RUBBISH piling up in the streets, wave after wave of industrial action, threatened winter power cuts, an energy crisis, rampant inflation, nothing seeming to work properly anymore ... “We’re back to the seventies!” is the cry that’s generally going up.

Anyone under 55 won’t have much sense-memory of what that means. My own recollections of living under crisis in the seventies are few but indelible.

Yes, I remember my parents dripping candle-wax onto side plates, and us playing with our ivory domino set during the power cuts. I also remember rubbish piling up in Coatbridge’s streets and closes, amazed that life could fall apart so easily. And I do remember bushy-browed politicians, managers and trade union leaders, grimacing together outside glossy front doors, inexplicably going in for “beer and sandwiches”.

But I also remember that the second half of the seventies was punk and the beginning of post-punk, with smart, spiky, exciting people bursting through our Baird telly. It also saw the launch of my favourite comic, the deliciously subversive 2000AD, and the first Star Wars movie, smuggling anti-imperial resistance into my tiny mind. I even expected to be living on an orbiting space-wheel by the time I was an adult, given the number of times I saw them in newspapers and magazines.

READ MORE: What the world’s top economists say about Scottish independence

Mired in the collapse of a post-war consensus between capital and labour; shimmering with utopian or alternative plans and dreams (the afterglow of hippie counterculture). Is that how the seventies felt to you?

Smart historians would rather render it as a “competition of nightmares”. The BBC radio producer Phil Tinline presses this thesis across shows, books and articles. As the years progressed to their crisis point with the election of Thatcher in 1979, Tinline sees a clash of horror shows. The left was warning about racism and right-wing authoritarian government; the right anticipated a shift towards Marxist-style bureaucratic control. Both rhetorics conjured up demons.

In one of his articles, Tinline digs up an extraordinary intervention: Prince Philip giving a dystopian 1977 lecture to Radio Clyde (no less!), titled Us In 2000: “[Philip] foresaw shrinking freedom of choice in public services and growing bureaucratic involvement in everyday life. People would become more dependent ‘for even the basic elements of existence’ on state, employer and union benefits. There would be ‘gradual suppression of anything which does not suit national economic policy, or which does not appear to do justice to the national cultural ideal’.”

Maybe no surprise that the old toerag was a swivel-eyed Hayekian beneath his many unwarranted chest medals. But you may have heard almost exactly this kind of discourse in a Tory leadership contest, somewhere near you … how easily establishment continuities persist across the decades.

Other continuities between the 70s and now are equally disheartening. I’m looking at a photo of a National Front protest in 1979, with slogans like “Jobs and homes for Britons, not boat people” (Cambodia and Vietnamese refugees). I’m also remembering, from the other day, Farage using his GB News tv pulpit to rage against “Albanian boat migrants”.

For all their activity in the late seventies, the National Front performed pathetically in the election of 1979, winning 0.6% of the vote. It’s hard not to conclude that the far-right’s agenda has been so absorbed into the political mainstream that they can broadcast under Ofcom-regulated media, rather than scrappily wave placards in the streets.

The 1970s and the 2020s may be marked by an energy crisis – but the causes are universes apart. The 70s were the age of peak oil and gas: a merrily-spewing carbonocracy, only bothered at the edges by environmental concerns. They were more challenged by Middle Eastern oil cartels, or powerful domestic unions with a chokehold over the national economy.

In 2022, Putin’s invasion of Ukraine has only made more widespread the understanding that our economies and societies are too fossil-dependent – particularly on the aggressive, illiberal autocracies which possess them. The high wave of zero-carbon consciousness that peaked around the last few COPs and the youth protests does not look like reverting to the status quo ante, even under current pressures.

And yet, there’s a juicy irony here. The most lasting solution to the current energy crisis – which is to renationalise key providers, who can then control prices to consumers’ (not shareholders’) benefit takes us right back to the heart of the political economy of the seventies.

HAVE the incessant instabilities of Russia/Ukraine, the next pandemic to come, and our baked-in climate disruption, put the cassette player of Thatcherism into reverse? There’s a resonant old phrase from the seventies: “social security”. It used to be a technical description of welfare payments. It’s now more like a collective demand from a battered population.

Of course, there’s a deep continuity between these eras that’s right on our doorstep: Scottish self-determination. Many of my strongest seventies sense memories pulse around this. I had many teen dreams of a rich, futuristic Scotland. A land of flashing ziggurats, fuelled by oil revenues to Disney-esque “City of Tomorrow” heights.

Some of you may have caught the clip flying around social media recently – a 1977 Thames TV show on Scottish devolution. It features an Amazonian Margo MacDonald, cast among a warren of combed-over and side-burned male politicos of the time (including an incorrigible Hugh MacDiarmid).

What makes it seem like a lost world is the sheer petro-centricity of the economics involved – the “black, black oil” literally fuelling the constitutional arguments. Progress was defined by how much of it could be extracted, and which sovereign polity would benefit the most from its burning. Not a whisper of any of the externalities and pollutions of fossil-fuel use that have gripped us over the last decade or so.

Very different times.

If there is current impetus for independence, the economics will be defined by “sustainability” and “net zero”. As this year’s GERS report on Scotland’s economic performance in the Union came out this week, John Swinney was at pains to separate out oil and gas revenues from the country’s operating budget. We still could pay our social expenditure, he asserted, from revenue that didn’t include taxes from North Sea extraction.

It’s still “Scotland’s Oil”, to revive that old seventies slogan – but it’s no longer Scotland’s solution. It’s more our responsibility to steward it than extract it.

And what of the alternative dreaming and utopian scheming of the seventies – is that echoed today? Certainly the means of that dreaming and scheming is more ubiquitous. Our digital palettes can realise almost any kind of world, from the far past to the far future, in games and movies and VR, with startling verisimilitude. My seventies comics and blockbusters-in-flea-pits seem gritty and implausible by comparison.

But has the quality or radicalism of that imagination improved since the 70s? To quote Slavoj Zizek, it’s still easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. That holds true for so much of the narratives and worlds that capture our attention, in entertainment or news media.

READ MORE: BBC checked my opinion on independence before interview, Outlander author says

You might pine for a new punk to kick against the times. But at least they could swing their Doc Martens against clear targets. Our boots would launch themselves at the screen and instantly dissolve into pixels and memes. There’s an endless, incorporating matrix behind them, rather than a clear “establishment” to overthrow.

Perhaps doggedly, I still think that Scottish independence is the kind of big-e Event that can break through these loops, and return us to fundamental questions about power, resources, lifestyles, the military, democracy, technology, health, and happiness.

It may be that a conversation about these matters was beginning to swell in the 70s, and was snipped off by Thatcherism in 1979.

But that musing is for the oldies among us. Let younger generations bring their own language and priorities to the Scottish future. Not “back to the seventies”, but “forwards to the rest of the century”. And let’s admit it: there’s a lot of rubbish for them to clear away.