Bernard Ingham: A generation that couldn’t plough a steady furrow

This longevity, while nothing to write home about these days, perhaps invites some assessment of where, amid the encircling gloom, the human race has got to in my time on this planet.

First, a few facts. I was born into the last gasp of the horse age – my relatives farming on the Pennines mowed, shook, rowed up and led in the hay with horses – and have seen man reach for the stars and land on the moon.

Technology has liberated Yorkshiremen out of their corner of the dale to motor or fly in the footsteps of Julius Caesar, Alexander the Great and Attila the Hun. No longer is a bus ride to Halifax a day out from Hebden Bridge or a holiday in Blackpool the norm. You see the exotic gastronomic consequences of this global exploration – and immigration – on every High Street.

Technology has also freed generations of women from drudgery and exponentially improved surgery and medicine while performing wonders for (telephonic) conversation. It has also left millions twittering wrecks and enslaved others with the endless gush of computerised information. But that is by the way

Those of my generation who retired before Gordon Brown’s frontal assault on private pensions in 1997 have known unprecedented comfort and security in their old age, always assuming they can look after themselves.

Our lives have been transformed within 80 years. The time has come to ask whether we are the most favoured generation in the history of the world? Have we seen the best of it?

Well, we are the first generation to have escaped slaughter in a major war. We have known 66 years of peace, if you ignore the killing fields of Korea, the Falklands, Iraq and Afghanistan. We were brought up to be independent and do our duty. We were grounded in the 3Rs, expected to make the most of our talents and imbued with the work ethic. Only the upper crust knew anything more narcotic than fags. We only had to learn how to cope with beer and sex.

The class rigidity of our parents’ generation steadily gave way to a more open, upwardly mobile, if no less snobbish, society. We now know the sky’s the limit for our grandchildren, provided they inherit a functioning economy.

On this evidence, no one generation has ever had it so good. But what have we made of it? Not a lot.

We may have bred the first university generation but we cannot educate our grandchildren to earn their keep. As Iain Duncan Smith says, the welfare state has trapped people into dependency.

Lord Dannatt, the former head of the Army, sees our moral decline reflected in military recruits. Prisons are overflowing, even if the criminal justice system seems incapable of jailing the villains.

We elderly dread when the time comes to be taken into care. Can we rely on being treated with respect and dignity?

Popular culture worships “celebrities”, excusing their worst behaviour and ignoring their status as mere commercial tools. This pursuit of money also imposes on innocent individuals by harrying them in their homes with cold calling or hacking into their mobiles.

After Hitler, we may have seen off Soviet communism but we have so far made a very poor fist of containing militant Islam, which similarly seeks world domination through terror.

Floating on the comfortable bubble of property inflation that has rendered the working class liable for inheritance tax, we have utterly failed to conduct our affairs with the rectitude our mothers taught us. The world is awash with the debt we were warned to avoid like the plague. Our children and grandchildren will be paying it back for years to come.

This is what comes of ignoring the basics that were drummed into us as youngsters. It is not a legacy to be proud of. It demonstrates that for all our advance we have no more idea than any of our ancestors how to conquer the eternal failing of the human race – how to avoid extremes and plough a steady furrow.

So, yes, my generation has been blessed beyond the singing of it. But it has allowed too much that was good to go to rack and ruin. Born into the Great Depression, we cannot die entirely happy having landed our descendants in another.