When I was about fifteen, just when the liberal revolution had really got underway in this country, I began militating for Religious Instruction lessons in our school to include the study of religions other than Christianity. Not exactly manning the barricades with Molotov cocktails, I grant you, but nevertheless it gave me a thrill to belong – if only briefly – to the massed ranks of smug provocateurs questioning traditional authority in all its forms. I had absolutely no desire to study other religions, you understand – I couldn’t have cared less what Buddhists or Muslims got up to. Like most teenagers, I just wanted to assert myself.
To my amazement, the very kindly vicar who took us for RI agreed. The following term he had to ask me to pay attention in class on several occasions, reminding me, with the gentle courtesy which was his hallmark, that, as I had been the one to request a widening of the curriculum, I might reasonably be expected to take a passing interest in what was being discussed.
Over a century of tradition swept away on the whim of a boy.
Around this time some old suits belonging to my father’s were altered by my dressmaker granny to fit me, and I thought I looked pretty damned cool in them. I started militating for a change in sixth form dress codes to allow us to wear lounge suits instead of school uniforms. To my amazement, the school caved in at once.
An ancient custom overturned to accommodate a child’s sartorial preferences.
Now, I’m sure any modern liberal reading this will have felt a tiny warm glow at these petty victories – what could possibly be wrong with sweeping away Euro-centric religious studies and the wearing of anything as silly as a school uniform? – but I am appalled at how easy it was for one self-centred teen to get their own way so easily.
What were they thinking of? Why didn’t they just turn round and bark at me to grow up and bloody well do as I was told?
Late in the following decade, Penguin published “The Seventies” by Christopher Booker. In it, he examined the behaviour of Trade Unionists whose increasingly ludicrous demands and viciously anti-Social antics had just brought down a Labour government. (Ronnie Corbett used to tell a good joke around this time. A union leader informs a mass meeting of his car worker members that he has got them a 25% pay increase while reducing their working week from five days to one. “From now on, you’ll only have to work Mondays for a full week’s pay.” There’s a pause while that sinks in, then a voice from the back of the hall pipes up, “What, every Monday?”) Booker’s theory was that when parents regularly give way to teenagers’ demands – to stay up late, to get up late, to skip school, to eat when they want – the demands simply increase, while compliance with previously agreed codes of conduct vanishes.
It seemed a good analogy then. And it still does, because if legitimate authority accedes to demands without insisting on some sort of measurable behavioural improvement on the part of those who’ve just got their way, increasingly silly demands will surely follow, accompanied by sullen anger and, probably, direct disobedience should any of their whims ever be denied.
If I’d been told 40 years ago that we could study other religions if we were prepared to stay an hour after school to do so – or that I could wear cool-looking suits if I arrived at school early every morning for a clothing inspection – I’d have immediately turned down the offer and the perfectly reasonable status quo would have been maintained. As it should have been.
When Jim Callaghan’s government finally tried to reverse years of giving in to union demands, they acted in the way you’d expect undisciplined teenagers to do – they brought the Labour movement crashing down around their own ears in an orgy of petulant, self-destructive behaviour. A few years later when Arthur Scargill – the NUM’s equivalent of Harry Enfield’s eternally outraged teenager, Kevin – tried the same trick, he found we’d all had enough and had voted in someone who’d give him a clip round the ear and tell him to stop being so bloody rude.
It’s probably time someone did the same to bankers, MPs and public sector workers. But, this time round, I doubt if anyone has the balls.
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