Bring back the Sixties

As the 1960s drew to a close, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin were walking on the Moon, pop’s dopeheads were experimenting with ten-minute-long guitar solos, and a mop-haired Tony Blair was in the sixth form at Fettes where, in between canings for insolence, he was railing against fagging. Now, we are led to believe, the Prime Minister has decided that the decade of his youth was all a ghastly mistake. Launching his government’s latest five-year plan on crime, he declared the ‘end of the 1960s liberal, social consensus on law and order’. In other words, he was wrong and the likes of ‘Bugger’, as one especially cane-happy beak at Fettes was nicknamed, had it right.

We have seen enough of Tony Blair by now to know what to make of his sudden declaration of war against 1960s values. It is all a load of hot air, designed to play to the Daily Mail readers whom he still fears even after winning two general elections against that newspaper’s implacable opposition.