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The sooner the 1960s are over, the better
by Simon HefferThanks to a happy accident of birth, I was only nine and a half when the 1960s finished. I say happy, because when I survey a country run by people 10 years older than me, and who are still fixated by the dope-smoking, peace-and-love, hairy hippy self-indulgence for which that dismal decade is famed, I thank God I escaped. Although an apparently conservative figure by comparison with some of his contemporaries, one damaged by this seductive ethos was poor old David Blunkett, the lothario and newspaper columnist. Mr Blunkett was once home secretary, and when he was he decided to downgrade cannabis from a class B to a class C drug - which, in this Government's terms, makes possession and use of it virtually compulsory. Now, though, reliable scientific and medical evidence has categorically proved something that Mr Blunkett and his advisers dismissed out of hand at the time: that cannabis does indeed addle your mind and send you bonkers. And so his successor at the Home Office, Charles Clarke, is now about to reverse the downgrading, and try to impress on the public that cannabis use is not such a terrific idea after all.  All sensible people should welcome this recovery from the 1960s' hangover, and we should reflect how nice it would be if certain other obsessions that linger from those years were quietly parcelled up and stuck in the museum of obsolete ideas.Our Government of former student political activists - notably Jack Straw, Charles Clarke and Gordon Brown - remains utterly hamstrung by its own teenage prejudices, and utterly boring about them. And the damage these people, in their lack of wisdom, inflict on society is still enormous, and every bit as corrosive as the scourge of drugs about which, until now, they have been so casual. The worst manifestation of this is the culture of political correctness. Although that poisonous ethos grew out of an American campus culture of the 1970s, its wholehearted adoption here by our governing class has its roots in the largely uncritical attitude that 1960s' youth took towards anything remotely anti-establishment or radical. It is, for example, why the idea of merit has gone out of our public life, and why utterly incapable people - be they women, ethnic minorities or white working-class men such as John Prescott - are let loose on important positions of power for which they are by ability and temperament completely unsuited. It is also why we have a savage crime wave in this country, because of a notion over the past few decades that wrongdoing is somehow the fault of those who live by the rules, and whose lives, with their normality and affluence, are a constant provocation to criminal elements. Worst of all, it is why frightening groups such as the BNP have been able to take such a foothold in our supposedly civilised society. Rightly or wrongly, many poor whites living in deprived areas have allowed themselves to become convinced that the authorities for too long turned a blind eye to some of the activities of ethnic minorities, notably the creation of the sort of radical atmosphere out of which suicide bombers have been bred.  These are just some of the lingering and entirely harmful prejudices of the 1960s that one might hope would also soon come up for revaluation. Others include the ease of our divorce laws, the ready availability of the act of murder known as abortion as a form of post-coital contraception, and the notion that middle-class values are at best held in suspicion, at worst regarded as downright evil.Oh, and there is the disaster of comprehensive schools, too. I know that this is quite an agenda for Tony Blair to overturn before he leaves office, but at least, in realising the full stupidity of his former drugs policy, he has made a start. Posted by: .com 2006-01-07 |
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