It is partly the rise of selfish individualism, at the expense of the shared values of restraint. The Sixties had something to do with it; shared values seemed part of the stuffiness and conformism that young people found so repressive. (Reader, with my then shoulder-length hair, I was one of them.) Then came Thatcherism, which, for different reasons, had the effect of exulting the individual over society. To the yuppie, litter was something for other people to pick up.

It’s an interesting example, for me, because it’s self-refuting, in that it contains the correct answer while asserting the wrong one.

Although in the UK we associate it with Thatcher and the 1980s, the word Yuppie was an American coinage. The origin of the word is pertinent:

The term gained currency in the United States in 1983 when syndicated newspaper columnist Bob Greene published a story about a business networking group founded in 1982 by the former radical leader Jerry Rubin, formerly of the Youth International Party (whose members were called yippies); Greene said he had heard people at the networking group (which met at Studio 54 to soft classical music) joke that Rubin had “gone from being a yippie to being a yuppie”.

Those 1960s radicals keep cropping up, don’t they? Aslet says the ’60s had something to do with 1980s “selfishness”, Greene noticed that a radical ’60s leader had become an arch Yuppie.

In the USA, the syndrome was so well known and remarked on that later in the decade, in 1987, a film called Wall Street was made, exploring this phenomenon.

But that wasn’t the end of it. Juppie was coined for Japanese Yuppies. Buppie for black Yuppies, Guppie, for gay or green ones. The term cropped up everywhere, France had les Yuppies, Germany… all round the world. By the mid 1980s, Yuppies were everywhere.

So, here’s the proposition that Thatcher Derangement Advocates require us to accept. She came to power in 1979. Within five years, she had influenced the entire world and driven it to selfishness. Such was her power that this happened in the USA even before it did in the country she lived in.

This is complete drivel, fatuousness in a propeller hat, riding a unicycle in circles while making high pitched noises. Yet somehow it has become received wisdom, such that Mr Aslett could refer to it even while putting his finger on the real cause of the changes noticed in the 1980s.

We’re looking for a cause for this changed behaviour (though it was nothing like as clear a change as is made out), a cause that was world-wide. A cause that started to have its effect around 1980. Around the time that people born in 1960 were entering the workplace. Around the time that people who were teens in the 1960s were entering the most powerful time in their working lives.

Yup. It was the 1960s counter culture coming to adulthood. It’s as simple as that. The people causing the changes so lamented by Guardian writers were… the people who have become Guardian writers. If you doubt that for a moment, read this 2007 conversation between Piers Morgan and Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger.

As Mick Jagger put it, “We piss anywhere, man”. Others drop litter.

Now don’t get me wrong, I’m a child of the 1960s and the Stones were my band. But they were not caused by the woman who came to power 15 years after they became famous.

And there [Nick Griffin] is, like a Bond villain relocated to the set of the Royle Family

But here’s a very strange paragraph:

Margaret Thatcher’s Right To Buy scheme changed things for ever, though only once former tenants sold up and moved on. As that happened, thousands of ex-council houses contributed to the cheapest rental market in London, drawing more and more of the economic migrants who now keep so much of the city running. The borough was thus transformed from a largely white community where abundant accommodation ensured that extended families lived within doors of each other, to a multi-coloured milieu in which people at the sharp end had to compete for scarce supplies of just about everything: decent jobs, adequate schools and, most of all, somewhere to live. The result: a tinderbox, where issues get reduced to race and nationality.

So while the houses were in the control of the Council, foreigners could be kept out, but when housing moved to the free market, those pesky darkies started to flood in. Is that really what the writer meant to say?

I suspect, in his haste to blame Margaret Thatcher for Labour’s electoral weakness in the constituency, the implications of this paragraph escaped the author.