The Long '68 by Richard Vinen

Author:Richard Vinen [Vinen, Richard]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780141982533
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2018-02-13T00:00:00+00:00

PARTY POLITICS AND THE NEW LEFT

How did students interact with the more general politics of the British left in the 1960s? The British party system was simpler than those in most of Europe. There were two main parties – Conservative and Labour. There were a few Liberal MPs, remnants of what had been a great party before the First World War, but there was after 1950 not a single MP who represented any party to the left of Labour. The British Communist Party was small and many of its members, particularly intellectuals, had resigned in protest at the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956. Curiously, left-wing intellectuals sometimes appeared to exercise more influence after they had left the party than they had done inside it – so much so that one of Enoch Powell’s paranoid correspondents ‘began to wonder if these mass resignations could not be part of a plot’.27

Two small publications sprang out of disillusion with the Communist Party in the early 1950s – both of them based partly in universities. The New Reasoner was founded by academics in northern England, notably the historians John Saville and Edward (E.P.) Thompson, most of whom were old enough to have fought in the Second World War. At about the same time, a group of younger people (born in the 1930s) in Oxford founded the Universities and Left Review. In 1960, the two publications merged to form the New Left Review. Its presiding spirits were, however, quickly divided. Those associated with The New Reasoner began to refer to themselves with some bitterness as the ‘old New Left’. The most important figures of the New Left Review were Stuart Hall, a Jamaican-born academic who was interested in what came to be known as ‘cultural studies’, and Perry Anderson, whose significance derived partly from his immense intellectual self-confidence and partly from the fact that he was rich enough to subsidize a loss-making publication. Anderson was interested in high theory and wrote about British national traditions with disdain. Thompson regarded himself as the defender of a more empirical approach and believed that there was special value in a certain kind of English political culture.

In 1960, the cause that most mobilized the British left was support for unilateral nuclear disarmament (i.e. the belief that Britain should abandon nuclear weapons regardless of what other countries did), and in that year supporters of unilateralism prevailed in the Labour Party itself, but that victory was quickly reversed. In spite of this, the radical left did not entirely turn its back on Labour. In 1965, Perry Anderson co-edited a collection of essays that included contributions by Lord Balogh, an economist and Labour peer, and Richard Crossman,28 an eccentric Labour cabinet minister who by the end of the decade would compare the atmosphere produced by student protest to the ‘early days of the Weimar Republic’.29 Membership of the National Association of Labour Student Organizations grew from 1,500 in 1956 to around 6,000 in the mid-1960s.30

What changed the mood on the left

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