During the period 1945-53 the initial confrontations of the Cold War took place: Berlin and Central Europe, Greece, China, Malaya, French Indo-China, Korea, Egypt and Kenya. Through the Truman doctrine of 1947, the United States assigned itself the role of leading the West in resisting Communist aggression and subversion. But more than that was needed. A great conflict of cultures and philosophies was under way, spreading across all the continents, and an all-embracing strategy was clearly required. It had become clear by the early to mid-1950s that the West, and in particular Britain with its still far-flung empire, needed to drop its previous outlook on the world and quite rapidly embrace a non-hierarchical, liberating world-view. The hope was that, with rising standards of living and self-determination, a new more optimistic social order might be established abroad as well as at home. In this vision the component countries of the former European empires would, with assistance and education be transformed over time into free and equal members of the international (liberal) community.
By the end of the 1950s prime minister Harold Macmillan was able to make his famous assertion : “you’ve never had it so good”. The British people, better fed and housed, now with more money, assured quality health care and the new failsafe national assistance programme for those in financial need, were indeed, to all appearances, happier. The political system as a whole seemed to be in more robust health and there was massive support for the two established and moderate major political parties. The crisis years of the 1920s and 30s, with mass unemployment, the continuing blight of slum areas and the rise of both fascist and communist ideas, were not to be repeated, and support for the extremes had fallen away.
For the indigenous peoples living under European control, the idea was that both the colonial power and the colonial world-view would be replaced by a growing freedom and dignity for the individual, along with greater equality and the opportunity to develop one’s own society in one’s own way. The allegation put by some that the European would never give up control over the indigenous people of European empires would be exploded, a greater contentment would result, and the countries concerned would remain and thrive within the capitalist world trading system. The sores which led to resentment and which fed the Soviet and Chinese view of the masses of Africa and Asia – that they were “ripe for revolution” – would be healed and the hopes and plans of the Communists frustrated.
At first the West’s plans for this brighter future went well: the French evacuated Indo-China, the Korean War reached a stalemate and the uprisings in Malaya and Kenya both found their long-term solution in the establishing of independent states, in 1957 and in 1963 respectively. But the Cold War proved to be reaching the end only of its first, violent, phase. For Communists the long-term victory of socialism worldwide was assured because of the nature of the forces at work in history, as examined and explained by Karl Marx and his successors. Only the time period was uncertain. Bumps in the road were inevitable; while these needed to be negotiated, the struggle would continue through propaganda, organisation and uprising (where likely to succeed). The combination of methods would depend on local conditions, until in the end final victory was achieved. In the 1950s the struggle extended to Vietnam, the rest of South East Asia, and also to Africa and Latin America. At the the same time the Soviet Union and its European satellites devoted themselves to producing the rapid economic and scientific development which would show to the world that Communism was not only about revolution. A new system built on Marxist principles would be built, ushering in prosperity and technological progress without economic depressions, exploitation and mass unemployment. The result would be a less unequal society which would be superior to that achieved through the capitalist mode of life. In this notion of building anew through great collective efforts lay the key to winning over the peoples of the former colonised world. And by the late 1950s/early 1960s, with many of the new leaders of what was now seen as “emergent Africa” proclaiming socialism as the way of the future, there were some in the West who felt that Communist strategy was working, that the Cold War was gradually being lost. Mass poverty, underdevelopment and lack of opportunity, it was thought, could well be the downfall of the capitalist West as the hegemonic world force.
The working out of this so-called East-West struggle is to be found in the record of the next three decades. In what way does this story connect with the cultural transformation of Britain which began in the mid-1950s? To get the answer we must look at the (often unintended) effects of the central components of Cold War strategy. The struggle between Soviet Communism and the Western system would be resolved by the early 1990s. But the cultural consequences of a struggle which, on the absence of large-scale military confrontation, focussed in depth on questions of way of life, of ideas and of world-view, would continue. What were the cultural questions which had been brought sharply into view?
The new social philosophy launched from the mid-1950s involved the dismantling of the ingrained hierarchical element in the national culture. But much more than this took place in the key 1950s decade. The new liberalising politics, shared by all three major political parties (in the new climate the Liberal Party of old was making a comeback) became the signal almost immediately for the attack on a wide range of the other cardinal features of the way of life. The most active phase of this process was to last until the end of the 1960s. Concurrent with the spreading of a more egalitarian attitude towards the leaders and majority peoples of Africa and Asia, and of a new increasingly sympathetic understanding concerning the indigenous inhabitants of America, Australia, New Zealand and the Pacific, there took place in Britain itself the breaking down of the old reference points. These included not just the habits of deference and self-discipline, but also that of respect towards, for example, teachers and the police, and also towards the older generation and the wider family. The basis of this attack was a belief which rapidly became popular amongst the young, namely that the way of life as it had been up to that point was class-ridden, repressed, suffocating and boring.
