1990 to 1997

John Major was a conservative prime minister who oversaw the country's economic growth. He was also responsible for the cease fire of the IRA in Ireland and deescalating the violence they caused. He received the highest number of popular votes in conservative history even though he only possessed a small majority. Through his time as prime minister he survived an assassination attempt on his life after the IRA mortar bombed number 10. In his terms as prime minister he pushed the importance of unifying the country after his predecessor Margret Thatcher has so violently divided it with the Argentinian conflict and the miner strikes.

1979 to 1990

As the first female prime minister Margret Thatcher faced no shortage of controversy. Her hard-line policy's saw a rise in unemployment at the start of her time in office. She pushed the ideology of 'self-help' in that the government would give people the tools they needed to better their own lives rather than just relying on the government. This meant that in her first term as prime minister unemployment doubled as funding for healthcare, schools and government housing was cut as well. In foreign affairs, the Falklands War illuminated her most significant international relationship, with  Ronald Reagan, president of the United States (1981–89). Thatcher and Reagan, who together made the 1980s the decade of conservatism, shared a vision of the world in which the Soviet Union was an evil enemy deserving of no compromise, and their partnership ensured that the Cold War continued in all its frigidity until the rise to power of the reform-minded Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev in 1985.  The implementation of a poll tax in 1989 produced outbreaks of street violence and alarmed the Conservative rank-and-file, who feared that Thatcher could not lead the party to a fourth consecutive term. Spurred by public disapproval of the poll tax and Thatcher’s increasingly strident tone, Conservative members of Parliament moved against her in November 1990.

Living in the Essex-Hertfordshire borderlands as I did, and making regular hit-and-run raids on London to visit clubs such as the Wag, the Electric Ballroom, the Cha-Cha under the arches at Charing Cross and the Camden Palace, I found those years of the late 70s and early 80s extraordinarily exciting. England was being convulsed by a social, cultural and political counter-revolution. There was violence on the football terraces and on the inner-city streets.

The forces that drove the punks and new wave bands that followed them were similar to those that motivated the Thatcherite ideologues - a profound desire for consensus-breaking transformation. This was a time of great innovation in pop music, as bands inspired by the can-do attitude of the punks and by the art-school cool of David Bowie began to experiment with synthesisers and computers, new technologies that would change forever the way music was made.

Yet some time in the mid-80s everything became becalmed. The fiercest political battles had been fought and won. The miners were defeated. Free-market fundamentalism was the new orthodoxy. People began to feel richer. The pop music was dismal. The culture became coarser and more reactionary.

As an undergraduate from 1986-89, I was surprised by how many of my fellow students were committed Tories. Apparently the urge was no longer to change the world, even superficially in the old spirit of student idealism and adolescent rebellion, but rather to prosper in it. OK, I was at a university in the south of England, popular with nearly-Sloanes and Oxbridge miss-outs - but something didn't seem quite right.

Then there was yet another cultural shift towards the end of the decade. The rave scene began spilling out of the Hacienda nightclub in Manchester and into wider society, altering the mood, energising a whole new generation, many of whom were high on the freely circulating drug ecstasy.

The summer of 1989, the last summer of the decade, was unusually warm and settled in England. Meanwhile, something was happening in eastern Europe, and it soon became clear that entire political eras were coming to an end, with the sudden and dramatic fall of communist totalitarianism. For one sweet extended period that year it seemed as if everything was changing for the better, that the Cold War was at an end, and that we were living, if not quite at the end of history, then at the beginning of something new and promising.

The feeling of euphoria didn't last; in retrospect, how could it have lasted? But it was an inspiring end to a thrilling decade of convulsion and upheavals.

• Jason Cowley is the author of a memoir about the end of the 1980s, The Last Game: Love, Death and Football, published by Simon & Schuster