Sailing home from Fastnet with a sharp north-wester, we raised Land's End in silence. Instead of the routine traffic calls and four-hourly weather forecasts on VHF Channel 67, there was a glum voice every hour or so saying that Falmouth Coastguard was taking industrial action all week and would respond only to emergency calls. Once a foreign merchant ship's captain called, in careful but precarious English, and received only the same sour, formulaic drone about “fair pay and grading”. He sounded confused.

Well, coastguard pay is indeed lousy, and all pay rises are well below current inflation; but it lowered the spirits just as the wind backed and threw a grey sea-fret over England's cliffs. Next we put into Plymouth harbour and found that the Torpoint ferry, which links Cornwall and Devon across the Tamar, was on strike. “Most people,” said my cab driver resignedly, “just took a couple of days off work.”

As Ben Macintyre wrote on Saturday, the 1970s are back. This coastguard strike is their fourth this year; some individuals have been worried enough about safety to break it. Other public service workers have walked out under the Unison banner and more threaten to; unions flex their muscles at a weakening Government. The Chancellor says there's no more money, petrol prices soar, inflation plagues food and fuel and nobody's pay can keep pace.

Yes, we have been here before. The signs are that this is not a 1990's blip but closer to the Seventies seasons of strikes that culminated in the Winter of Discontent: pavement binbags laced with scuttling rats, corpses waiting unburied and Prime Minister Callaghan coming back from Barbados and rashly making light of it (he never exactly said “Crisis, what crisis?” but the headline brought him down). Any minute now we shall have ministers instructing us to save power by cleaning our teeth in the dark and driving delicately, in socks, at 50mph.

Times Archive: 10 reasons why the Seventies are back

Strikes, inflation, Abba, maxi-skirts ... the past is coming back to get us

I remember it well because I was a young radio reporter, local and national, nipping in and out of diverse households and workplaces all through the era of rota power-cuts, the three-day week and general uncertainty as to what the shopping would cost and whether any transport or government service would function that day.

I was one of the lucky ones, being in my early twenties without commitments and rising through the pay scales (first salary 1972: £985 a year. It paid the rent on a horrid shared flat up Grays Inn Road, clothes from market stalls and macaroni cheese in a subsidised canteen). But I remember how the Seventies felt and how people reacted.

Not badly, on the whole. There was a certain Blitz-spirit resignation, a curious good humour, a dry shrug. Perhaps Abba, Angel Delight and embroidered flares really are soothing to the spirit.

But we are a different people now. Far more of us - even the young - are owner-occupiers, with homes and security achingly vulnerable. We are much deeper in debt: Seventies survivors, taught by frugal war-generation parents, can remember how shocked and fascinated we were by the first credit cards and Access's terrible slogan: “Take the waiting out of wanting.” A few years later supermarkets started accepting credit cards for the weekly shop, and we were shocked all over again.

Today debt is the general condition: and if you are already up to your neck, food and fuel inflation is more frightening. Individuals - just like government with its PFI con-tricks - have been living for too long as if debt didn't really count. We also trust banks and savings less, with good reason. Nerves will twang harder this time, desperation rise faster.

There is far less job security today, too: the short-contract culture has taken over, teamed with rash outsourcing to private companies that cut corners and squeeze employees. This has produced predictably awful results: think of the British Airways catering strike fiasco, of the early chaos of the Criminal Records Bureau or the current educational testing contract disaster. This all aggravates insecurity, and is compounded by growing awareness that, while private sector pensions are eroded, lavish public sector deals - including those of politicians and civil servants who fouled up the said services - must be financed forever by our sweat and our children's. There will be less sympathy with public sector workers, more aggression from both sides.

The old sense of social solidarity, of bumping through a rough patch and shaking our collective heads resignedly at the more unreasonable strikers, is gone. Moreover, the terrible fat-cattery of the boss class - whether in privatised utilities, politics, incompetent financial institutions or BBC top management - arouses in ordinary struggling earners a sort of crazy rage: a temptation to irresponsibility that can be hard to resist: “Let's all go to hell in a handcart, they're all bastards, why struggle in to work, why care?”

In parenthesis, it was fascinating to compare the attitude of people I met as a local reporter in the 1976 drought with the parallel crisis after privatisation of water. In 1976 people happily carried bathwater out to the allotment and obeyed pleas for economy; we were all in it together. By 2003 we had been told we were “customers” and saw water company shareholders making money. So the taps kept running, and hosepipe bans had to be enforced by authority, not peer pressure.

So if things are going to get tough again, it seems to me that this time round it could be nastier. The old stoicism has been eaten away at the foundations. We are a better society in many ways - it is infinitely easier now to be black, disabled, gay, or possessed of an eccentric creativity - but we are also more precarious, suspicious and fragmented. And, crucially, a sub-group has formed which was unknown in the Seventies: families workless for three generations. Taxpayers resent them, and those on welfare become sullen and defensive. Meanwhile the internet spreads lies faster than ever in human history, and mobile technology facilitates rumours, fears and flashmobs.

Still, the Seventies ended and prosperity returned. North Sea oil flowed. The silicon revolution came. The family silver was sold off and the unions tamed. Trouble is, few of these things are repeatable, and our level of trust in public authority has rarely been lower. But I dare say something will turn up. Meanwhile, all we can do is to contain our irritation and behave as well as we can bear to.

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