If you want to sum up the 90s in the UK for people like me who became adults then, it would be the song, "Things can only get better". A little embarrassing, yes? Naive? and yet there really was an optimism then. If things weren't great (and objectively it was a poorer country), they were getting better, and they could get better, and they would. Happiness is more about cake tomorrow than cake today, and in the 90s you really could believe it. Do we have that belief now? Managed decline, it feels like, is the best the UK can offer.

To make this a bit more pithy: in the 1990s we were excited about the coming 21st century. In 2025, do we think the 2030s are going to be better, really? Or are we looking down the barrels of one maturing catastrophe over another?

I too loved that song as a kid, but it's from 1985. It felt like the right song for that era too!