West Midland homeowners can apparently look forward to average house price rises of at least five per cent in 2014, according to a gushing press release from an organisation called the Property Investors Network.

A gentleman called Simon Zutshi, author of ‘bestseller’ Property Magic, predicts a ‘buoyant 2014’ for property, and says a ‘confident housing market’ is to be welcomed by all and sundry.

Property website Rightmove forecasts a rise of up to eight per cent this year, while Mr Zutshi says it is in ‘everyone’s interests that property prices rise over the long term.’

I beg to differ. It is not in the interests of the next generation, or the generation after that, or possibly the generation after that one, unless they are self-made millionaires.

It is not in the interests of the tens of thousands of graduates lucky enough to have landed a job while still struggling to pay off their student debts and raise a deposit at the same time as forking out a small fortune in rent every month.

It is not in the interests of a fair and just society, where hard work and perseverance over many years was once rewarded with a lifetime’s investment in bricks and mortar, eventually to be passed on to the next generation.

It is not in the interests of a working democracy, when millions can be denied the basic aspiration of property-ownership just because they happened to be born in the wrong place at the wrong time, or even to the wrong parents.

Home ownership is a tricky subject, and can divide as much as it unites. In Germany, for example, Europe’s most economically successful country, renting is still the norm for many, particularly in the big cities such as Berlin and Munich.

The Germans are not as obsessed as we Brits over home ownership, and the country has not enjoyed the same housing bubble as Britain in recent decades. But, just as in the UK, most young people cannot climb onto the property ladder without parental help or inheriting.

Germanic attitudes aside, it is hard to be quite so optimistic a la Mr Zutshi, where the future of home ownership is concerned. While a five to eight per cent rise this year in the UK would clearly be good news for the lucky haves, it’s just more bad news for the legions of have nots.

A generation or so ago, it was so much simpler. There were no student loans for a start, and the job market for the under 25s was considerably more diverse.

Back in the 70s, there was a much larger manufacturing sector, offering tens of thousands of well-paid jobs which could offer a large degree of security for life, particularly in unionised sectors such as cars, shipbuilding, steel, mineworking, printing and other heavy industries.

Many of those jobs were difficult, dirty and dangerous but that was the price millions of aspiring males were invariably prepared to pay to help them secure a stake in society through realising their dreams of home ownership. Who can argue in today’s squeaky-clean digital age that there was no genuine benefit to society by giving younger generations that chance? The coal-mines, steelworks and the like sustained whole communities and the livelihoods of millions, with jobs often passed down from father to son, and even grandsons. Those jobs also paid the mortgage, and much else besides.

There was a genuine working-class pride amongst the armies of practitioners of heavy manual labour that helped support the hopes and dreams of millions of families. There was also a more tangible sense of communal unity back then. The pit, or the car factory, or the steelworks, provided a bedrock of economic support to the wider community largely alien to the technology-powered virtual landscape of today.

It couldn’t last forever, of course. Just as the Industrial Revolution had once transformed the UK from an agricultural community into the workshop of the world, so the bastions of unionised heavy industry were about to be swept mercilessly aside by a toxic cocktail of technology, globalisation and Thatcherism, with privatisation replacing state nationalisation of loss-making heavy industry.

Whilst few would mourn the demise of the greed-obsessed printworkers who held Fleet Street to ransom while engaging in ruinous Spanish customs or the Scargillite union barons who held the UK economy hostage with three-day weeks and power cuts in pursuit of huge pay claims, something has been lost, and it’s not just the dream of property ownership.

There was a gritty reality about the 60s and 70s zeitgeist that has gone forever. They were, by and large, optimistic decades, regardless of the strikes, industrial unrest, double-digit interest rates and terrible fashions of kipper ties and flares.

The world was somehow purer, more innocent back then, untainted by the Wild West of the internet and the fake celebrity culture the web has helped to spawn with often tragic consequences. No vulnerable 14-year-old committed suicide back then because they were abused by some moron on a computer.

Just before the dawn of the 60s, Prime Minister Harold Macmillan told the nation ‘You’ve never had it so good.’ His words were to echo throughout the property-owning decades that had followed Britain’s immediate post-war austerity.

Nearly 50 years later, they will strike a desperately hollow note to the millions of under-30s with no realistic hope of ever raising a deposit, let alone purchasing a home of their own.