DOWN in the cultural sweatshops where arbitrary dates are woven into meaningless anniversaries, there was a rush on last week. Every other media outlet on the planet had placed an order for something called Back To The Future Day.

Strangely, it had slipped my mind. If I ever realised that October 21 was the day marked as “the future” in a 1989 sci-fi sequel, my synapses long ago did me a favour and mislaid the detail. The scriptwriter who picked a random Wednesday in 2015 all those years back probably had the same experience.

Mundane facts – it was a dumb movie; they made it up – never got in the way of an “and finally” TV news feature, however. Instead of meditations on time and our blind faith in progress, we got variations on a theme. To wit, a reporter standing beside a prop DeLorean saying, “It’s the future; where’s my hoverboard?”

Funnily enough, I had an answer to that question. Like the “problem” of leisure in a post-industrial society, the hoverboard never got off the ground. Like the belief that work would become a precious outlet for creativity and fulfilment amid prosperity, early retirement and endless free time, the hoverboard didn’t go anywhere.

Back in the days of Back To The Future, serious words were written about leisure as an impending “problem”. Job sharing was to be the least of it. According to futurologists – a quaint discipline taken seriously, back then – we were about to enter an era in which work would become a matter of choice. This was around the time when careers advice still involved concepts such as “job satisfaction” and “job security”.

Killjoy that I am, I didn’t observe Back To The Future Day. I didn’t need the absence of hoverboards to give me a clue about what has changed and what has stayed the same. A generation ago I was writing an obituary for the Ravenscraig steel works. Last week, sentence was passed on the last of the industry in Scotland.

In 1992, the Tories were in power, sacrificing lives and communities to what they called an economic plan. In 1992, a Tory chancellor, Lamont by name, was promoting “a budget for the recovery”. He was boasting about low tax, inward investment and “light government”. That was in March. In April, the Conservatives would win the general election after Labour refused to accept “sharp expenditure restraints”. That would become “Labour’s tax bombshell”.

The parallels are far from perfect, but you can see why I don’t wonder what became of hoverboards. The process of de-industrialisation that began in the 1980s goes on. The belief that workers are costs to be managed, not people to whom you owe obligations, has deepened. Notions of social security, employment rights, and collective security have been eroded almost to nothing. The difference now is in the extent to which things that were once unthinkable are taken for granted.

We have seen the big industries put beyond help one by one and even stopped wondering why other countries still have heavy manufacturing and we do not. Contrary to myth, making things has not – ask the Germans – become an occupation reserved for emerging economies. Last year, for example, the Office for National Statistics produced a fascinating (if that’s your taste) historical survey of Britain’s GDP. One detail: in 1948, industry (manufacturing, oil and gas, the utilities) was 41% of the economy; by 2013 it was 14 per cent.

But so what? Industries come and go. The UK’s experience is not unique, just more dramatic (much more dramatic) than that of other countries. In that context, the ONS also observed that whereas services were just 46 per cent of the economy in 1948, they accounted for 79 per cent 65 years later. Again, you might say, so what? Britain is good at providing services for itself and the world. The odd catastrophic banking crash aside, it has done well from intangible products.

Ravenscraig’s closure cost over 1200 jobs directly and perhaps six times as many in the wider Scottish economy. Tuesday’s announcement from Tata Steel that 270 posts will go at Motherwell and Cambuslang, though it brings a 150-year history to a close, is not on anything like the same scale. Ravenscraig was, metaphorically and actually, a part of the landscape in central Scotland. The plants at Dalzell and Clydebridge could be depicted as remnants, even as footnotes. This is 2015, not 1992.

In one sense, that’s the point. It is almost as though we are surprised that Scotland still had anything resembling a steel industry, or should still expect to have such a thing. The generation that has come to adulthood since Ravenscraig went under might be equally surprised by antique notions of the job, and community, and the right to security in the age of the zero-hours contract. Do such things survive? How can they possibly survive? Why should they survive?

I’m not sentimental, particularly, about industrial Scotland. The dignity of labour was often enough hard to recognise. The little truth that nagged throughout the miners’ strike all those years ago was that no-one, or no miner I ever met, ever had a good word to say about working down a pit. Steel mills were hellish places; factories were mind-numbing; all the heavy industries were tough, dangerous and relentless.

But the jobs were secure, or so it seemed. Rights were enshrined, safeguarded by laws and unions. Decent wages, once won, paid for houses and families. Women had a far harder time of it, then as now, in the jobs most men wouldn’t touch, but by the time Hollywood was dreaming up hoverboards economic reality was long-established: the world of work was no longer male. That was already a strange idea from another era.

Today, job security has gone. Employee rights have disappeared for many and are going fast among the once-envied professional class. Once again, a generation faces the whims of landlords. Child poverty has become our recurring social disease while George Osborne kicks away the prop of tax credits and Iain Duncan Smith drives even the dying to work with the cry that any job will do. This is how it is. Somehow our society has convinced itself that this, this serf existence, is how it must be.

A generation back, a handful of thinking Tories would worry now and then about something they called the social fabric. They feared what would follow if it suffered damage. Now Tories grumble about Osborne’s attack on tax credits only because they fear for their majorities. Meanwhile, those who still dabble in “future studies” predict that the robots are coming to mop up even the warehouse jobs, the delivery jobs, the call centre jobs: name it. An excess of leisure is guaranteed; prosperity is not.

In North Lanarkshire, with unspeakable timing, the council, trapped financially, has put forward proposals to rid itself of 1,095 jobs. Tories used to say that Scotland was over-dependent on the public realm. Some still say it. What they forgot to explain a generation ago, and decline to explain now, is what follows when jobs and public services are gone. It’s not hoverboards for all.