One of the tropes that has emerged, unquestioned in the past week or so, is that the Britain that Margaret Thatcher inherited in 1979 was a hopeless, broken and run down place - a European version of Zimbabwe, riven with internal strife, near-bankrupt and an international laughing stock. 

Well, having lived through this period I have wondered how true that story is. There was a survey awhile back which identified the long golden summer of 1976 as the happiest period in recent British history. The 1970s may have been a lot poorer than the 2010s (I think GDP per head was, in real terms, abnout half what it is now), but I am not sure it always felt like that. It is true that nobody travelled much or had a new car (I remeber frequent foreign trabel and flash motors carrying the slight whiff of spivvery that has vanished now) but we were hardly starving. 

Yes there was the Winter of Discontent (and numerous other strikes) but the fact is that these troubled periods were relatively short. The actual Winter of Discontent lasted for some three months between November 1978 and February 1979. Yes, rubbish piled up on the streets of some cities, there were rats and other nastinesses, but what I mostly remember from this time was the extraodinary snow and the appearance of Star Wars at the cinema. 

The broken Britain of the 1970s was home to about a million unemployed, less than a third of the figure seen in boomtime 1980s. London may have looked a bit shabby and down at heel but the northern cities had jobs and cash that they have never really recovered. In many ways this was something of a golden era. Culturally, the 1970s were far more interesting than the 1960s. This was the time of Bowie and Punk, clever, innovative television .This was the time of Life on Earth, Monty Python and Fawlty Towers, the Good Life and Whicker's World. Pink Floyd and  those epic battles at Wimbledon - a tournament which actually produced a British winner, remember. A fantastic Jubilee (those street parties) A broken Britain? I am not so sure.

This is not to denigrate the (very real) achievements made by our only female prime minister. I have no doubt, as her supporters attest, that much of what she did had to be done and, furthermore, would probably have been done anyway, even by a Labour government.

But we forget so much of the detail that the simple story that I have read so often in the past few days must be doubted. We forget not only the unemployment figures but also the effects of new technologies (which drove the Big Bang as much as any political decision) and, as Ian Jack pointed out rather brilliantly yesterday, the massive boost of North Sea Oil which was coming on stream even then to the tune of £19bn a year into the Treasury coffers.  Memory is unreliable. Economic memory even more so. And what decline there was did not always have the causes we assume; as someone else has pointed out, Red Robbo did not design the Morris Marina. 

Interesting piece by Stephen Bayley today on the Boeing 747, the original 'Jumbo Jet'. This aircraft is reported to be entering the final straight before the world's airlines finally begin to phase this colossal machine out, in favour of newer, more high-tech rivals such as Boeing's own 787 'Dreamliner'. Indeed, British Airways is planning to phase out the 747 by 2021. 

Bayley describes the Jumbo as possessing if not elegance then a form of pure, functional beauty. He is right. While America has only rarely (to my mind) mastered the art of making a decent automobile (odd on so many levels when you think about it - the US should be the home of PERFECT cars but it so manifestly isn't) its planes are magnificent. 'If it ain't Boeing I ain't going' is the old travellers' motto. These days, of course, Airbus makes airliners every bit as good as its American rivals and the greatest civilian aircraft ever built was the tragic, flawed Concorde, but the Seattle birds remain at the very top of the tree.

But I doubt whether we are even close to seeing the last of the 747s. Aircraft design turns out to be an extraordinarily durable technology. Today's civilian airliners may be quieter, safer, more fuel efficient and more reliable than their 1960s forebears but to the untrained eye they look scarcely any different. Big, round-nosed aluminium tubes with wings, with two or three rows of forward-facing seats, turbofan engines and a top speed of around 600mph.

Indeed today's jets are mostly a few per cent slower than some of the pioneers of the age; I believe that some of the first-generation long-distance jet airliners, machines like the VC10 and Convair 880, aircraft designed in the 1950s, were faster than anything you can buy a ticket to fly on today.

