ABSTRACT
The Sixties, and the lead-in to them from the late Fifties, seemed at the time one of the more cheerful decades. The first widely spread prosperity relaxed a lot of people, made British society feel more open. At the turn into the Eighties the air had changed more abruptly, more chillingly, than it had for a very long time. The Eighties were harsh and hard-nosed. In relation to deeper changes in society, the attitudes of the governments of the Eighties are only symptoms and consequences, a first exploitative phase in the new or at least the emerging social landscape. More and more varied, finer and finer layers of provision for the top group goes along with more and more coagulated provision for the next and much the biggest group. The academic who allows those kinds of exterior roads to call him is always an ambiguous figure, and especially if he is thought actively to have sought to tread them.
