Via National Review comes this excellent gaffe from the New York Times that is further evidence of their Raines-era fall into kneejerk American-style liberalism.
The British milieu that the Clash emerged from called out for punk. When the Sex Pistols’ Johnny Rotten, draped on his microphone, intoned, “No future,” it was the cry of youth coming out of school to discover that there were no jobs in Margaret Thatcher’s Britain and refusing to accept that as reality.
Ah yes, if young Brits were pissed off, it had to be Thatcher’s fault. Of course, as National Review points out, the Sex Pistols predated Thatcher’s election by three years. The bleak future Johnny Rotten faced was the UK’s declining welfare state led by a Labour government.
Source:
No Second Acts in Punk? Ed Ward, The New York Times, December 29, 2002.