Reading about the kidnapping of the French yachting family, whose 41ft Colin Archer bermudian cutter, Tanit, was seized on passage in the Indian Ocean on Saturday, I was struck with a feeling of deja vu.

When it was revealed that Florent Lemacon, the yacht’s skipper had told his local newspaper Ouest France that he, his pretty blonde wife, Chloe and their three-year-old son Colin, were ‘fleeing the consumer society’, I was transported back to the 1970s when such ogres were fought by bourgeois ‘revolutionaries’ such as the Symbionese Liberation Army.

There were many middle-class, western, but anti-western, para-military college boys and girls knocking about in that decade. They were mostly rebels without a brain, and certainly a genuine cause.

Oddly enough today, when there are plenty of causes to choose from, they all seem to have melted away. How long will it be before the UK sees the rise of a Somalian refugee group raising awareness of their war-torn homeland, a state crying out to have nothing else to worry about, but consumer goods?