If we must go back to the Seventies, can I at least get some cheap beer?

‘You ‘eard Mick! Everybody out!” Yesterday afternoon, the RMT abandoned negotiations and triggered a summer of discontent, forcing us on to a slow-moving train back to the 1970s, minus the consolations of cheap beer and good music (Harry Styles in his nan’s cardie is the closest we’re getting to glam).

Mick Lynch’s retro press conference so stank of stagflation that all it was missing was Jack from On The Buses with a fag in his mouth and an arm around a dolly bird, shouting: “What about the workers?!” – those knights of labour who never want to strike but always have “no choice”. After all, £3,000 an hour to clip tickets isn’t much to ask for.

When low pay is commonplace, “what makes your representatives so special?”, asked a running-dog lackey from the press. “The whole country is sufferin’,” said Mr Lynch – bald, tieless, exuding the compassionate air of a Rottweiler with its mouth around your ankle. The difference with the RMT is that it is “prepared to fight for what it’s got”. The rest of us lack “power” and the “ability to organise”.

We’re just jealous! Mick might have a point: if sketch writers could strike for more lolly, I might be able to afford never to ride one of his crowded trains ever again. Take me back to the 1970s, when Parliament wasn’t broadcast and people had to read sketches – giving us hacks industrial muscle – and politics was a simple class war.

The very bourgeois Grant Shapps looked in his Thatcherite element at the Dispatch Box: it’s a strike, he declared, “orchestrated by some of the best paid union barons representing some of the better paid workers ... which will cause misery and chaos”.

But does fault not lie with the Government, countered Louise Haigh for Labour, for it has been “boycotting the talks” and tied negotiators’ hands? Ms Haigh, who in another happy throwback has hair like Elsie Tanner, put in an impressive performance that caused a ripple of doubt across the House: could it be that the Government wants to turn the clock back to industrial chaos because men like Mick – like Scargill – are easy bogeymen, and the Tories can cash-in on Labour’s refusal to denounce them?

Two Labour MPS asked tricky questions; Shapps claimed that the constituency parties of both had received cash from the RMT. Olivia Blake called the strikers, “our railway workers”, as if they were the sainted NHS, or sending an ice-skating team to the Olympics. I also “love the railways”, countered Shapps. “I just want them to work!” and unless they modernise – i.e. replace staff with computers – they will go the way of the coal mine.

The debate hinged on that age-old problem, first diagnosed by Barbara Castle, that when one group of workers holds the country hostage, trying to cling on to “what they’ve got”, it hurts all the other workers in turn.

That includes nurses, teachers and, yes, sketch writers, who will be forced to watch the Commons on telly, with a Watneys Party Seven.