I used to be Jeremiah-esque about the impact of austerity on public services in the UK.  I was wrong.

So far in Britain, overall public satisfaction with most services has remained relatively unchanged – partly due to ring fencing healthcare and schools – despite 700,000 job losses in the public sector.

Careful prioritising and stripping out ‘nice to have' services means that as last week's BBC survey, and my own polling suggest, only state care of the elderly and the disabled (oh, and potholes in the roads) seem to be getting bad enough for users to notice.

Apparently, British potholes are now collectively large enough to cover the Isle of Wight – which may be why they now outstrip activities for teenagers for the first time in a decade as a key local concern of the public in Ipsos MORI's polling.

Overall satisfaction with local government is largely unchanged –pretty significant given 30-40% cuts in local government spending.

At the SOLACE conference last week I was impressed as usual by the resilience and positivity of people running local government – although they point out that we still have another seven years of cuts to come.

So, there could well be some kind of tipping point when we have Greek-style rebellions and rioting about it, but not so far.

In part, this is because generational shifts mean the young, who have seen the largest relative cuts and face the real prospect of lower standards of living than their parents' generation, have become markedly less collectivist than when I was growing up in the 1970s.

They don't celebrate the post-war welfare state in the way their grandparents did.

What comes next no-one knows, but it may well not be as dystopic as some people have imagined.

The young who now think they will never be able to afford a home remain happier with their lives than the middle aged – as normal.

Ben Page is chief executive of Ipsos MORI