IS anyone else experiencing an unsettling sense that time has jumped back 25 years?

Consider some recent news headlines: Unemployment is above two million and rising.

Some Metropolitan Police officers are accused of dealing out summary beatings on the streets of the capital.

And Spandau Ballet are going on tour.

Surely these are all worrying signs that the 1980s nostalgia phenomenon has gone too far.

You may, like me, have gained the impression that life is imitating the TV series Ashes To Ashes, and that you’ve somehow sustained a blow to the head and woken up in 1982. In which case, you should be very afraid – because there are all sorts of things about life in the 1980s that nobody would want back.

Remember the riots?

The strife? Or the extra bank holiday in 1981 which we wasted watching a royal wedding which turned out to be a bit of a sham?

But one feature of life in the 1980s which I really wouldn’t want to return is this: the constant complaints you used to hear directed against the many people who were unemployed.

In those days, it was common for people to say things like: “They say there are millions of people out of work, but if you ask me, the trouble is that they don’t want to work.

“I’ve been looking for someone to pick up the clippings in my hair salon. You get £4 a week for working 78 hours, you just have to supply your own broom and I only beat you with a meat mallet twice a day. And yet I’ve had a card in the window for nearly eight minutes and only three people have applied.”

Sadly, with the dole queues rising again in the 21st century, one or two people have once again taken to blaming it all on the unemployed themselves.

The most notable recent example is Sir Michael Caine. Complaining about the government’s recent decision to put up tax on the highest earners, he said: “We’ve got 3.5 million layabouts on benefits, and I’m 76, getting up at 6 am to go to work to keep them.

“Let’s get everybody back to work so we can save a couple of billion and cut tax, not keep sticking it up.”

Now, I admire Michael Caine’s best films as much as the next person, and I’ve seen his Oscar-winning performance in Hannah and Her Sisters more times than any sane individual probably should.

And you have to concede that Sir Michael is one person who really is prepared to set an example by taking any work going – as those of us who have seen The Swarm or The Island or Jaws The Revenge will testify.

But all that aside, accusing the unemployed of being work-shy is just ignoring the evidence around you.

An awful lot of people have been laid off from some of Britain’s best-known businesses lately, and as far as I could tell, hardly any of them wanted to go.

A friend of mine who was jobless in the 1980s received a form from the DHSS asking him what he was doing to find work and why he thought he hadn’t found a job. His answer to the latter question was impossible to argue with: “Probably because there are three million other unemployed people out there.”