RICHARD LITTLEJOHN: Economy dragging us again to the Seventies? I by no means thought I’d say this, however why not! Couldn’t be any worse than what we’re going through now

Best of order, laydees and gentlemen, please. I’ve been watching re-runs of the Wheeltappers and Shunters Social Club (Affiliated) on Talking Pictures TV.

Starring Northern comedians Bernard Manning and Colin Crompton, it was the model for Peter Kay‘s fabulous Phoenix Nights series.

Running from 1974 to 1977, the popular ITV show was set in a fictional working men’s club and featured ‘turns’ ranging from knife-throwers, jugglers and xylophone players who made Sooty sound like a concert pianist, to down-on-their-luck American stars such as Roy Orbison, The Platters and Billy Haley and his Comets.

The other night featured a terrible one-trick-pony magician, yodelling Australian crooner FrankIfield (Remember him? He remembers you), and Britain’s answer to Doris Day, Kathy Kirby, who had obviously had a few before tottering on stage.

(Actually, I have a family connection to Kathy Kirby. My Uncle Eddie was a chauffeur who used to drive her from her home in Essex to a drying-out clinic in Swiss Cottage. On the way back, he’d stop and buy her a bottle of gin for the journey home.)

It was a cornucopia of hilarious hairdos, appalling fashions, rotten teeth, flat beer and a bar menu which included such delicacies as ‘peas on a saucer’ for 5p. That’s if you could see through the fug of cigarette smoke.

Many of the jokes were not even borderline racist and sexist, which is why Talking Pictures has to broadcast a trigger warning about ‘offensive, outdated attitudes and language’ before every programme.

It was so bad at times that it was absolutely magnificent. And despite some of the material which would have the club raided by police and Manning banged up for ‘hate crime‘, there was an innocence about it.

The Wheeltappers was certainly a more authentic representative of the Seventies than modern PC interpretations such as Life On Mars.

So where am I going with this? Since before the last election some commentators, me included, have been warning that Labour would take us back to the Seventies.

Strikes, fuel shortages, stagflation, a run on the Pound. Sounds familiar? The damage done to the economy by Rachel From Complaints in her disastrous Budget has drawn valid comparisons with the 1976 sterling crisis.

But it got me thinking. I never thought I’d say this, but would going back to the Seventies be such a terrible thing? It wasn’t all bad.

The past really was another country. Yes, it had its privations. Strikes were commonplace, but at least we had a manufacturing base, unlike today.

In 2025, politicians seem only too happy – indeed, thrilled – to sacrifice our steel and motor industries on the altar of Net Zero and to outsource jobs and prosperity to China.

Speaking of strikes, I can remember banging out stories by candlelight on an old sit-up-and-beg typewriter because of the power cuts which resulted from the 1974 miners’ dispute, which also forced the then Tory government to introduce a three-day working week. Today, a three-day week is seen as an imposition, if it involves actually going in to work.

Looming power cuts are now deliberate official government policy, thanks to Ed Miliband’s kamikaze-style Net Zero nosedive.

Back then strikes by dustmen left rubbish piled up in the streets. When they were working, though, the bins were emptied at least once a week. Yet now, councils not emptying the dustbins more than once a month is par for the course in pursuit of saving the planet. Result: overflowing bins and widespread fly tipping.

In the Seventies, you could get a same-day appointment with your GP, who would make a home visit if you were bedridden or too sick to make it to the surgery. If you were seriously ill, an ambulance would turn up and rush you to the nearest hospital.

In 2025, you can wait weeks to see a doctor and the best the Government can promise is that, if you’re lucky, within five years you may only have to wait 18 weeks for an operation.

On Sunday, my phone pinged to tell me not to bother going to A&E if I came down with flu or Covid because all the hospitals in North London were full to overflowing. At the Whittington, in Highgate, they’re even advertising for nurses to treat people in corridors, if they ever make it out of the ambulances stacked up in the car park. I could always try the 111 website. Don’t call us . . .

