Wish you were living in the
Sixties? You must be mad. It was a ghastly decade
By Simon Heffer for The Daily
Mail
Things must be even worse than
I thought if one-third of my fellow Britons would, according to a poll, rather
live in the so-called ‘Swinging Sixties’ than in the present day.
The popular conception of
Harold Wilson’s Britain as an ‘age of change for the better’ could not be more
mistaken.
Wilson’s Labour government can
most politely be called a catastrophe.
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Like all Labour
administrations, Wilson’s lived far beyond its means. This caused a 14 per cent
devaluation of the pound in the autumn of 1967, final proof that we were no
longer a serious economy.
It taxed people at a top rate
of 83 per cent. And for the so-called seriously wealthy — which in reality was
more or less anyone who owned a few shares and drew a dividend — a 15 per cent
super-tax was added on top of that, causing most of them to flee abroad, taking
their wealth-creating potential with them.
The nostalgia for the Sixties
as a golden age is, I am afraid, a stark reflection of the quality of history
teaching in our schools. For the sample surveyed in the poll for a TV channel
was aged between 18 and 60 and few who participated will have had first-hand
experience of the years we are talking about.
It is clear that our national obsession
with pop culture has fed this longing for the era, with few realising there was
actually more to the decade than the priapic Mick Jagger and the celebrated IRA
sympathiser John Lennon.
It was, above all, the age of
the great experiment with the liberal society. Certainly, it was right and just
to de-criminalise homosexuality in 1967, thereby putting an end to the
unwarranted intrusion of the state into the private lives of adult men.
However, the Sixties was also
the decade that effectively created abortion on demand. It was the decade in
which divorce law was reformed to the point where marriages could be dissolved
at the drop of a hat, leaving us with a poisonous legacy of dysfunctional
families and damaged children.
It was also when the death penalty
was abolished in 1965, and some of us hopeless reactionaries remain unflinching
in our belief that human life was cheapened as a result.
The Sixties and I came in
together. Being about three when The Beatles unleashed themselves upon the
world, and seven when psychedelia and Flower Power were the rage, I can hardly
claim to have been an active participant in the heady days of sexual freedom.
But my abiding memory of the
world around me at the time was that, frankly, it was pretty damned weird. And
it also seemed that most of the things that did seem rather normal and pleasant
were in the process of being destroyed by the relentless drive for something
called ‘progress’.
The town nearest to where I
lived as a child had fine Georgian streets and a handsome Victorian Corn
Exchange ripped down, to be replaced by charm-free, brushed-concrete shopping
malls.
The one good thing about
Sixties architecture is that it was so badly built, and with such defective
materials, that much of what has not already fallen down is now being pulled
down. Hideous scars are finally being removed from our landscape and liberating
people from appalling high-rise housing.
I remember the decade, too, as
a time of distinctly dodgy haircuts, preposterous clothes and ubiquitous tinny
noises emanating from cheap transistor radios. One of my earliest memories is
of Clacton-on-Sea, not far from the village where I grew up, becoming something
akin to a war zone because Mods and Rockers were using it as a giant
gladiatorial arena, as they exercised their right to express their own variants
of the new culture.
Later, the Western world was
convulsed with student protests, carried out in a drug-soaked atmosphere of
mindless, Left-wing malevolence. If the middle-aged radicals look back on the
era now with fondness, to many at the time it seemed as though it was an
attempt to replace civilisation with self-regarding anarchy.
Perhaps because our parents’
generation had been used to wartime rationing, or because the government’s
rigid exchange controls meant people seldom travelled abroad to see how others
lived, nobody complained about how incredibly bad everything was.
It wasn’t just the food that
was appalling, but almost every consumer product.
In the British provinces one
went out to eat at one’s peril, the national cuisine having apparently chosen
the Sixties to reach a historically low ebb. Vegetables were there to be cooked
to extinction, and it was easier to win the weekly Premium Bonds draw than to
find an avocado.
I’m only glad, in retrospect,
that I was too young to drink. The height of sophistication appeared to be a
toxic sludge called Emva Cream — a syrupy Cyprus ‘sherry’ whose success relied
solely on the ignorance of the public about the existence of any other brand —
and wine was generally a near-drinkable form of paint stripper.
The national drink, beer, also
underwent horrors in the Sixties. Big brewers gobbled up small ones, and
replaced their distinctive, traditional ales with fizzy slop so weak it could
almost be sold to babies. This was an era of national shame: the era of
Watney’s Red Barrel.
Cars were rust-buckets. Leave
the average Sixties Ford, Austin or Morris out in the rain for a week and you
could probably put your fist through the bodywork at the end of it.
And, even though many claim it
was a golden era for TV, other than the BBC’s 26-part series on The Great War,
Kenneth Clark’s Civilisation series and The Forsyte Saga, most of us would
struggle to think of anything memorable from the decade that introduced the
nation to Jimmy Savile, Dave Lee Travis and Rolf Harris.
Meanwhile, televisions
themselves were temperamental, unreliable and mostly black and white. They
received two or, if you were lucky and lived near a BBC2 transmitter, three
channels — and the most effective way to get a decent picture on them was to
thump them very hard.
This was hardly the ‘white heat
of the technological revolution’ that Wilson claimed he would harness if
elected in 1964. His friends in the trades unions — old men with bad teeth and
Brylcreemed hair who seemed to run the country with the actual Prime Minister
acting only in an advisory role — saw to that by squashing innovation with
their addiction to restrictive practices.
Watching U.S. television shows
in those days was like observing activity on another planet. Even rudimentary
American kitchens had waste disposal units, fancy gadgets such as coffee
grinders and ice cream makers, and fridges the size of Yorkshire.
We were way behind, and not
just with our primitive kitchens. Central heating was a luxury even in the
grandest houses. Millions of people in the Sixties still didn’t have mains
drainage, and, thanks again to Mr Wilson’s friends in the unions, if you wanted
a telephone installed you might have to wait up to six months.
And, of course, life expectancy
was shorter. Most serious illnesses were incurable. Diseases such as smallpox
had yet to be eradicated, and celebrities appeared in advertisements professing
that smoking was positively good for you.
Despite David Cameron —
despite, indeed, Ed Miliband — I would struggle to say that I would rather have
a re-run of the 1960s than carry on through the 2010s. But, if I were offered
the 1860s, and a few years under the exciting and benign rule of Lord
Palmerston and Mr Gladstone . . . now that would be quite another matter.