I don't remember much of the 1960s (because I was too young, not because I was off my face all the time), but I know that until 1968 theatre productions in the UK were regulated by the Lord Chamberlain's office. That's to say, if you wanted to put on a play, you had to get a licence. This seems extraordinary now, but it's all of a piece when you consider that Penguin books were prosecuted for publishing Lady Chatterley's Lover as recently as 1960.
How freedom of speech has come on! Now you can say - or show - pretty much anything you like. Hard core pornography is available at the touch of a button, and Channel 4 puts on a show called Sex Box which, apparently, features couples having it off and then talking candidly about it on screen.
Oh that D H Lawrence should have lived to see this hour! Oh Mariella Frostrup that your career should come to this!
Well not so fast. I wonder whether in fact we have not reached the high watermark of liberty, and whether the tide is now ebbing. It was depressing to read that at the weekend a Spurs fan was arrested for being one of thousands of Spurs fans shouting the word "yid" at White Hart Lane. As I wrote a couple of weeks ago, the Y-word is not a racist slur, and in the football context it is not even anti-Semitic. Now a yobbo from Kent gets prosecuted for posting on Facebook a picture of a burning poppy captioned with the words, "Take that you squadey (sic) c---ts". Now UKIP's crappy Godfrey Bloom gets booted out of the party because the media wilfully misunderstands his use of the word "slut" and Nigel Farage won't stand up for him.
We live increasingly in a world where you cannot say what you like, or at least not if you say something the chattering classes (people like me, in other words) find unacceptable. The sad irony is that advances in freedom of speech were driven by the Liberal Left - the Conservatives lost that argument comprehensively around the time prosecuting counsel Mervyn Griffiths-Jones asked the Chatterley jury, "Is this a book you would want your children or servants to read?" - but it is the Liberal Left which is leading the charge back to censorship. It sometimes seems to me that there is a range of opinions which it is legitimate to hold, and within that range you can say what you like. But should you stray outside, woe betide you.
Too many people in Britain fail to understand that there is no right not to be offended. And that true freedom of speech involves other people being able to say things you really don't like. That's a freedom worth having because it gives you the right to say things they don't like either. That the decline from this ideal should be driven by the same political group that was instrumental in giving it to us in the first place I find desperately sad.
P.S. A couple of days ago at the LSE freshers week two students from the University's Atheist Secularist and Humanist Society were told to cover up "Jesus and Mo" T-shirts (you can read the satirical online cartoon here), on the basis that they were "offensive" and might be considered "harassment". Yes, that's right. The LSE founded by George Bernard Shaw and Sidney and Beatrice Webb, forefront of 60s student radicalism, telling a pair of students what they can and can't wear. The wearing down of freedom of expression goes on and on.