That’s the reality of Our World Class NHS in the 21st century. OK, so medical science has advanced exponentially. But that’s down to science, largely funded by Big Pharma and private enterprise, not politicians or the legions of self-serving bureaucrats who run the health service. We weren’t handing out fat jabs and free shampoo on the NHS in the Seventies, either.

Petrol was expensive, but the roads were half empty. You could normally guarantee getting to your destination on time. There were no extortionate ULEZ zones or congestion-generating LTNs and blanket 20mph limits, designed to fleece motorists with fines and penalty charges.

Today, petrol prices are still astronomical but the Government is planning to force you to go electric, though the deadline is hopelessly unrealistic.

Even Labour’s Net Zero Tsar admitted recently that she had no idea what to do when her electric car ran out of puff.

If Miliband gets his way, we’ll all be running round in those foot-propelled contractions, like the Flintstones.

Yabba, dabba, doo!

And if you couldn’t afford a car in the Seventies, bus services were frequent, reliable and cheap as chips. From this month, by government order, the cheapest one-way bus fare across much of England has risen to £3. Yep, three quid.

We tend to think of the Seventies as an era of confiscatory taxation. And it was. But now we’re lumbered with the highest taxes since World War II – and rising. And does anyone seriously believe we are getting our money’s worth from our ‘world-class’ public services?

Some of us remember when there was a police station on every high street and in every village, and the police could actually be bothered to patrol the streets and investigate burglaries and shop robberies, rather than combing the internet for ‘inappropriate’ comments.

In 2025, the world is now more dangerous that at any time since the Cold War, yet we are spending less than ever on defence. And we now read that Labour is planning still further cuts to our Armed Forces’ budgets because of Rachel From Complaints’ financial recklessness and naivety. Be afraid, be very afraid.

I’ve never been against immigration, but what was a trickle in the Seventies has become a tsunami. Our once green-and-pleasant is bursting at the seams and being concreted over to accommodate the uncontrolled influx. Fifty years ago, we had room to breathe and our public services – our legendary schools’n’ospitals – were far less strained.

There was a genuine sense of community. Kids played in the streets, not on the internet, and people spoke to each other, instead of staring gormlessly at mobile phones.

Maybe this nostalgic look back with a degree of rose-tinted affection is because the Seventies were good to me. I married my teenage sweetheart, had two wonderful children and got my big break in newspapers.

But, on reflection, I wouldn’t go back, although I do mourn what we’ve lost, particularly freedom of speech and thought.

In the Seventies, drag queens like Danny La Rue were much-loved novelty acts on the Wheeltappers and Shunters. Today, they’re everywhere on the BBC and considered fit and proper people to read stories to children in kindergarten, aimed at furthering the militant MGBGT+ agenda.

Anyone with a penis entering the ladies’ toilets at the Wheeltappers would have been shown the door, and probably the gutter, as a basis for negotiation.

Before the usual suspects start bouncing up and down, I’m not defending some of the attitudes of the past. But now we live under a woke tyranny, where expressing an unfashionable opinion can result in your collar getting felt and your life ruined.

The main difference, looking back, is that by 1979 and the election of Mrs Thatcher we were able to look forward with some degree of confidence.

North Sea oil and gas were coming on tap, promising self-sufficiency and a more prosperous future. Five decades on, the Government is refusing to issue any more North Sea oil and gas licences, condemning homes and businesses to paying the highest energy bills in the world.

A Labour movement which once stood shoulder to shoulder with unions fighting to defend jobs is now deliberately instituting policies which will drive companies abroad and put hundreds of thousands of people out of work, perhaps permanently.

Today, all we’ve got to look forward to is another four and a half years of the worst government in my lifetime. And I’ve seen a few. Four more years of slash and burn, high taxes and inexorable decline.

As for the few remaining working men’s clubs like the Wheeltappers and Shunters, they might as well shut up shop now. The way things are going, by 2029 there won’t be any working men left.