You have to admit there is something faintly comical about the Office of Fair Trading's decision to investigate the school uniform market, announced on July 5. I mean, why should anyone be surprised if their children's school requires all uniforms to be bought from a single supplier in exactly the same design and quality at exactly the same price? Isn't that what "uniform" means?
What bothers me more about the announcement is not any lack of competition in the school uniform market but the fact that there is a market big enough to be worth investigating. As a member of the postwar baby-boom generation I was forced to wear a uniform when I was at school but I always assumed the permissive society we fought for in the 1960s would see to it that future generations of children were spared such tyranny.
Instead, we appear to be more in love with uniforms than ever. According to the OFT, nearly all state secondary schools require pupils to wear a uniform of some description and no doubt the rules are even stricter in the independent sector.
Parents, who as youngsters in the 1960s sought to tear up all the rules, have turned into grumpy old men and women demanding probably even more discipline for their children than they were subjected to themselves.
On a similar theme, have you heard about this summer's surprise bestselling hardback, The Dangerous Book for Boys? With its instructions on how to build a treehouse, make a catapult and skin a rabbit, its inspiring stories of British military heroes, its sections on Latin and grammar and its lists of famous battles and British kings and queens, it too seems redolent of the good old days before cultural diversity when British schoolboys were white, middle-class, went to boarding school and understood that a good beating never hurt anyone.
In fact, all around us there are signs of a hankering after stricter times. People lament a decline in manners and common courtesy, we turn Lynne Truss into a bestselling author for correcting our sloppy punctuation in Eats, Shoots & Leaves and the prime minister launches a "respect" agenda to punish yobs responsible for anti-social behaviour.
The odd thing is, a lot of this nostalgia for pre-1960s values comes from the baby-boom generation itself. It is almost as if the boomers have lost faith in the social and cultural revolution they engineered and have even become a little frightened of its consequences. So now they want to roll back the changes by reviving the values of simpler times; and since the only simpler times they have ever known are those of their own childhood, that means the 1950s.
Allow me to suggest three obvious reasons why this is a mistake.
First, those ageing boomers are identifying the wrong cause for their anxiety. Yes, these are troubled times, but the greatest uncertainties of our age are the result of globalisation, the onset of the digital era and the growing threats to global security, not the cultural changes initiated by boomers in their youth.
A return to 1950s values will not make the world, or Britain, a simpler or safer place, nor make boys want to give up their video games and start playing conkers again.
Second, the only people who could seriously want to go back to the 1950s are those who never experienced the era; or who did but have forgotten what it was like. Yes, you could say it was a simpler and more innocent time of traditional family values, nice manners and wholesome family entertainment, but at what cost?
The leitmotif of the era was an omnipresent, stultifying air of deference and conformism that kept people in their place and denied them the opportunity to fulfil their potential or ambition.
"What will the neighbours say?" was the question that summed up the times, reflecting the prevailing atmosphere of curtain-twitching censoriousness and people's horror of departing from the norm.
A woman's place was in the home and a rigid class system discouraged social mobility. Those who did not quite fit in with the mainstream earned insulting and dehumanising epithets such as wog, cripple, queer or yid.
Homosexuality and abortion were illegal, the divorce laws kept people trapped within failed marriages, the arts were heavily censored and sex was repressed. For much of the decade there was only one television channel available - fittingly, in monochrome.
Third, the cultural revolution was right. Yes, we can mock some of the things that went with it - the long hair, the flares, the psychedelia - and regret some of the excesses of relativism and political correctness to which it led. But it was right to attack the authoritarianism, snobbery and ugly prejudices of the 1950s in favour of a fresh set of ideals based on equality, opportunity and personal freedom.
So keep the faith, fellow boomers! Do not abandon your youthful ideals. As for those uniforms: of course schools need rules but surely schools should also be encouraging children to find out what makes them happy, interesting and different from one another, not putting them on a regimented, disciplined educational production line that turns out identical, goal-driven clones.
Heaven forbid we should return to the drab conformity of the 1950s. Perhaps what the OFT should be investigating is not whether there is enough competition in the school uniform market but why schools should have uniforms at all.
