I worry when politicians talk about the 1960s; I worry when they are pro-Sixties, because they’re trying to sound hip and young and any minute now they’ll tell you that they tried dope but it wasn’t for them.
I worry more when they’re anti-Sixties, because they sound like the right-wing former United Kingdom premier Margaret Thatcher. Furthermore, they do so knowingly, and therefore must think that that is an acceptable way to sound.
Whether for or against, any mention at all of this decade demonstrates a lack of rigour in thought and argument. It conjures up an era whose definition is no more palpable or precise than ”it was all a bit wild and liberal”. It rarely provides a preferable decade — the repressed Fifties? Surely not the even-more-liberal Seventies? How about the relentlessly self-seeking Eighties?
Above all, it relies on the fact that a lot of us can’t remember it because we weren’t there, and everyone else can’t remember it … well, we all know why they can’t remember it — because they tell us all the time. As a total aside, oh baby boomers, get over yourselves.
So, in his new crime-fighting initiative, British Prime Minister Tony Blair promises ”the end of the 1960s liberal consensus on law and order”, in place of which the values of the law-abiding majority will henceforth govern the criminal justice system. This in itself is weird — law-abiders come in all shapes and sizes. You could argue that the only value we demonstrably share is that of abiding by the law. So the law is to be tailored to the values of people whose only shared value is not breaking the law. It’s not even doublethink; it’s half-asleep-in-the-bath-think.
But back to the 1960s — what was this liberal consensus? Did it have any legislative manifestation? If so, would we be happy to see any of those laws repealed? Or are we really just talking about being able to see Mary Quant’s pants when she tied her shoelaces?
Granted, much of the seminal legislation covering sex and associated matters of decency was passed in this decade: the Abortion Act was passed in 1967; the Divorce Reform Act introduced the no-fault divorce in 1969; the Sexual Offences Act of 1967 decriminalised gay sex in private between two men over 21.
In conjunction with the pill, this represents a massive shift towards sexual freedom, probably the greatest and certainly the most concrete of any decade in the past century.
But there isn’t a politician in his right mind who would want to see any of those Acts undone; Blair makes that clear as he lobs some rather half-arsed plaudits at the social revolutions in gay rights, feminism and race relations.
And yet he continues to attack the ”some who took freedom without responsibility”. But if he’s not talking about people grasping the freedom to do what they liked in their own bedrooms, who the devil is he talking about?
If the defining features of Sixties liberalism were about sex, how are we to extrapolate from there the woolly minded, middle-class laissez-faire to which Blair and particularly the British Home Secretary, David Blunkett, attribute a breakdown in law and order?
There is a link, of which the principal theoretician was the lawyer and philosopher Ronald Dworkin. In Taking Rights Seriously he posits that people have personal and external preferences (the personal relating to their own conduct and conditions, the external relating to other people’s).
His argument is that legislators must base their decisions entirely on personal preferences. So, if a majority wants a football ground rather than a theatre, that must be heeded, since it’s personal preference.
But if the same majority decides homosexuality is immoral, the preference is external, and therefore doesn’t count as a compelling legislative argument.
This is the classic liberal legal philosophy — which can be applied to all social mores from the sexual to the fiscal — that Blair appears to be attacking. But the book wasn’t written until 1977. The spectre of the offender-centric, respectability-be-damned 1960s simply doesn’t stand up.
Although the emphasis of the prison system — towards reform, away from punishment — shifted over the 1960s and 1970s, it would be daft to suppose that this obviated incarceration as a disincentive to committing crime. And if you’re looking for more explicit measures that appear to put the offender before the right-thinking majority, you’d have to go as far as the 1980s (the Police and Criminal Evidence Act was 1984).
Most of Blair’s inaccurate time-lining is naturally just set-dressing for the real action — a proposal to set up a satellite track on 5 000 serial offenders, and extend the use of DNA profiling. If there’s any obstacle to this at all (unless a Tory bright spark wants to bring a charge of theft, not just of ideas, but also of priggish tone of voice), it’s the Human Rights Act, which was passed in 1998.
So, in his attack on 1960s liberals, the prime minister is not talking about sexual freedom; he’s not talking about racial equality, nor legislation for equal pay between genders (which, since we mention it, didn’t come about till 1975); he’s not talking about legislation protecting the accused, nor articles protecting individual human rights. So what on earth is he talking about? The frigging Beatles? — Â