
brought about great changes in the Soviet Union and
greatly improved relations with the countries of the
West. The BERLIN WALL was taken down in 1989,
and by 1990 the COLD WAR had ended.
The Nineties
In both the US and UK, the RIGHT-WING governments
of the 1980s lost power, and were replaced by
governments whose ideas were less extreme. Bill
CLINTON became US President in 1993, and Tony
BLAIR became Prime Minister of the UK in 1997. The
nineties became known as the 'caring, sharing
nineties', because it is thought that people were less
concerned with making money, and more concerned
about other people and the environment than they
were in the 1980s. Diana, Princess of Wales, who
died in 1997, was extremely popular because she
was thought to be very caring, and to represent
nineties values.
Popular music included GRUNGE in the early 1990s,
and BRITPOP in the late 1990s. Dance music (=music
produced from electronic sounds usually with a fast
beat) was popular through the whole of the nineties,
especially with young people in CLUBS (=places where
you go to dance at night) or at RAVES (=large parties
in empty buildings). It became common for young
people in clubs to take illegal drugs, especially ECSTASY.