When were the ’80s? This isn’t a case of the classic ’60s blur – “if you remember them, you weren’t there” – more that any definition of a decade will reveal an inherent bias. As Lucy Robinson writes in the introduction to her entertaining new study, Now That’s What I Call a History of the 1980s: “This is my version of Britain in the ’80s. It might not be yours”. She’s right. Parts of it jogged happy memories, parts left me cold, but in general, I liked her cultural-studies approach – though it is, inevitably, a partial one.

Many writers on the ’80s concentrate on one aspect: the deindustrialisation and monetarism brought in by Margaret Thatcher. Andy Beckett’s 2015 book, Promised You a Miracle, for instance, concentrating on the decade’s first years, does this well. Dominic Sandbrook’s 2016 TV series, The 80s, on the other hand, aimed to avoid “the Punch and Judy” aspect of such a fractious time – something that will never be possible. Thatcher bestrode the decade. She effectively began it with her election as prime minister in 1979; she would remain in post until 1990. She was a radical who transformed so many aspects of society, and where you stand on her will completely colour your view of her era. In my view, we’re still paying the terrible cost of her “revolution”, yet the Right have never got over her, and the Left have never understood her.

Robinson, a Professor of Collaborative History at the University of Sussex, does well in charting the various social movements that emerged in opposition to Thatcher’s rule. The moribund Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament suddenly became massive again, morphing into Greenpeace. I went to Greenham myself a few times, an experience as much about female solidarity and endurance as anything else. There was Rock Against Racism, during which I remember fights with skinheads, armed with bottles and knives, breaking out at gigs. There were Hillsborough, the Battle of Orgreave, riots against the police and the resistance to Section 28.

If we tell the story of the ’80s through popular culture, which, as Robinson points out, had already started to look back through the notions of “retro” and “vintage”, we find that popular culture alive with protest. Remember Boys from the Blackstuff, with Yosser Hughes (“gizza job”), dealing with mass unemployment; Nelson Mandela by The Special AKA; Stand Down Margaret by The Beat; the whole post-punk Blitz Kids dressing-up scene (“you can’t afford to look poor”)?

Thatcher’s “economic miracle” did not touch me, or anyone I knew. Instead, it made me even more politically engaged. The 1981 riots came as no surprise, as I lived in Brixton, where tensions against the Metropolitan Police were already high. Coming home from an evening class in a nice car with a friend who happened to be black, we were aggressively stopped and searched. But I was lucky compared to others. The destruction of heavy industry resulted in the devastation of towns and lives. Britain gave up being an economy that manufactured anything. The so-called “left-behinds” are not a new invention: the economic policy of the Thatcher years decided that whole swathes of people were dispensable. Adapt or die!