Spare us the new

There is no new thing under the sun. Over the weekend, I read a book which was alarmingly relevant to our present discontents: The Neophiliacs, by Christopher Booker, written at the end of the 1960s. That decade began well. The country had recovered from the austerities of wartime. It seemed to be an era of social stability. Most couples who married expected to stay married and bring up their children in stable families. Living standards were rising. National service was about to end. The public schools, whose oppressive regimes had created many left-wing dissidents, were liberalising.

Politics was also stable. Less than three years after the Suez debacle, Harold Macmillan had won a majority of 100. Macmillan was an extraordinary figure; it is doubtful if a more psychologically complex — but also politically effective — character has ever occupied Downing Street. The inner man had deep psychic wounds, but equally deep moral and religious seriousness. The outer could often seem like an insouciant boulevardier. But that was just a mask. The pains of private life and his wife’s infidelity often drove him back to faith and stoicism. Often, he must have been tempted to echo Parolles: ‘Simply the thing I am shall make me live.’ (Not that he was anything like Parolles.)

Yet by 1960, all seemed serene. The lower-middle classes, their numbers swollen by prosperity, were buying houses, Hillman Minxes and washing-machines. Labour, trapped between proletarian primitivism and Hugh Gaitskell’s Wykehamist priggishness — not that he was a prig in private life: merely a hypocrite — seemed unable to come to terms with the new Britain. Then it all went pear-shaped.

In recent weeks, London has been subjected to a children’s crusade, with hysterical youngsters not only talking nonsense about the environment but being taken seriously by the grown-ups.