We have less freedom now than we did 40 years ago

Forty years ago this week, I became the editor of this paper. That is as long ago from now as was D-Day from then. It must seem as distant to today’s young as did the men on the Normandy beaches to my 27-year-old self. I can now see more clearly how much my generation enjoyed the freedom for which those men had fought. That freedom is trickling away.

Re-reading The Spectator’s Portrait of the Week (which I restored to the front of the paper as soon as I became editor), I find many aspects of the world in March 1984 echoing today. There was near-anarchy in Lebanon; American marines withdrew. Israel/Palestine peace plans were unsuccessfully touted. Sunnis and Shi’ites were killing one another in the Persian Gulf. An Assad ruled Syria. A Trudeau was prime minister of Canada. A Benn (Tony) was in parliament, fresh from victory in the Chesterfield by-election. Protesting French lorry drivers blocked roads. Students threw eggs at the prime minister. As today, everyone groaned about mortgage rates (10.5 per cent, twice current ones).

What was different in March 1984? Mrs Thatcher’s fight about Britain’s contribution to the European Community budget was raging. Now we’re out. The IRA was busy, murdering a deputy governor of the Maze prison. Gerry Adams, too, was shot, by the UDA. Now that’s over, or seems to be. Nelson Mandela refused a prison release which would have confined him to the Bantustan of Transkei. Instead, he waited six more years for freedom. Nigel Lawson’s first Budget began a story of tax simplification and tax reductions, not seen in those of Jeremy Hunt.

The big story in Britain was the miners’ strike. A young 21st-century mind, schooled in greenery, must puzzle why people wanted coal at all, let alone, as the NUM leader Arthur Scargill insisted, wanted every seam to be mined until exhausted, whatever the cost.