Friday, 18 September 2009

One Revolution: The Sixties, The Eighties, The Noughties

Today's Telegraph piece, on which comments are welcome over there:

The Beatles are all over the place again. So what really happened in the Swinging Sixties? What was, and is, their real legacy?

There was a Labour Government between 1964 and 1970. A proper one. Full of, and supported by, working-class patriots and social conscience toffs, temperance Methodists and traditional Catholics. Its economic policy was social democratic. It indulged social policies that were much less conservative than many of its members or most of its supporters wanted, but not in the form of Government Bills subject to whipped votes. Its foreign policy was ardently pro-Commonwealth, moderately pro-American, and almost completely Eurosceptical. It was fiercely Unionist.

And the Sixties Swingers hated it with a burning passion. The pirate radio stations were their revolt against its and the BBC’s deal with the Musicians’ Union to protect the livelihoods of that union’s members. Behind this union-busting criminality was Oliver Smedley, later a key figure behind the proto-Thatcherite Institute of Economic Affairs. Those Swingers used the lowering of the voting age to put what they thought were the Selsdon Tories into office in 1970. They then went on to entrench their own moral, social and cultural decadence and libertinism, first in the economic sphere during the Eighties, and then in the constitutional sphere under Tony Blair. David Cameron accepts uncritically the whole package: moral, social, cultural, economic, and constitutional. Indeed, he embodies it.

When is this country going to wake up to what has really been happening over the last fifty years?

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