Love isn’t quite all you need in life. But it’s a whole lot better than hate. And if that ideal continues to pervade British society, then we should be profoundly grateful to the Summer of Love which took place 40 years ago in 1967.

According to a YouGov poll for Readers Digest, we are all hippies now. And it’s not just the maxi dresses flooding out of Topshop or the instant sell-out of Glastonbury tickets. The values of peace, love, greenery, independence of mind and sexual freedom are no longer alternative but mainstream.

Three quarters of us now agree with sex before marriage, 82 per cent want to save the planet and 48 per cent believe in questioning authority. Roughly the same proportion think there are too many rules in society and a similar percentage – the same people, perhaps? – enjoy walking around barefoot.

You may think that some hippy values have been taken too far. Perhaps a little more deference would be desirable. But you have to remember the world from which the hippies burst: the stultified, uptight, rigidly hierarchical society of the 1950s and early 1960s, in which wives were expected to give up their jobs and wear pinnies. The hippies’ rejection of 1950s values was a great hurricane of fresh air blowing into a stale room whose windows had been painted shut for decades.

People then felt trapped by social convention. Women in particular had very little power over their lives. It was the hippies’ insight that everyone should be allowed to break out and be themselves, not be forced into a persona that had been ordained by others – real freedom of expression, in other words.

The hippies were also green long before their time. Many of them tried to live a life of self-sufficiency, growing their own food, generating energy and building homes. Now 47 per cent of Britons say they would consider trying to emulate them.

Of course, there was a huge naivety about the movement. “Make love, not war” might sound cool, but it wouldn’t have impressed Adolf Hitler. A synchronised sexfest would hardly have won us the Battle of Britain. Still, nearly half of Britons say they agree with the slogan and 35 per cent think there is never any excuse for war. What would they have done when the Nazis invaded? Put flowers in their hair?

But if in general you prefer gentleness to violence, if you think nature should be tended not destroyed, if you believe optimism, however misguided, beats hard-faced cynicism, then you are probably, like me, an old hippy at heart.

And the great news is that much of the rest of the country is too. We, as a nation, have become kinder, more open and more broad-minded in the past 40 years. We should light an incense stick for the hippies of 1967.

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