As those on the right claim the UK has ‘gone to the dogs’ and life was better in the 1970s, and some on the left articulate a return to an old-school style of collective politics, our intergenerational panel asks: Is nostalgia for the 1970s justified?

A Boring, Violent Life

Otto English

Mum picked me up outside school and we drove home with her asking me how my day had been. I told her about the music lesson I’d had, the rugby match I’d dodged, and made no mention of the fact that just an hour earlier my 60-year-old headteacher had beaten me with a shoe. I had let another boy copy my homework, we had been caught, and both of us had been violently punished as a result.

It was the late 1970s, I was not yet 10.

Unfortunately, such everyday brutality was commonplace in the era, so I just sucked it up.