IS BRITAIN “MORE CIVILIZED” NOW THAN 50 YEARS AGO??
It has been claimed that Britain is now 'more civilized' than it was 50 years ago because it has adopted liberal and permissive standards almost right across the board.
But was there an undercover plot to turn the UK into an extreme liberal society?
There is extensive evidence that various people have moved (dare one even say 'plotted'?) behind the scenes – out of the immediate limelight – to enact far-reaching changes in British society which would not have been accepted by the British public at the time that these individuals were quietly working. Could this be called plotting, and/or a misuse of public office?
Roy Jenkins was a well-known British Labour Party politician of the 1960s and 1970s, indeed, at one time he was in the British Government and was Home Secretary. He seemed an eminently reasonable politician at the time. Yet now it is known that Jenkins was one of the chief 'movers and shakers' in turning Britain into a liberal and permissive society. Although well-known by the public, few of the general public were aware of the far-reaching changes in society which Jenkins and a few other liberal-minded politicians was quietly enacting behind the scenes.
As a young and raw politician in the late 1950s, Jenkins had written a booklet entitled 'Is Britain Civilised?' - in this booklet Jenkins attacked Britain's "archaic" laws on abortion, censorship, homosexuality, and divorce, as well as arguing for the abolition of capital punishment and for changes to the country's criminal justice system, which he labelled “Victorian”.
A group of middle-class intellectuals had risen to prominence in the Labour movement and these men held a devout liberal and “modernizing” agenda. These men were led by Jenkins and his friend Tony Crosland; their dream was to see a truly permissive and liberal Britain free of the moral shackles of the country's Christian heritage. When The Labour Party came to government in 1964, these men (and others who held their extreme libertarian views) seized what opportunities they could to further an agenda which the public were never made aware of. When Jenkins became British Home Secretary in 1965 he became quietly determined to pursue this liberalizing agenda. In fact, the death penalty had been suspended that very year. Now these liberalizers became determined to encourage and give what support they could to private member's Bills to decriminalise abortion and homosexuality, relax censorship, and to make divorce much easier. In Opinion -Telegraph (9/1/2003), Neil Clark made these revealing comments,
'Jenkins's impact at the Home Office did not end there. He also embarked on the most radical programme of penal reform since the Second World War. His Criminal Justice Act of 1967 said very little about the victims of crime, but plenty about the perpetrators. The Act introduced the parole system of early release of offenders serving sentences of three years or more, established the Parole Board and introduced the system of suspended sentences.
In two years, Jenkins had succeeded in transforming the criminal justice system from one whose raison d'etre had been to deter wrong-doing to one designed to be as "civilised" as possible to the criminal.
Jenkins was of course convinced that the "permissive society" was the "civilised society". In this, he - alas - got it all terribly wrong. What underpins civilised society is not permissiveness, but self-restraint, a phrase detested by libertines of both Left and Right. What Jenkins failed to see was how the freedoms he espoused would lead to the degeneration of British society and the selfish, me-first libertinism of today.'
The point in all of this is that although Jenkins was a well-known UK politician, the British public did not know that he and a few others held a hidden agenda to make such widespread changes within British society. If – at the time – one can imagine a nation-wide poll or referendum being held to seek support for such sweeping changes within society there seems little doubt that the new Labour Government would have dramatically lost popularity and may even have been unceremoniously thrown out of office!
Jenkins was not the only liberal plotter, of course, there were certainly others and they were not all in the Labour Party; David Steel, who introduced the Bill to legalize abortion in 1967, was a member of the Liberal Party. Today Britain is, in many respects, morally and socially almost unrecognisable from the Britain of the 1950s, yet few members of the British public are aware that a well-respected Home Secretary in a British Government of the 1960s, was largely responsible for encouraging and pushing through the massive social changes which has turned Britain into perhaps the most libertine – and frankly immoral – country in Europe.
Mr Clark accurately comments:
'More than 30 years on, the damaging impact of Jenkins's reforms on the society we live in is all too clear to see. One marriage in three now ends in divorce. Almost 40 per cent of children are now born out of wedlock, the highest figure in Europe. Since the 1967 Abortion Act, more than six million unborn children have been aborted.
The legalisation of homosexuality has not been the end of the chapter, but merely the beginning, with an aggressive "gay rights" lobby demanding more and more concessions. The policy of early release of prisoners has had a catastrophic effect on the safety of the general public: 14 per cent of violent criminals freed early are convicted of fresh violence within two years of their release.'
So the sad moral decline of British society did not happen by some accident; well-meaning but totally misguided liberals - with considerable power within their grasp - moved behind the scenes to enact major changes within a country and society which had formerly been one of the most stable, decent and law-abiding in the world.
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