THE TELEGRAPH: In the second extract from his new book, Philip Johnston says we must restore traditional British common sense.
When I was growing up, there were two common phrases that you hardly ever hear today. One was: "It's a free country." The other was: "There should be a law against it." They tended to be uttered by people older than my parents who had been born not long after the First World War and may well have fought in the Second.
These phrases captured the essence of Britishness and why those wars were fought. We were, or imagined ourselves to be, "a free country" in a way that most European countries were not and had never been. That notion of being free defined us. We were not people subject to arbitrary state power and we both knew it and could say it. Perhaps this first phrase was used ironically at times; but when I heard it as a young boy it had a sense of certainty and permanence about it. What are we? A free country.
The second phrase also says much about the sort of country we were, and are no longer. There were, obviously, lots of laws but they were less restrictive of individual activity. They set parameters within which the "free" bit could be exercised and were governed by common law precedents handed down over the centuries. We had liberty; we did not have licence.
Yet there were clearly things of which many people, especially older ones, disapproved and that they sometimes wished could be legislated away, such as the looser morals that were on show in the 1960s. You could imagine an old codger leering at a girl in her thigh-high mini-skirt in 1963 (when sexual intercourse began, according to the poet Philip Larkin) and saying: "There should be a law against it." And if the girl had overheard, she would have replied: "It's a free country, grandad. Mind your own business."
However, neither of these phrases applies today. We are no longer a free country, not in the way previous generations would have understood the phrase; and as for the demand for laws, there almost certainly already is a law against it. >>> Philip Johnston | Sunday, March 21, 2010
'Bad Laws' by Philip Johnston (Constable) is out on Thursday and is available for £8.99 plus 99p postage and packing from Telegraph Books. Please call 0844 871 1514 or go to books.telegraph.co.uk
