My views on social justice developed as I was entering my teens. On journeys into school, my father would have the “Today” programme on the car radio (with Jack de Manio, so not as hard news as the current version), and late at night I’d listen to “Today in Parliament” on my little transistor radio. In those days of 1967 and 1968, social progress took great leaps:
Abortion Act 1967 legalised abortion (and provided it on the NHS in some circumstances)
Sexual Offences Act 1967 decriminalised homosexual acts (between men over 21 in private)
Criminal Law Act 1967 abolished the death penalty (except for treason, piracy, and arson in HM’s dockyards)
National Health Service (Family Planning) Act 1967 provided for the provision of family planning services through the NHS
The Matrimonial Causes Act 1967 reformed divorce law, introducing divorce based on the irretrievable breakdown of marriage rather than “fault”.
Race Relations Act 1968, which vastly widened the scope of and gave teeth to the previous 1965 Act.
All of them were a bit limited and had numerous imperfections, but in those heady days we could hope that there would be gradual improvements. Instead, each of these has been subjected to attacks and restrictions, both in law and in practice, over the nearly six decades since. I am tired, damn tired, of the same old battles (even if the outward manifestations have changed). I simply don’t have the energy to put into fighting the current crop of flag-hoisting neo-Nazis as I did back in the days of stewarding “Anti-Nazi League” benefit gigs and supporting “Rock Against Racism”, or protesting Thatcher’s “Section 28” and her government’s attempts to restrict access to abortion. What little strength is left to me also has to cover the climate crisis and planetary extinction, as best it can. The energy and excitement of social justice causes in my youth has been replaced by an exhausted but dogged determination to hang on as best we can.
