Paradise? No, but the Britain of my youth was FREE

WHEN I spoke out in favour of free speech last week on Channel 4 News, I was unpleasantly surprised to find just how unpopular this view now is with the fashionable people who watch that programme.

My great sin was to suggest that the Britain of my youth had been much more free than it is now. Oh, yes, they sneered, free for people like you – white, heterosexual males. They suggested that, for anyone else, the country was a seething pit of racial and sexual bigotry.

One, utterly misunderstanding the past, even tried to tell me that women were not allowed to drink at the bars of pubs until 1983.

Revolutionaries always defame the past. I remember the amazement and surprise among Russians when a film called The Russia We Have Lost appeared in Moscow in the 1990s, showing how clean, civilised and often beautiful preCommunist Russia had been, including the people themselves, uncrushed by decades of war, poverty, purges and stupidity. And there is a wonderful passage in George Orwell’s 1984 in which the hero, Winston Smith, tries in vain to discover, from a rambling old man in a pub, what the past before Communism was really like.

HE GIVES up in despair. ‘When memory failed and written records were falsified, t he claim of the Party to have i mproved the conditions of human life had got to be accepted because there did not exist, and never again could exist any standard against which it could be tested.’

When I first read this 50-odd years ago, I believed it was fiction about a time that could never happen. Now I think it is coming true. There is little need to destroy the written records, as historical knowledge is almost abolished, and true curiosity about the past with it. Through the increasingly biased filters of social media, a picture can be obtained which confirms the prejudices of the modern conformist, that this is the best age that ever was and that the recent past was a hell of prejudice and grinding poverty.

When I describe freedom, I’m not thinking of the group rights for protected categories that are now widely seen as the only freedoms that matter. I’m thinking of a general feeling that we were free to do, say and think as we liked within the boundaries of a clearly understood law and of good manners.

I’m also thinking of the independence of strong families, through which tradition and faith were passed on, along with manners and the habits of unselfishness. And I am thinking of schools in which teachers with authority passed on hard knowledge.

It was not paradise – though by comparison with now, the liberty of children to live free-range lives was so astonishing that many find it difficult to believe it happened at all. It had many things wrong with it that could have been put right without the snooping and surveillance, and the heavy hand of politically correct conformism which we now endure.

There is one telling metaphor that seems to me to explain it very well – the pedestrian crossing. A few stripes painted on the road and a couple of flashing orange globes were enough to halt the heaviest lorry to allow a child to cross the road. No need for elaborate traffic signals and surveillance cameras. No need to wait for a whole minute for those lights to change. The driver’s obligation to stop was so strong in his or her own mind that it was a more powerful force than any such precaution.

We governed ourselves and disciplined ourselves, and by doing so we obtained a freedom far greater than any available now. I miss it, and am not ashamed to do so.