Were we better off in the 1950s than we are now? The Labour MP Frank Field thinks that we were, commending the fact that back then, instead of getting drunk, stabbing one another and watching Strictly Come Dancing, the mass of British people were cheerfully occupied with such fulfilling and organic pastimes as “cooking, gardening, dressmaking, music-making, rickets, polio and smallpox”.

Actually, Frank didn’t mention the last three – I added those, the diseases which were prevalent in those austere and crepuscular years after the war had ended, all of them less funny than even the bloody Goons, which is saying something.

We also had Ministry of Defence scientists testing nerve gas on British soldiers (and in the process killing them), a much lower life expectancy, endemic poverty, the continual threat of nuclear annihilation, all manner of class, gender or racial bigotry, rotten food, rotten housing, rotten bodies. Bomb sites, tenements, prefabs, dysentery.

We all look back at the decade in which we grew up as being a golden era. I suspect that there are octogenarian Russians even now telling their great-grand-kids how lovely it was back in the Thirties, with Stalin and Beria and mass starvation and terror; tough men, sure – but at least you knew where you stood with them. Up against the wall, quite often, as it happened. I look back at the Seventies with a glow of nostalgia, conveniently forgetting the three-day week, the Baader-Meinhof gang, purple brushed denim loon pants and It Ain’t Half Hot Mum.

Frank Field’s eulogy is part nostalgia and part also that traditional politician’s lament; which is that when given a choice, the public always seem to choose wrongly. We do not quite match up to what our leaders expect of us. Karl Marx looked forward to a time when the proletariat would spend its mornings working and its afternoons at leisure, “reading Plato”. Ah yes. How are Plato’s sales doing now, in these days of leisure? Frank is an unlikely Marxist but his misapprehension is the same: given the opportunities rightly afforded us by socialist administrations, we do not read Plato but instead collapse on the sofa watching Strictly Come Dancing, or go out for a spot of recreational stabbing.

There was a similar point made by a senior Conservative politician last week. Andrew Lansley seemed to welcome the recession because it would mean that people ate “less rich food” and would have “more time at home with their families”. They would also smoke and drink less, because they were skint. All good, he argued (before being forced to apologise).

Now, I like the idea of your average Woolworths counter clerk being forced to forgo the usual supper of snail porridge and truffled monkey-spleen as a result of being made redundant, and settling for beans on toast instead.

But I’m not sure how this vision accords with reality. What rich foods do you think the working classes will have to give up, Andrew? No more oscietra caviar and foie gras? And do you really think that people who have been made redundant will drink or smoke less? My guess is that, like me, they will smoke and drink a lot more when trouble comes knocking at the door. And does Lansley, with his private school education and Sloaney university degree, have any conception of how ordinary people live?

Both Field and Lansley, in their different ways, are in essence complaining that the public has had it too good; that the stuff which has been won for them by the politicians these past 50 years are things which they know not how to handle; they have been spoilt. It is rather like David Bowie insisting, back in the dark days of the troublesome Seventies that the British people needed a good dose of fascism. Give the people a choice, and they will mess it up – what they really need is poverty and misery and privation.

+ Having closed down half of the country’s pubs by banning smoking in them, the government is now opening a new front against another national institution, our corner shops. The shovel-faced termagant Dawn Primarolo, the public health minister, will be introducing legislation banning shops from displaying cigarettes, a measure small shopkeepers insist will be ruinous. Also, cigarettes must be sold in plain white packets.

Those small shops not already done for by the government’s recession should be finished off by this restraint on their trade: the shopkeepers’ association reckons it will cost its members £252m.

Remarkably there is no hard evidence that banning the display of fags will have the remotest effect upon the numbers of people smoking. The government’s own study reports that in the only countries where this has been tried out – the world’s most exciting and captivating nations, Iceland and Canada, where they probably try out legislation like this on a regular basis in order to alleviate the national boredom – the evidence is at best “speculative”, ie, there is no evidence at all.

Is that a wand in your pocket?

Sexual jealousy seems to be the driving force behind the new Harry Potter film – with the now minxy, and legal, Hermione, outraged that neither Harry nor Ron wishes to give her one. So it goes. What began as an enchanting story about a nerdy wizard has now become Sex and the City with Added Elves. We are in Harry’s adolescent years; future franchises will show Harry smashed out of his head on vodka and Red Bull, then later Harry facing up to his responsibilities and taking a good job with an index-linked pension in health and safety. There will be no wizards, or witches, or magic of any kind; just endless grey desolation. It’s important that our children continue to watch, to let them know what’s around the corner.

Sex with moths is a winner, Rachel

Huge congratulations to Rachel Johnson, the second Sunday Times writer to win the Literary Review’s Bad Sex award. In 2003 I was shortlisted for a reference to the bright red bottom of a baboon.

A A Gill scooped the prize in 1999 with some seriously weird stuff. Simon Sebag Montefiore gave it a valiant stab again this year, but 2008 is the year of the Johnsons – both literally and, if Rachel’s book is anything to go by, colloquially.

You have to say, the babe deserves her award for a passage from Shire Hell. If you read it, it will ensure you never, ever, have sex again. It is when Rachel’s “bush” and a “fluttering moth” make their appearances that your kedgeree might begin to make its way back up your oesophagus. Not to mention the invocation of poor Richard Wagner later on.

Is that what posh people get up to between the sheets? Bushes, moths and Wagner?

+ Among the first things to suffer in a downturn are our pets. Phil Bishop, a former TV executive, was up in court last week for having shot dead Foggy, a neighbour’s bedlington terrier, because it barked at him. Dougal Thorn “punched and throttled” his neighbour’s cat Chopper because it “smirked” at him.

In the house price slump 17 years ago, a “fiend” baked a puppy in an oven. The recession of the 1970s led to the assassination of Rinka, a great dane, who may or may not have been murdered on the orders of the then Liberal party leader, Jeremy Thorpe. Pets should keep their heads down, eat their Whiskas and shut up, until we humans are over the worst.

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