PEOPLE say to me: “Hey, older guy who had your finger on the pulse once. What happened in the 1990s? Was it all grunge and flannel shirts? Or flappy jeans and baggy tops and Madchester and the house music? Or did Britpop sweep all that away?”

And I say: “Yes, it was all those things. Wide eyes under Kangol hats, then boozed up nights in the Good Mixer. Ladettes and irony and Cool Britannia and Girl Power all entranced the nation.”

There was enough to fill dozens of cheap It Was All Right in the ’90s TV shows.

But it was also a decade that saw a shift in politics from a war of manoeuvre to a war of attrition.

The Tory and Labour parties won and lost small advantages — and lost some of their identity on the way. In some ways we are still on the same battlefields.

In 1990 Thatcher resigned. Her powerful programme against “socialism,” by privatisation, cuts and limits on trade unions and protest had apparently reached its limit.

She was brought down by the anti-poll tax campaign, a huge grassroots movement of law-breaking protest.

This unofficial movement, and some semi-official grassroots, led strikes made the Tories drop their favourite premier. The conflict was too great.

However, the Labour Party, which had outright disowned, or been very cool on, some of the main movements against Thatcher — including the poll tax protests, the 1984-5 miners’ strike and CND — so it could not capitalise on the fight that finished off its enemy.

Labour’s “modernising” moderates lost the 1992 election.

So both Tory and Labour parties tried to gain ground in the 1990s, but not by the big win-or-bust battles of the Thatcher years.

The new Tory premier, John Major, tried to solidify Tory hegemony by appealing to “silent majority” moral reaction in his 1993 Back to Basics speech.

People rightly see Major as a joke now. But Back to Basics was a serious attempt at a “culture war.”

Major’s speech is an antidote to anyone who thinks Tory Brexiteers are the first to appeal to reactionary nostalgia.

Major appealed to “many people, particularly those of you who are older” who “see things around you in the streets and on your television screens which are profoundly disturbing. We live in a world that sometimes seems to be changing too fast for comfort. Old certainties crumbling. Traditional values falling away. People are bewildered.”

Major said “fashionable opinion” meant “in our schools we did away with traditional subjects — grammar, spelling, tables and also with the old ways of teaching them. Fashionable, but wrong. Some said the family was out of date, far better rely on the council and social workers than family and friends.

“I passionately believe that was wrong. Others told us that every criminal needed treatment, not punishment. Criminal behaviour was society’s fault, not the individual’s. Fashionable, but wrong, wrong, wrong.”

His speech was about “muggers” and a call for “sound money, free trade, traditional teaching, respect for the family and respect for the law. And, above all … a new campaign to defeat the cancer that is crime.”

Meanwhile social security secretary Peter Lilley and other ministers attacked “single mothers” as “benefit driven” and behind social breakdown.

This “crackdown on crime” included a Criminal Justice Act outlawing outdoor raves, giving police new powers and ending the right to silence.

There was big resistance. A coalition of ravers and civil liberties campaigners organised protests, including three London marches.

Raucous protesters tried scaling the gates of Downing Street in the second of these. The final march ended in a riot.

However, both Labour and the trade unions refused to be involved: some leading trade unionists later admitted they had allowed a law which could be used against both pickets and ravers to passed unopposed, and missed a big opportunity to connect with younger people.

A big hole was also blown in Major’s “law and order” drive by the “miscarriage of justice” campaigns which freed supposed terrorists, police murderers and child killers.

The Birmingham Six, Guildford Four, Tottenham Three, Cardiff Three and Bridgewater Four and other campaigns showed the supposedly guilty were victims of high-level conspiracies involving police and judiciary.

The campaigns were hard-fought and frequently attacked by the right. But their victory undermined Major’s “anti-crime” moralism and ended long-running calls for the return of the death penalty, previously a staple of the right. The Labour leadership did not back these campaigns, though many left MPs were central to them.

While Major tried distracting voters with his “back to basics” politics, he also slowly advanced Thatcherite privatisation on two fronts.

He pushed through the privatisation of British Rail and created the new private finance initiative (PFI). He wanted to sneak through a slower Thatcherism, by making it boring.

For its part, Labour’s leadership kept its distance from any movements actually fighting Major, hoping instead to pick up some votes by appealing to the “sensible centre.”

Major’s Back to Basics campaign fell apart because of an unending sequence of sex scandals among Tory MPs. Labour made the most of the hypocrisy, but did not strongly challenge the full basis of Major’s moral crusade.

By the 1997 election Major’s “morality” was a joke. Enthusiasm for Major’s watered-down Thatcherism also stalled, thanks to high unemployment and the grim state of hospitals and schools suffering his cutbacks.

Without an economic miracle, Tories resorted to fighting each other over Europe. Britain’s disastrous involvement with the Exchange Rate Mechanism — a preparation for the euro — added to intra-Tory arguments over the EU.

However, the Labour Party that won a landslide in 1997 from Major’s collapse had itself retreated frequently in the war of attrition.

The new government initially stuck by Major’s anti-single-mother rhetoric and benefit cuts, the “anti-crime” rhetoric and new police powers, stayed within Tory spending limits for two years, accepted British Rail privatisation (the scheme later fell apart), and embraced the ultimately disastrous PFI.

The Tories were held back in the 1990s but Labour gave a lot of ground. It is only now that some of Labour’s political retreat might be recovered.