In this interpretation the old ways and values which may have been heroic in wartime (though this idea too would be rejected in the move towards a more pacifist, anti-patriotic world view) failed to embrace the possibilities of life that were now becoming available. Fellow-feeling between the generations began to deteriorate as the transformation taking place in society appeared to be rejected by many of those of an older cast of mind. But for the increasingly carefree and irresponsible youth of the post-war era, while the changes being wrought in the fabric of everyday life were unnerving, this feeling was mingled with a sense of excitement, liberation and a relishing of doing things differently from before. Common to most young people was the idea, above all, of enjoying something that was essentially new. And such was the force of the cultural “new wave” that over time the majority of the middle-aged and older generation adapted, developing the more relaxed, accommodating approach to change which seemed required to avoid the accusation of being “stuck in the past”. Few, it seems, were happy with the feeling that they had been left behind, the feeling that they had not “kept up with the times”.
The election of Harold Wilson’s Labour government in 1964 after 13 years of Conservative rule owed much to these ideas of modernity. The onslaught on all aspects of the traditional British way of life was certainly a factor in the swing of votes which gave Labour and their vision of socialism a second chance after the major socialist experiment of 1945-51. The quieter, more conservative Britain of the 1950s had been officially brought to an with thus election, never to return. But this was no landslide. Mr. Wilson scraped in by 4 seats in a parliament of 630. This may have been due in part to a certain public disquiet with another by-product of the broad cultural changes which were occurring. Freed from the restraint of firmer times the profile of Labour in national life had grown along with the growing organisation, power and assertiveness of the Trades Union movement. While, for many, this had paved the way for a new Labour government, there was also a significant section of the public which baulked at what was seen as increased and unacceptable working-class militancy.
The cultural mood of 1964 was also heavily influenced by the exaggerated furore of the previous year over what rapidly achieved notoriety as the Profumo scandal. In the course of this episode, a report by a judge, Lord Denning, which depicted the corruption, duplicity and hypocrisy of the old class-dominated society, mushroomed into a festival of satire and mockery, the effects of which spread throughout the nation. In many ways this period can be seen as the climax of the process of the dismantling of the national culture, the undermining and belittling not only of what was portrayed as the old, oppressive sets of rules and observances which had hung like palls over the life of the country, but also of the structures and beliefs of the past. Irreverence was on display in all things, to the delight of the new generation. (Few then would have imagined that this period of liberation would transform itself into the liberal dictatorship over words, ideas and social attitudes that was to descend on the country fifty years later). The tenure of Roy Jenkins at the Home Office in the later 1960s provided the opportunity for the liberalisation of the law and the setting of a new tone for the relationship between government and individual. These changes on the domestic front marked the ending of a restrained, strict, even self-denying, social era, and the opening up of a supposedly less rule-bound, less censorious world in which individual feeling and expression would become central.
Was this then the long-overdue shake-up of the social order, the development of the easy-going, egalitarian and tolerant social fabric that would accompany the new prosperity, would welcome change and be more open to the world? What is clear, certainly when considered in retrospect, is that the revolution in culture was not a casual or accidental by-product of economic change. There had been a deliberate attack on the pre-existing way of doing things, on the idea of Britain, and England in particular. Patriotism – the sense of country and national culture – had long been linked with self-discipline and structure, as well as with the community-based institutions of church and chapel-going. All of these, along with the armed services and the traditional family were out of tune with the times and were fairly continuously under attack. This attack was not the result of a government or ruling class plan. The energy and drive behind it did, however, have a long social pedigree in British life.
To summarise, it was the government which had opened the window, which had, through the new accommodating attitude to what were then described as the aspirations of subject peoples, given the signal for the weakening of hierarchy and discipline and self-restraint in general. The social explosion which followed was led by people of a liberal or left cast of mind located in the increasingly influential areas of the media, the universities and schools, arts, music and fashion, as well as directly in politics. These elements were united neither by transformative economic ideas nor by anti-capitalism as such. Many, though by no means all, possessed a distaste, even loathing in some cases, (a feature observed in the 1930s by George Orwell) for Britain as a national entity, for its class system, and for the British way of life which had been dominant since at least Victorian times. The result, in the late 1950s and 60s, was that beneath the excitement and the joyful embracing of all that was new, little space was available for consideration of what was happening to the structured, ordered, predictable and once-confident social order. This, it seems, had been simply and carelessly cast aside with no thought for the enduring loss of morale that was to be the long-term consequence of the demolition process.
This cultural movement begun from the mid 1950s through to the late 1960s was important to British life and to British history. The question then poses itself : what was the character, the anatomy, of this new liberal-leftism which had emerged through this onslaught on traditional culture and which was to leave so great a mark on British life?
Junius 2 