Leadership Quote by Roy Jenkins

Jenkins is trying to rescue a whole political era from the smear campaign that followed it. “Permissive society” was the 1960s-70s catch-all for liberalising reforms in Britain - easier divorce, decriminalised homosexuality, abortion reform, the end of theatre censorship - and it quickly became a scolding label, shorthand for moral slackness and social breakdown. By saying it has been “allowed” to become a dirty phrase, Jenkins subtly indicts his own side for losing the narrative: liberals didn’t just get attacked; they failed to defend the moral logic of what they’d changed.

The rhetorical move is to swap an anxious word for an aspirational one. “Permissive” sounds like permission granted to people who can’t be trusted; it frames freedom as indulgence. “Civilised” flips the hierarchy: tolerance and personal autonomy aren’t decadent add-ons, they’re markers of a mature polity. Jenkins is smuggling a values argument into a branding argument: the reforms weren’t about letting people off the hook, they were about treating citizens as adults under the law.

There’s subtext, too, in the contrast between taboo and legitimacy. Jenkins isn’t denying that social change carries risk; he’s insisting that the greater risk is a state that polices private life to preserve a fragile public morality. Coming from a Labour reformer who helped engineer many of these changes, the line reads like a late-career attempt to fix the epitaph: not permissiveness as looseness, but civilisation as restraint exercised by government, not by citizens.