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I’m not much of a gambler but I do have bets with myself and I hate it when I lose.

Take this week, when I was convinced that as soon as Labour’s manifesto was leaked every right-wing paper would refer us back to 1983 and call it ‘The World’s Second Longest Suicide Note’.

Instead they regressed a further decade with ‘Corbyn to Drag Britain Back to the 1970s’ (complemented in many cases by Jezza wearing his black comrade-friendly cap and striking a Citizen ‘Freedom For Tooting’ Smith pose).

A brief modern history lesson: The phrase ‘dragging us back to the 1970s’ is used to inflict maximum damage because Tory spinmeisters have managed to portray that decade as even grimmer than the 1340s when the Black Death was all the rage.

The Satanic 70s, they say, was when rats roamed streets feasting on unburied corpses, inflation was on a par with 1920s Germany, all houses were lit by candles because the miners were always on strike, and it took you so long to get a phone most people invested in a homing pigeon instead.

That’s not how many like me remember a glorious decade. There was Bowie and The Clash, Rigsby and Fawlty, cheap football, and tens of thousands of kids becoming the first in their family to go to university (for free).

But mostly there were still proud, content, working-class communities which had yet to be destroyed at the expense of a Thatcherite economic model based on individual greed.

Which was why, in the 70s, inequality in Britain reached its lowest-ever point.

If Labour are offering to undo some of that damage by re-nationalising key industries, bringing in a £10 minimum wage, forcing salary caps on bloated executives and properly funding our schools and hospitals, then what’s not to like about a 70s revival?

Especially when you look at the alternative on offer: A one-way tram ticket back to the 1950s.

Did anyone else see Theresa May and her hubby on The One Show , and think: “My God, it’s chirpy Arthur Askey with his Jolly Hockey Sticks playmate, Joyce Grenfell?”

A pair of black-and-white, Harry Enfield sketch throwbacks, talking about “boy jobs and girl jobs” and no doubt having a corker of a pillow fight after lights out.

(Image: Getty Images Europe)

But then when the majority of your party members are middle-class pensioners who envisage a perfect Britain as one of cricket on village greens, maidens riding on bikes, boys scrumping apples and women knowing their place, then why not try to take them there?

Forget how repulsive and dated the sight of chinless wonders on horses chasing animals until they die, is. Bring back fox hunting .

Forget how divisive the 11-plus is, and how ALL of our state schools are crying out for funding.

Pledge to pour an ever-decreasing pot of cash into grammar schools to give middle-class families who can’t afford private schools a leg-up the jobs ladder, while the poor kids rot on low pay.

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Forget the need for more police, just evoke images of Dixon of Dock Green.

Sell a Hard Brexit as a patriotic opportunity to bring back the days of the Empire when the rest of the world left us alone, we bought New Zealand lamb not French brie and we had local shops for local people.

If we must take our country back, let’s stop in the 1970s, eh?