The Friday Round-Up

This week was all about the 1970s, and not in a good way. Our standard of living is slipping while costs rise, says the Mail. Memories of the decade of the three-day week and blackouts are doing little for the nation's mood.

Labour's brought back the "worst of the 1970s" with its temp directive, bleated the Telegraph.

"We're back to the 1970s stagflation," says Vince Cable in the FT Adviser, managing to retrofit a word coined only a year or so ago by the IoD's chief economist, Graeme Leach.)

Ownership policy has also stepped back in time: 1976 government papers reveal an economic crisis so bad, says a BBC article, that "civil servants warned the UK may have to give upits Polaris missiles." Just like today, as we prepare to sell the family silver -- or plutonium -- to the highest bidder.

But it's not all bad. TV's 'The Supersizers Go Seventies' inspired a mass outbreak of nostalgia from the likes of Nancy Banks-Smith and Martin Clayton at Garbled Noise. He was only five and a half when the 1970s ended, but his trip down memory lane can now be accompanied by that other 1970s revival, vinyl.

Now playing? Through the Past, Darkly.