With apologies to future generations...

I WAS 11 when the ‘summer of love’ 1967 highlighted a significant shift in attitudes to mainstream life. It was an impressionable age for me and for many.

Peace and love was the message and a reaction to a growing materialism, distrust of the old order, class, Vietnam and the Cold War.

Just for a while there was hope of a new, better and safer world but it lasted barely three years before the dream was marketed as a cynical version of itself, even by some of the ‘love children’ involved.

The unions carried on the egalitarian ethos into the seventies and made great strides for the benefit of the working classes but then let their first taste of real power go to their heads and pushed too far and too quickly.

By the eighties, ‘All you need is love’ became ‘All you need is greed’ and one-time ‘hippies’ all but ruled the world as they were now the generation in positions of power.

I apologise to the subsequent generations on behalf of mine for we have let you down (apologies also for the generalisations). Our baser human instincts betrayed us, and hence yourselves.

I can only wish that the present generation will find more integrity and conviction than we did in finding the important values of life. I am hopeful but it is a big ask as history shows us.

As a postscript, any chance of the public being repaid for the faulty goods that is the test and trace system, amidst the many crony contrived contracts this government has handed out?

Peter Lawrence Dursley Gloucestershire