There was no such thing as a “trigger warning” in 1990. But there should have been one in front of This is England ’90, which premiered on Channel 4 on Sunday night (13 September). The latest instalment of the cult series begins, as always, with news footage of the year’s events. And what events: the poll tax riot, the Strangeways riot, Gazza crying as he’s yellow carded, Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait and Thatcher’s resignation.

Director Shane Meadows has picked 1990, but he could have chosen any one of the years between the fall of the Berlin Wall and the release of Netscape in 1994 to capture the period. For this was the last gasp of the analogue working class. Meadows’ loving portrayal of the early 90s will trigger memories for those who lived it: the daft hats of rave culture, the eclectic mixture of fashion styles you could see at a local club, the sudden visibility of out gay men in working-class communities. But to those who didn’t live it, one aspect of life back then will seem utterly unreal. In TIE90, young people sit around on sofas in the daytime talking bullshit. They sit, they smoke, they watch TV, they indulge in prolonged and pointless conversations.

Nobody looks at their mobile phone because – as thousands of parents will have had to explain – there weren’t any. Nobody goes on the internet because it didn’t exist. Nobody flicks through movies and games on TV because, back then, the box beneath a TV was for playing tapes.

That’s not the only difference between now and 25 years ago. In 1990, intelligent twentysomethings sit around in the daytime because they are unemployed. Britain was in recession. Estates such Sheffield’s Gleadless Valley, where the series is filmed, were as stark and poor as Meadows makes it look. There is no self-loathing, yet, among the spliffed-out youngsters. The estate is trashy but not yet dysfunctional. The precarious low-paid job has barely been invented – so people without work are still referred to as “jobless” not “welfare recipients”.

It is probably just as well that this is going to be the last This Is England. Because what happened to that last generation of the pre-digital working class has not been pretty. They were born into a world of upward social mobility but – even as they necked their ecstasy pills – it was stalling rapidly. Statistics show that people born in 1970 were living through a sharp and tangible drop in social mobility. For that generation, what your father earned was far more likely to determine what you would earn than it was for those born in 1958. Meadows captures well this sudden reversal of fortune: In TIE90 the twentysomethings struggle, while their parents, the baby boomers, sit in chintzy living rooms clueless as to what’s gone wrong.

A glance at the deprivation figures for the real Gleadless Valley (2013) reveals the legacy of this turnaround. According to Sheffield council: “The entire population live in areas classed amongst the 10% most deprived areas in England.” Just under a third of children in the ward live in poverty. More than half the women booked in for childbirth are overweight or obese.

Lol and Woody, the couple at the centre of the series, would now be aged 45. Lol’s a dinner lady in 1990 and Woody’s on the dole. What they would be doing now depends on whether they have escaped Gleadless Valley estate. That was the issue for working-class kids in the first years of globalisation. Could you escape the trap that was opening up, and how would you do it?

Of all the footage in the opening montage of TIE90, it is the poll tax riot that contains the biggest signifiers. The police lose the fight. Thatcher falls. The girl knocked over by the charging horses is a punk with dreadlocks. I was quite close to that event so I remember that corner of Trafalgar Square being defended by young miners, some of them already sacked.

They fought in a way they’d learned in the last months of the 1985 miners’ strike – hurling rocks and bottles, completely free of the deference and pacifism that had made the older generation prefer the “link arms and shove” tactics.

I recall feeling on that day that a lot of certainties were falling apart around me: the deference and hierarchy that had kept protests self-controlled, even during the fractious 80s. The social solidarity that enforced law and order in working-class towns, the maleness and the straightness of public life were fading; recreational drug use was flaunting its smiley face across mainstream culture.

This new fluidity meant that, when the economy recovered in the mid-90s, the labour market would become more stratified. The rungs on the earnings ladder separated rapidly, leading to sharp and rising wage inequality. It trapped the poorest but – as the free-market model found its stride – enabled the return of upward mobility by the 2000s.

If they’ve been lucky, the real Lol and Woody will be living in a nicer part of Sheffield having survived several episodes of layoff, retraining, outsourcing and offshoring. The real people I remember from the riots and raves of 1990 – mainly the clever non-graduates who populated the trade union movement – are now ward sisters, chemical engineers, shift supervisors in highly automated factories. Whatever the job title, most are working with a raw material that barely existed in 1990: digital information. The ones who didn’t escape will be living a life you know all too well from the benefit-porn documentaries: poor, hopeless and stuck; dazzled by the celebrity circus, perennially hounded by the DWP.

So as we laugh at the hapless youngsters of TIE90, and snicker at the analogue drabness of their world, let’s remember. This is what it was like just before we got divided into the saved and damned: when you could still riot without a balaclava, walk into a jobcentre with your head held high, and when a whole family could – if it had to – live on the earnings of a dinner lady.

• Paul Mason is economics editor of Channel 4 News. @paulmasonnews

• This article was amended on 14 September 2015. An earlier version said Paul Gascoigne was red carded; he was actually given a yellow card.

