Into our bedrooms, and under the sheets!

Actually, after I posted my report on OC I thought that perhaps it would have been better posted on the main board; but by then it was too late. Just some further thoughts. Is there, I wonder, a relationship between the failure of Burnham's government (at least to date) to live up to Burnham's rhetoric and the increasingly repressive environment of legislation, both in terms of policing sex and policing thought (the arresting of pensioners for protesting genocide, academics denied entry into the country because they say things that Israel doesn't like, etc.)? Britain, in contrast to more civilised countries such as France, has a long history of taking a prurient and puritanical interest in what people do in their bedrooms. This only ceased to be the case for about thirty years or so following the Second World War. I think of the intellectuals who grew up in the 1930s and 1940s, whose attitude influenced public discussion in the postwar era, people like A. J. Ayer, who utterly despised puritanism, didn't care a tinker's cuss what other people did in their bedrooms so long as it didn't limit their own sexual freedom; but at the same time rejected the world of pre-war capitalism and the whole philosophy of devil take the hindmost, and wanted a society in which everyone could have material decency. They shaped a postwar environment in which there was much greater equality than before (taxes on the superrich of 83 per cent of earned income and 98 per cent of investment income), as a result of which property and income were widely distributed, and homes were affordable. (One lesson of modern times is that one can have a flourishing home owning middle class or one can have a billionaire class, but one cannot have both.) At the same time, there was gradual liberalisation across a range of areas, from sex to censorship. This applied to a degree even to the Conservatives. Edward Heath may very well have been a boysexual man, albeit one who had intentionally chosen celibacy in order to pursue a political career, leading to a touch of melancholia in his personality that his acquaintances often noted. Is it a coincidence that the moment of the first extension in modern times of sex laws into our lives here in the UK, the Protection of Children Act 1978, was the moment in which the postwar consensus was unravelling? As government abandoned the terrain of improving people's material lives, so they extended their policing of their sex lives. I cannot prove causation, but I can't help feeling that there is some causal link in all this. The age of neoliberalism is the age of repressive sexual legislation.