A History of Modern Britain | Andrew Marr

Inevitably, there are some themes which surprise by their absence. No one, for example, has ever seriously studied the impact of national service on British social attitudes, and there is nothing about it here. Yet for 13 years after the end of the second world war it was a major factor in the life of young men. Its disappearance marked a major change. Had it bred undue deference to authority? Inhibited originality? Reduced youth crime? It would be interesting to know. Marr is suitably reticent about the much increased influence, for good or ill, of the press in which he has passed his career, and even more reticent about the culture of rights, and the culture of blame that goes with it, which keeps journalists and lawyers busy.

More generally, we have witnessed in the space of a generation the triumph of the received idea. Race, gender, disability and the environment are only the most obvious examples of issues on which only one, off-the-shelf view is tolerable in public men, or fit to be expressed even in private. This is a striking reversion to the Victorian conviction that certain opinions about, say, God, king or sexual relations were beyond discussion, because to challenge them was to strike at the foundations of social existence. It has been accompanied by a very un-Victorian insistence that our hearts should not only be in the right place, but worn on our sleeves. Whether this is a good thing is not for a historian to say. But it marks a major change in what were once deeply embedded traditions of reticence and tolerance, which should not be allowed to pass unnoticed.