The work ethic instilled in Hannah Hauxwell seems lost to time as more young people join the dole queue - David Behrens

We seem to have crossed a threshold in national life. The promise of what is possible has begun to burn off the miasma of what is not. I may be jumping the gun; check back in a year to find out.

So far we have only words, and words are cheap. But if you thought the last two years have been depressing – and no-one’s arguing with you – it’s worth considering just how much worse it was in 1973. That’s when, on a Tuesday night in late January, the nation first encountered Hannah Hauxwell.

While the rest of us relaxed in the flickering glow of our 21-inch colour sets from Radio Rentals, she sat alone in her Dales farmhouse with no electricity to cook what little food she had, and only her books and a harmonium for comfort.

She would have been 100 today – Yorkshire Day, though no-one had begun calling it that.

That first glimpse of Hannah set off a collective outpouring of pity and admiration. We saw in her a set of values we had abandoned, and though we were grateful for the comforts in our own lives, she made us rue what we had lost.

The same might be said of the journey from 1973 to the present. We remember that beige decade for its strikes, the off-the-scale inflation and the candles we kept at home for when the lights went out. We tend to forget how hard work life, and life in general, could be.

There were two colliery disasters in 1973 alone, one at Lofthouse in Yorkshire, and five IRA bombings in London and Manchester. Petrol was rationed and we were at war with Iceland over fishing rights.

Today’s challenges cannot be measured against those. We benchmark them only against the relative stability we have enjoyed in more recent times.

But amidst the darkness, one statistic from 1973 shines like a beacon from a golden age. That summer, nearly 99 per cent of the country’s young people were at college or in jobs. It was the highest figure for around a decade and it’s gone downhill ever since. By the end of the 1970s teenage unemployment had risen tenfold and today two young people in every 15 are on benefits.

Worse yet, over half are not even looking for work. For them, the dole queue is not a stigma but an expectation, an entitlement even. The work ethic instilled in Hannah Hauxwell and those of us who watched her on TV has been lost to time.

That has created an unsustainable social sandwich. With retirees living longer (myself included, an oversight for which I apologise) and so many of the young reliant on handouts, the tax-paying workforce in the middle is being squeezed like never before.

That’s why it is unproductive to criticise the new Prime Minister for making it his priority to tackle the issue from both sides. It’s something his predecessors should have done long ago. But modern politics is predicated on ‘quick wins’: squeezing Pollyfilla into the cracks of our national framework instead of replacing the foundations.

Andy Burnham’s big pronouncement this week was to explode the myth that university is the only choice for ambitious young people. He articulated what many teachers have long believed, that a generation of teens has been failed by a one-size-fits-all national curriculum that prevented them from studying engineering, agriculture or something else that might have eased their path into the local jobs market.

Michael Gove used to argue that a level playing field across the school timetable gave everyone an equal shot at success. But in his world, the curriculum was the only thing that was level. The attitude to learning across different communities was certainly not. Gove’s idyll of English baccalaureates was rooted in Eton, not Cleckheaton.

The consequence is a generation of young people and parents alienated by their schools and incentivised not to work because they have no qualifications and the minimum wage pays less than the dole.

Meanwhile, the cleverest have been saddled with student debts they may never be able to repay. It’s an upside-down system – more Socialist than elitist – which benefits only the most indolent in society. It is a curious legacy for a Tory government, and ironic that it should fall to a left-leaning PM to dismantle it.

There is one further lesson from 1973. The Labour Party at that time was in thrall to militant trade unions which held the nation to ransom. Workers were encouraged to believe it was their prerogative to down tools whenever they wanted. That baggage has dogged it ever since.

Yet in one respect that generation outshone today’s: they knew that to be able to go on strike you had to have a job in the first place.