Anthony Barnett (London, OK): There have been lots of nice, or at least interested, responses to the Radio 4 discussion on 1968 in London that is repeated in abbreviated form tonight at 9.30pm. Some brief points:
The sixties were economic, social and political. Economically they meant the 'Americanisation' of the world: meaning capitalism of the spectacle - consumerism, television. Socially, they meant liberalisation and ending hypocrisy and the rule of "oui papa" - "yes Daddy" authoritarianism. The mini-skirt symbolised both. The UK and especially London was a leading epicentre of this sixties, musically as well. Politically, a murky world-wide civil war took place, driven by the enormous generational change that followed the the sudden arrival of sexual 'liberation', consumeration, mass higher education and the American attempt to try and complete the French colonialisation of Vietnam with over half a million troops in Indochina and eventually 2 million Vietnamese victims. Some countries, despite a small band of deadly nutters, had a good sixties politically, notably West Germany with its "anti-authoritarian movement" as an entire generation faced up to the way its parents had almost all been Nazis or their collaborators. Others countries didn't, notably Mexico. (Paco Ignacio Taibo's 68, translated by my old friend from that time Donal Nicholson Smith is one of the best accounts of what it was like everywhere, except that hundreds were massacred; capturing the rage, fear, sexism, sectarianism, inexperience, ambition and integrity in a short, vivid memoir).
Britain was peculiar in that it had a very broad and successful economic and social 'sixties' but a small and isolated political one that quickly became sectarian. Why? In a sentence, because we had a "good war" meaning 1940-45. The political establishment has still never recovered.
There is more to say, about the contrast between the civil rights sixties and the 68 one that never believed in what at the time was referred to as "mere bourgeois democracy". I only got to human rights after 1975. But there was a deep, democratic impulse against the authoritarian state. As I said in the programme both London having an independent executive Mayor and Scotland its own parliament are achievements rooted in the impulse of the sixties - meanwhile the centre holds.
Another aspect was not touched on in the BBC discussion. Politics then was international. We were part of a global and a European movement, and went there accordingly: subverting the colonels in Greece, checking out the movement in Frankfurt. Now, a ghastly parochialism has settled over British politics (not in Scotland - where they feel part of a politically global movement). One of the last gasps of the right-wing sixties was Blair and Brown's uncritical embrace of globalisation, as an inevitable force. Let's hear from the new generation about what they make of it all.
