So, Tony Blair has decided that it’s now time to end the “1960s liberal consensus”, and has the full backing, not surprisingly, of David Blunkett, who has coined the term “liberati”. Apart from the fact that they seem to be forgetting how the Tories managed to erode just about every last vestige of liberalism in this country between 1979 and 1997, this stinks of what I like to call “Baby Boomer Spite”.
Blair and Blunkett (along with many of their colleagues) are prime examples of the Baby Boomer generation. Growing up in the sixties, they saw the golden age of British social policy, enjoying top-class free healthcare, free university education and the broadening of opportunities for women and the working class. And now, like so many successful members of that generation, they have the power and inclination to stop those of us in younger generations from enjoying the same freedoms.
Of course, we all know that the great hippie peace’n'love revolution was largely the result of marketing, idealistically viewing the activities of an educated middle class minority, while the majority, in their brown suits and crinoline skirts, got on with their jobs in offices and factories. Britain simply wasn’t a land gripped by hedonistic excess and lawlessness. However, important changes did happen; changes which do not deserve to be casually dismissed as the acts of the “liberati”.
Writing in the Guardian, David Aaronovitch (a Baby Boomer himself) lists a number of injustices to which the advances in 1960s society provided much needed cures…arbitrary justice, corporal punishment, capital punishment, backstreet abortions. If 21st-century government policy can be informed by nostalgic views of what a few people may have boasted about doing 40 years ago, while forgetting the real advances, gawd help us.
As Aaronovitch remarks “you want to blame someone for the mess we’re in? Those bastards from the 80s, they’re the ones.”