I was born in 1957. I think of myself as one of ‘Attlee’s Children’. I grew up in the Welfare State that his government created. I was the first person in my family to go to University, partly because I was the first generation for whom higher education was free.

Attlee, Bevan, Cripps and their colleagues were born in the Nineteenth Century. They saw the poverty and inequality in Britain close up. They lived through both World Wars. They and the generation who voted for them, emerged from the other side of that trauma with a passion to build the basic decencies into our political system. I think we all owe them for that.

I am bitterly disappointed that many people in my generation seem to have either lost sight of them or been raised in ignorance of them. Too often, they see themselves as ‘self-made’, attributing their home ownership and their incomes to their own hard work without recognising the advantages that they were handed by the previous generation.

If the polls are right, they are the ones who have kept in power a generation of Tories committed to turning back the clock to Britain as it was before World War II.

The generation after me ended their higher education, if they could get it, deep in debt and with almost no chance of being able to buy a house.

The generation after them is struggling to leave home. There is nowhere to rent. There are no jobs. Many of them know that by the time they reach their fifties, they’ll be living through the consequences of climate change that the current crop of politicians, lost in greed, narcissism and fantasies of empire, do nothing to prevent and who try to lock up those who protest their inaction

I hope that that generation produces its own crop of Attlees, Bevans and Cripps and finds a way to restore the decencies that we were gifted with a century earlier.