"Insofar as it was then acknowledged that the Welfare State would undermine the social pressures on people to be upright citizens, this was mostly regarded as a good thing. The Welfare State would enable people to escape from narrow-minded social prejudices and live freer and happier lives.Ah yes, "the social pressures on people to be upright citizens". I remember them well. I’m not as old as Brian, but I remember those pressures vividly. They were the pressures that led to me being called a “bastard” at an English primary school in the sixties because I didn’t have a visible father. These were the same pressures that later led me to describe my father as being dead because, at a English Catholic school, it was preferable to have a “dead” father rather than being the son of a divorcee, the product of a “broken home”.
I consider the Prime Minister's somewhat implausible attempts to civilise our current crop of barbarians to be evidence, if you need any more, that those diehard free-marketeers had a point.
They were the same pressures that required me to spend one of my school years referred to simply as “The Jew” because I was the only circumcised boy at my school. And the same instincts led to ceaseless jibes about my German surname and my American heritage – in those times, my background was just too different to warrant any kind of acceptance.
By all means Brian, talk to me about the old days, but unless you were on the receiving end of those “social pressures on people to be upright citizens”, don’t try and tell me they were days of milk and honey. Because, for a lot of us (though, obviously, not the majority) they were the hardest days of our lives.
