Nigel Hastilow: Note of caution about those good ol’ days

This was Britain’s glorious heyday before Margaret Thatcher. A time when the Government owned the gas, electricity and water companies, the railways, the airlines, the Royal Mail and we voluntarily joined the European Common Market.

In the 1970s, the State owned docks, coal mines and even car-makers like good old British Leyland.

Of course, most of the time the workers were on strike, Britain was the ‘sick man of Europe’. Inflation was over 20 per cent, interest rates hit 17 per cent and Labour Chancellor Denis Healey had to beg the International Monetary Fund to bail out the economy.

Actually it was Healey who first imposed the ‘austerity’ spending cuts which Margaret Thatcher took the blame for. But the country elected its first female Prime Minister in 1979 because the voters were so horrified at the state of the nation they knew something had to change.

Unfortunately, if you were born less than 40 years ago, most of this isn’t even ancient history because you won’t know strikes meant rubbish piled up in the streets and the dead remained unburied. You certainly won’t know that high rates of tax forced businesses and entrepreneurs to flee Britain in order to hang on to some of their hard-earned money.

All you are likely to know is what you learned in school where your teachers will have taken great pleasure in vilifying ‘Thatcher’ at every opportunity. You will despise her because you were taught that she destroyed the miners and their communities and left nothing but a wasteland everywhere north of Watford. This is why Jeremy Corbyn’s version of left-wing extremism is actually going down well with many younger voters.

People who are saddled with student debt, can’t afford to buy a house and struggle to meet the high cost of rent don’t have any sympathy for those on £80,000-plus who may have to pay more tax. They want more to be spent on ‘elfneducashun’, they want tuition fees abolished, they don’t see the point in investing money on nuclear weapons.

They can’t understand what’s wrong with nationalising the railways, energy companies, water industry or the Royal Mail. They dislike zero-hours contracts, want worker’s rights and think anyone who is unenthusiastic about immigration is a racist.

They think Theresa May is the reincarnation of ‘Thatcher’ and refer to her as Cruella de Vil from ‘101 Dalmatians’ even though the harshest thing she seems to have done so far is laugh at the idea of giving Nigel Farage a knighthood.

There is something particularly bizarre about the way Jeremy Corbyn seems to have such an appeal for young people. In any other line of business, you might consider it deeply dodgy that an old man spend so much of his time hanging about with kids a third of his age.

The reason for the adulation he receives in some quarters is mutual ignorance – Jezza wants a Labour Government which appeals to just about every starry-eyed 19-year-old idealist.

Of course it’s naïve to think the State can run anything better than the private sector. We tell ourselves the NHS is ‘the envy of the world’ yet the truth is survival rates for most diseases are far superior in other countries.

It’s easy to blame high bills, late-running trains or public sector wage freezes on greedy fat-cats lining their own pockets and evading their taxes – especially as, inevitably, there is some truth in it.

The fact that Labour’s manifesto sums simply don’t add up – they probably asked Diane Abbott to double-check the figures – is almost entirely irrelevant to the young and angry.

They think they are hard done-by compared with their parents and grandparents. They have no truck with suggestions a Labour Government would wreck the economy by spending vast sums of money the country hasn’t got. They would not accept that even the young might find the tax bill for Jeremy Corbyn’s socialist nirvana a little hard to swallow.

For if Labour won the election and went on a spending spree, they would blame the subsequent recession on Brexit and the refusal of rich people to pay their fair share of tax.

Taken item by item, Labour’s manifesto is attractive to young voters. But even if they don’t remember the 1970s, they can’t have forgotten the Noughties when Labour ran up massive Government debts and help precipitate the disastrous banking crash.

Churchill, among others, is quoted as saying: ‘If a man is not a socialist by the time he is 20, he has no heart. If he is not a conservative by the time he is 40, he has no brain.’

The tragedy for Jeremy Corbyn is that he has never grown up; the tragedy for his supporters is that one day they will.