We forget how old some designs - and actual planes - may be. The 747 first flew 43 years ago. According to various aviation websites there are several around still in service that date back to the 1970s. But that is nothing compared to the Douglas DC-3, the first 'modern aircraft' in the world which dates back to the mid-1930s. Astonishingly, several dozen of these marvellous planes are still in regular use, one or two dating from before the Second World War.

Aside from shipping, I cannot think of another form of mass transportation that so is happy to trust septugenarian machinery. And the military is even happier with its antiques; a recent Pentagon report suggested that the B-52 long-range bomber will still be on front-line USAF duties well into the 2040s, meaning that America will be relying on a weapon nearing its centenary. It is quite possible that with the airliner, we got it right more or less first time. In which case, if you have a Rip Van Winkle-style experience and wake up a couple of centuries hence, you will be able to wallow in nostalgia for your own era just by lookng up into the skies. 

Most of us, I would guess, have a pretty good idea of what constitutes a 'serious crime'. Anything that involves hitting people hard and hurting them. Murder, rape, torture, sexual assault, obviously, ditto offences against children. Burglary, robbery, blackmail, extortion, people-trafficking, serious harassment, driving dangerously/while drunk, setting fire to things and/or people, epic vandalism, theft on a large scale, mugging and so forth. Across the spectrum from the hangers-and-floggers to lily-liberals like me I think there is a consensus that, after taking things like the existence of lunacy and so forth into account, people who do these things should find themselves in prison and, in some cases, we should perhaps not be too worried if afterwards we find we have misplaced the key.

I do not think most people would add to that list 'lying about speeding' or 'jumping into the Thames to disrupt the Boat Race', and yet people who have done this (the hapless Huhnes and the Australian class-war protestor Trenton Oldfield, who spent two months inside for annoying spectators and rowers last year). Two months? For making a harmless (if senseless, I have read about this case and still have no idea what Mr Oldfield was protesting about) gesture that did no more than cause inconvenience to a load of braying hoorays clutching plastic glasses of lager on the Putney riverside? 

Something is going wrong here. If I willfully defraud my bank, or the taxman, or the benefits office or a shop out of a few hundred pounds I might rightly expect, if not jail, then certainly a criminal record. At the very least I will be asked to pay back what I have stolen, with punitive interest. 

But that if not what happens to Very Big firms who lie and cheat and steal from the state or from their customers. This week the energy firm SSE (formerly Scottish and Southern Energy) was fined £10.5m by Ofgen for 'mis-selling'. This was portrayed as a 'massive punishment' but of course it was nothing of the sort. What this cowboy outfit was doing was deliberately defrauding its customers on an epic scale, promising lower bills if they switched suppliers when in fact they woudl be paying more. This is fraud, theft, call it what you will. No less so than if I walk into a bank and lift a grand out of the till. Yet no one has been charged, no one is facing prison, why? Deliberately defrauding people is a criminal offence unless, it seems, if you are a large privatised utility.

And thanks to the very excellent Private Eye this week for pointing out that after killing 1200 people, not a single manager, doctor or nurse at the Mid Staffordshire NHS Foundation has been charged, investigated or even - this is utterly beyond belief - sacked. Some of the behaviour detailed in the recent report into this scandal clearly falls into the definition of 'criminal' and yet not a single collar has been felt. Remember, this is a country where, acing on heresay, police officers in North Wales were ordered to investigate the Prime Minister, Tony Blair, on the grounds that he was reported to have said something disobliging, in private, about the Welsh. These absurd anomalies have to stop. We have to stop allowing huge firms like Vodaphone to cut a deal with the taxman while persuing the little guys with the full force of the State. We have to stop treating supermarkets as though they are above the law - if mu local butcher traded horsemeat as beef he would soon have the Council round and possibly face charges for defrauding his customers. Yet Tesco, for some unfathomable reason, gets away with it.