Suddenly, almost without warning, liberal Britain finds itself friendless. William Hague uses "liberal elite" as a term of abuse, and the government doesn't bother to challenge him. Philip Gould, the Prime Minister's favourite pollster, warns that Labour, as the voters see it, is soft on crime (even though the prisons now hold record numbers) and puts asylum-seekers and minorities first; this, he says, must change if the party is to get back in touch with "ordinary people". An eccentric farmer who shoots a burglar becomes a national hero. Almost nobody can be found to defend teachers who think there is more to education than multiplication tables and spelling tests. The Secretary of State for Culture makes disapproving noises about nudity on Channel 5. In Scotland, a privately organised "referendum" finds overwhelming public opposition to the repeal of Section 28.
The trouble is that those now in positions of power and influence (Tony Blair, born 1953; Mr Hague, born 1961) are too young to remember the 1950s. They came to adulthood in a world where it was already lawful to buy Lady Chatterley's Lover, to get an abortion or a divorce, to have homosexual relationships, to put on a West End play without first consulting the Lord Chamberlain. They have no memory of long hours of school boredom, parsing sentences and memorising the capital cities of Europe. They may not even know that, as Humphrey Carpenter recalls in his forthcoming account of the satire movement, as late as 1957 Malcolm Muggeridge could be sacked from the editorship of Punch for printing a mildly facetious poem about the Queen's choice of Cheam prep school for her eldest son. They can certainly have no conception of Dennis Potter's "great greyness", the "feeling of the flatness and bleakness of everyday England".
Three observations are worth making. First, the world of the 1950s was one in which, as Jimmy Porter put it, "nobody thinks, nobody cares". A liberal society is a thoughtful society, one that thinks twice about the "common sense" to which our more primitive, atavistic instincts lead us. It thinks long enough to understand that allowing householders to shoot intruders may lead burglars themselves to carry guns; that, while we should indeed sympathise with the victim, criminals, too, have nearly always been victims of crime or abuse; that to lock up young offenders together may create finishing schools for crime (and that excessive use of school "sin bins" could have a similar effect); that immigrants, however much we initially fear them, add dynamism and cultural richness to a society; that imagination and creativity can be stifled if schools place too much emphasis on measurable achievement. Common sense may sometimes be right; but Oxford made a poor fist of educating Mr Hague if he failed to learn that what seems most obvious always deserves the most rigorous scrutiny and questioning.
Second, different eras are liberal about different things. The 1950s were remarkably liberal with respect to drink-driving, to violence in the home against both women and children, to sadistic teachers, to aggressively racist language. Would we prefer a world where it is acceptable to call a man a "dirty nigger" to one where you can say "fuck" on television?
Third, the 1960s did not invent liberalism, they merely democratised it. Members of the elite always knew how to get themselves a safe abortion or a rapid divorce. They carried on promiscuous affairs, both heterosexual and homosexual. They could readily obtain a copy of Lady Chatterley's Lover; the point of the ban, which emerged when the British publishers were prosecuted, was to keep it away from the servants. Although most elite schools remained traditional, those who could afford it bought a liberal education for their children at places such as Summerhill or Bedales.
Only a fool would argue that society is in every way improved from 40 years ago. We have more inequality, less social cohesion, more violence, less efficient public services, more beggars, less stable families. But it is hard to see how Mr Hague offers solutions to any of these problems, since most are the result of the market forces and the diminished public realm that Conservatives broadly favour. Though dissatisfied with Labour's progress, the voters will recognise this at the next election. Just as the welfare state was the great creation of the 1945-51 Attlee government, so a more liberal, thoughtful, tolerant Britain was the great creation of the 1964-70 Wilson government. Labour should not be afraid to defend them both.
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