AQA A-LEVEL HISTORY 7042/2S |Component 2S The Making of Modern Britain, 1951–2007|QUESTIONS & MARKING SCHEME MERGED| GRADED A+|

Section A Answer Question 01. Source A From a speech in the House of Commons during a debate on the Wootton Report, by Conservative MP Patrick McNair-Wilson, 27 January 1969. This report recommended the legalisation of cannabis. I have listened to the arguments of those experts outside this House who have tried to persuade me and others that the smoking of cannabis is no more than a social pastime. But I think that we are accepting too many kinds of social changes, not so much because we want them but merely because we believe that they are inevitable. I do not subscribe to the inevitability of what must happen to our social order in this country. For the report to suggest that the use of cannabis amounts to nothing more than youthful experimentation is the most dangerous premise on which to build any sort of legislation on drug-taking. We have to keep a firm grip on our society if we do not want it to get out of control. As a nation we can either just go with the flow or we can draw the line. I want to draw the line. 5 10 Source B From comments on the 1960s made in an interview by John Lennon, 1971. These were published in the influential and widely read music and popular culture magazine, ‘Rolling Stone’. The people who were in control and in power and the class system and the whole bourgeois scene was exactly the same except that there were a lot of middle-class kids with long hair walking around London in trendy clothes. But apart from that, nothing happened except that we all dressed up. The same people were running everything. It was all hype. We’ve grown up a little, all of us, and there has been a change and we are a bit freer, but it’s the same game. They’re doing exactly the same things, selling arms to the whites in South Africa and here people are still living in poverty. I woke up to that reality. Nothing happened except that we grew up. We did our own thing in the Beatles just like they wanted us to, but now most of the so-called ‘Now Generation’ are getting regular jobs and all of that. I don’t believe in the sixties’ dream any more. It was all a myth. 5 10 3 IB/M/Jun23/7042/2S Turn over ► Source C From ‘Looking Back at the 1960s’ by Sara Maitland, 1988. Maitland is a feminist writer who had graduated from Oxford University in 1971. The 1960s were born out of the ‘you’ve never had it so good’ years. The security provided by the relatively high employment and rising wages of all classes created a new dynamic in society: a youth group which was both more monied and leisured than any previous generation. This, of course, does not deny that there were devastating injustices, prejudices and real poverty, but it was, nevertheless, an historic moment. The 1960s were transforming times, the beginning of the liberation of all women in Britain. We were undeniably greedy both for personal experience and instant gratification. We were undeniably arrogant in our conviction that we could change the world, but the optimism, excitement and aspiration of the time was real and produced the first British National Women’s Liberation Conference in 1970. Feminism does seem to me to be my life and in that sense, born in 1950, I am the person I am because of the 1960s. 5 10 0 1 With reference to these sources and your understanding of the historical context, assess the value of these three sources to an historian studying