If Starmer takes us back to the 1970s he will face a millennial revolt

Labour is planning to nationalise the railways. UK state monopolies were awful. It will be quite a shock to the under-40s

The train drivers have won. They may as well call off all further strike action and drop any more phoney talk about pay rises. This was never about money.

Aslef leaders and their members know full well that they earn two to three times more than nurses and classroom teachers for doing jobs that are almost entirely automated. No, this was about power.

The carefully orchestrated industrial action that has shut down individual train franchises in turns was all about creating so much disruption and unreliability that the entire system of private rail ownership would be discredited. And Labour has neatly obliged with the desired response: train travel is to be renationalised when they return to power.

Some of you may be old enough to recall the original incarnation of this system. British Rail became the symbol of a paralysed Britain in the days when striking was a favourite national pastime. Back then, the unions were dealing not with a collection of individual companies but with just one employer – and that was the government itself.

The entire railway network of the country could be (and was regularly) shut down with a single action and the union leaders were playing in the biggest political league by publicly facing down elected ministers.

Those were the glory days of militant trade unionism which the Thatcher reforms of the 1980s finally brought to an end. Now the union leaders have a promise of a return to their previous status: parlaying and bargaining with the highest forces in the land.

Even before the election that promises to put Labour in office, their plan ensures that there will be no further investment by the present private franchise holders in services which are to be seized from them without compensation.

Effectively, Labour has imposed a form of planning blight on the possibility of any immediate improvement in train travel. This is particularly grievous since, at least in cities like London that have Labour mayors, the use of cars is being penalised with higher costs and greater restrictions.

Maybe you don’t regard this as particularly alarming. All that matters to you in your exasperation, especially if you are a commuter, is that the trains are reliable and reasonably priced, and that certainly isn’t the case under the present arrangements.

But, in fact, this move to renationalise an essential public service has huge political ramifications because it reverses the overwhelming social and economic tide that has changed the face of Britain in a generation.

The current population of this country – especially its younger cohorts – are quite phenomenally sophisticated consumers. To almost anyone below the age of 40, the expectation of having a choice of mobile phone network, television streaming service or broadband provider is regarded as a natural right.

Not so very long ago, in the Before Time, what telecommunications existed were owned by the state and operated by the General Post Office. If you requested the installation of a landline, you were put on a long waiting list which is why so many British homes did not have a telephone at all.

In today’s Britain, your household, like mine, is probably being lovebombed relentlessly by its communications providers with free offers, helpful advice and requests for feedback (“How are we doing?”), all designed to keep your loyalty.

But it is not just the newer forms of service provision that have been transformed. If you can remember back to the 1960s, you may recall that the distribution of milk was controlled by the Milk Marketing Board, so milk could only be sold at fixed prices in dedicated shops run by either Express Dairies or United Dairies who also controlled its delivery by milkmen in their assigned neighbourhoods.

When the selling of milk was opened up to supermarkets prices began to fall and milkmen eventually disappeared. (That could be regarded as a loss to the community, but who now would not expect to be able to buy a late-night pint of milk from a convenience store?)

Many of the assumptions that underpinned this sort of state monopoly and control had come from wartime rationing when the whole point was to make it more difficult for people to purchase goods and make demands on services.

People were not customers to be courted. They were passive supplicants who accepted what they were given.

Indeed, even the times that it was possible to purchase food were severely restricted. There were early-closing days and not-open-at-all days. When I first settled in London, the local butcher was closed all day on a Monday and on the afternoons of Saturday and Wednesday.

Life was planned and regimented to suit the rules on what you could purchase when, with your own money, and there was always a queue for fresh meat on Saturday morning.

Until quite recently, there were planning restrictions which prevented supermarkets from being built too close to one another so there could be no effective neighbourhood competition between chains. Now the new entrants from abroad which specialise in low prices can fight it out with the established giants.

You may well argue that a lot of this supposedly fierce competitiveness is less than it seems. Mobile phone providers are merging, supermarket price wars are often simply devices to get you through the door.

The actual scope for choice may not be quite what it is cracked up to be. But all of this creates an atmosphere of expectation about the relationship between buyers and sellers that would be unrecognisable to people who lived out their adult lives in the Britain of the 1970s. The very idea of being able to choose a new service provider – or to make a complaint about your present one – which young people now take for granted, would be a revelation.

So just how far is Labour planning to take its revived commitment to state control and monopoly services? And have they considered what the reaction of younger voters will be if they discover that they no longer have a choice about how they spend their own money?