'For whom was the Seventies a period of crisis? As far as I can make out, it wasn?t a crisis for the unions, it wasn?t a crisis for the poor, it wasn?t a crisis for workers, it wasn?t a crisis for the young, it wasn?t even a crisis for business, or if it was, this was as much due to rapacious new Neo-Liberal asset strippers like James Goldsmith and various stock market bubbles as it was ?the English disease?. It wasn?t a crisis in terms of Law and Order, Public Health, Housing or Education.'
At the time, it was indeed thought of as a crisis. Pointedly, Jim Callaghan lost the election because he returned to the country (from America) and was asked about the crisis, to which he replied 'Crisis? What Crisis?' This was reproduced as a headline in more than one newspaper, over pictures of the great piles of uncollected rubbish that had been heaped up in Trafalgar Square, during the (in)famous strikes amongst the low paid of 1978.
There were indeed law and order panics, around 'mugging', particularly, which are well described in Stuart Hall's book Policing the Crisis. The British economy was seen as being moribund by many (which was, after all Mrs Thatcher's main claim, coined by the Saatchi brothers 'Labour is not working', under a picture of an unemployment queue - or in fact the staff at Saatchi and Saatchi). It was also the decade that miners' strikes led to power cuts, which added to the gloomy mood. Not, however, that organised labour thought of it in glowing terms. On the contrary, they were very angry about the way their wages were being eaten away by inflation, and how they had suffered under the various wage-control schemes.
The literature of the time has something of the flavour of what was going on. Zoe Fairbairns Benefits (1978) is quite interesting on the oppressive character of 'statist' reformism. Anthony Burgess' Clockwork Orange - and even more so the Kubrick film version sums up corporatist in Britain very well, Lindsay Anderson's Oh Lucky Man does too, but his is more pointedly anti-capitalist
There are a plethora of book about the seventies in Britain, see here: http://www.amazon.co.uk/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Dstripbooks&field-keywords=seventies