A lot of people would be very happy to go back to the 1970s. The Tories should be careful about saying that Andrew Burnham will return us to those years. He can’t and won’t, but if people get the idea that he can and will, a lot will vote for it.

As someone who lived through that decade, I tire of Thatcherite hardliners going on about the three-day week, flying pickets, union barons and unburied bodies.

This is not because these things did not happen. They did. I reported a lot of it. It is because they are a tiny part of a far larger picture.

Other shocking features of the times were that almost everyone walked out of school into a job; that the streets were peaceful and patrolled by the police; that you could keep a family and house them on one income; that most of the things you ate and drank or used were grown or made in Britain; that if you got into university you weren’t forced into lifetime debt.

Broken families were much rarer, education better, drugs unusual. In many ways it was a pleasing, comfortable era. It wasn’t wrecked by wicked unions, though there were some stupid and foolish strikes. The real problems began in the 1960s, when the first great wall of inflation hit this country. Much of that was cooked up by the USA’s huge spending on war and welfare.

The slippery Harold Wilson also devalued the pound, slashing its value by 14 per cent but claiming falsely that ‘the pound in your pocket’ would not be affected. I remember him telling this lie on black-and-white TV. It was part of a great ruinous global earthquake, a lot of it caused by the huge costs of the stupid Vietnam War (nearly as stupid as our current wars in Ukraine and Iran). Some things we did made it worse, especially joining the Common Market and relaxing wise limits on debt. Yes, it was often dangerous and destructive to go on strike, and seldom did much good, but most of those who did so were only trying to win back some of what raging inflation had cost them.

Inflation was horrible for anybody on a small income or a fixed pension. At the start of it, when we still had our lovely old currency, the prices of things in shops and markets would have been recognisable to an Englishman of the 1660s. At the end, all prices were mad, as they have remained ever since.

I recall very clearly the day in 1973 when those relatively contented days ended for good. My wife (as she then wasn’t) and I had spent a beautiful early October day punting on the river in Cambridge, and took the train back to London, where we were staying for the weekend – to find that, while we had been lazing in the sun, war and misery had struck in the Middle East.

The Yom Kippur War, the fourth major Arab-Israel conflict, had broken out at lunchtime that day and would lead, much as Donald Trump’s Iran adventure is leading now, to rocketing oil prices and the world we know. For me, the planet visibly darkened and I do not think it has ever fully recovered the light-hearted sunlit feel it had that long-ago afternoon.

I watched with some bafflement the new BBC self-advertisement, in which it suggests that we would all lose terribly if the Corporation stopped broadcasting. This may be so. Even I sometimes watch and listen to it but I must confess that

I have no idea who any of the people are in this short film, though I am obviously expected to. That includes the alleged comedian who fronts it. The only one I recognised was the Dalek.

Will cars eventually eat this country? Half of all councils in England now actively encourage parking on pavements through marked bays or signage. Imagine the fuss from ‘motorists’ if town halls encouraged pushchairs on roads.

More than a million cars which are too big to fit the standard parking space (of roughly 7ft 10in wide and 15ft 9in long) are now sold in Britain each year. There are plans to expand the standard parking space to 8ft 6in wide and

16ft 5in long to cope ever-fatter motor cars. So, much less space for humans.

There are now about 33 million cars in Britain, most of them spending 23 hours a day depreciating in gutters. About £92billion is currently lent out to people to buy cars.

Next year I hope to publish a book called The Madness Of Cars. This is why.

Last Wednesday, the Daily Mail reported that a judge had condemned calls to legalise marijuana. He did so as he sentenced a man who had battered his 73-year-old mother to death with such ferocity that he broke his hand. He killed her after going mad following his habitual smoking of marijuana.

Judge Steven Everett warned that cannabis was a ‘terrible’ substance which ‘caused and exacerbated’ mental health issues. He said campaigns to decriminalise it were ‘wholly misconceived’. The judge ordered him to be detained indefinitely in a psychiatric unit.

The BBC website reported the case without once mentioning marijuana. How come?

Charles and Camilla emerge from a Tardis – a 1920s police box – at the Commonwealth Games. Jolly good wheeze. But the one thing you won’t see coming out of a police box (abolished) or a police station (mostly closed) is a police officer (extinct). The reason the prisons are so full is not because we put too many people in them, but because criminals don’t encounter the law or punishment till they are already hardened criminals. By then prison is useless as a deterrent.