Hippies

I have just finished reading a book about the Sixties. I never knew so much was going on whilst I went about the business of scratching together an education. Well, something like anyway. There is a retained image that it was a time of peace and love and anti-war protests.

But in fact it was a whole lot more. The Hippies, representing the intellectual Left as they did, were a painful group of self-impressed, inward looking trouble makers, who thought that taking drugs improved the correctness of their views and that 'free love' referred to men doing what they liked to women.

The anti-war movement came up with the brilliant idea that they should kill people to make their point. In fact, as an age it seemed that a collective view of the Left was, that violence was the answer to pretty much everything. It certainly managed to avoid that troublesome irritant, debate. If you were right about something, you didn't need some smart-arse pointing out the flaws in your reasoning.

Of course, having failed miserably during the Sixties to derail civilised society (by which I mean people who work for a living, contribute to society and don't blow things up), they had to change their plans. Out went confrontation and in came taking up jobs in the institutions to undermine them. Hence the Left wing allegiance of academia, with the concomitant lack of rigour or desire to educate. In too, came Political Correctness to close down debate, still the hated enemy of the Left (see Global Warming).

The damage that decade did (and not least by infesting the institutions creating lasting harm) is coming out as a pustular poison now. People have allowed the brainwashing that has led us sleepwalking into the nanny state, but slowly and surely those same people are coming to realise something is wrong. State education we were told was the finest and we swallowed it. But now, with legions of 'highly qualified' children who cannot read properly and cannot add up, the penny has dropped that we have been conned.

Everywhere you look, the effects of Left wing propaganda spouted in Universities confounds manners and achievement, stops social mobility, leads to an elitist political class, incompetence across the public sector and high taxes.

People are beginning to ask 'why?' to all kinds of actions of the state and there really is no satisfactory answer. If the Left cannot find another way to again stifle debate, they may well be in real trouble.