Did my generation break Britain?

When I was 11, I was a pompous little git, but was I also a playground prophet? It first dawned on me that I was one lunchtime in the late 1970s as I looked around at my peers. There they were shouting, swearing and hitting each other. Were we, I wondered, the clueless inheritors of a system we wouldn’t be able to take the reins of successfully? A system that we hadn’t been raised with the discipline to appreciate, or even to understand? Were we doomed to decline? The years since – and the current state of Britain – suggest I was right.

Looking back, it seems clear I was picking up on the doomy declinism of the pop culture of the late 70s; the John Mills’ Quatermass TV series, all social breakdown and ultraviolent youth cults; or World In Action with its melancholic organ theme and grainy titles of riots and swivelling nuclear warheads – allied to a budding conservative temperament.