The phenomenon described here as Liberal-leftism emerged from the 1950s Cold War policy of spreading prosperity and of moving society towards what was hoped to be a greater informality and greater individual freedoms, both internally and in the wider world. It was the liberal-left world-view that quite rapidly installed itself as the social and cultural accompaniment to the major political and economic moves being made on the world stage. In practice this was to mean a wholesale turning away from the established national culture, something which, however, only became clear in retrospect.
The Cold War imperative demanded a radical shake-up of Britain’s social structure and of its posture vis-a-vis the rest of the world. In the late 1940s while, unlike before, there had been no declarations of war, it was clear that a new global conflict was in being. Many in Britain were uncertain about the nature of the war and, as time passed, about Britain’s exact part in it. Given that the preoccupation with nation-state aggression and militarism which had been created by two world wars had begun to diminish, and that Britain’s overall role in the world was seriously under question, the social environment of the mid-1950s was wide open to some new departure. Liberal-leftism stepped forward to take the opportunity offered, and rapidly filled the vacuum created as the old attitudes and ways of doing things began to be derided and destroyed.
While changes in social behaviour seemed at first minor or superficial, what was happening represented a profound challenge to the way in which the modern civilisation of the West was mediated through British culture. With independence in the Indian sub-continent and the growing prospect of the further dissolution of the Empire, confidence in Britain’s role and historic contribution in the building of the modern world began to wither. The fiasco of the Suez intervention of 1956, where Britain at first had a significant role to play, then suddenly decided to withdraw, was a key marker point. A new view was growing regarding the old (mostly taken for granted) concept of “bringing modern civilisation to the peoples of the Empire”, as well as towards the assumptions which this idea embraced. The probably apocryphal story that when asked his view on Western civilisation, Mahatma Gandhi replied that “it would be a good idea” summed up the sense of collective self that was spreading in the country. At the same time as raising a laugh, the core meaning of this exchange was central to the new mood. Pride in the British past and in the way her achievements in industry, education, health, in impartial administration and in the maintenance of the rule of law had been carried to other lands were sentiments that had dominated the public consciousness over several generations. These ideas were now upended in unceremonious fashion and while the explicitly political world in Britain understood, coped and adapted, amongst a much larger world inhabited by the mass of unknown and unheard people of the country, a chronic loss of morale was setting in.
The general dismantling of the old ideas sped up towards the end of the 1950s and especially in the early 1960s against a backdrop provided by the new infectious, rhythmically novel jazz and pop music and by the harsher and more raw trends in theatre and film. These were now sweeping the boards, and the careers of many old-fashioned actors, writers and entertainers were being radically reshaped and, in many cases, terminated. Conventions were falling all around and for many amongst the young, this was an exciting and liberating experience. With new-found levels of spending (unmatched certainly in living memory), the phenomenon of youth itself became the focus of attention with their wants, desires and feelings being placed increasingly to the fore.
Where did this leave the parties of the political left? The new cultural trends came as something of a surprise and did not sit easily with the traditional left’s social outlook. Theirs was a predominantly sober and serious approach to the problems of life in general. Their concerns had been with the steady improvement of workers’ wages and conditions, with the practical problems of the housing and health of the poor, and with analysing the changing balance of economic forces which they felt would eventually enable the growth of a more socialistic society. Their painstaking work was circumspect rather than exciting, looking always for opportunities and struggling to consolidate any gains. The Trades Unions had been built up on this basis in the second half of the 19th Century, and most of the English socialists, if pressed, would choose a process of gradualism rather than that of revolution. For many, the culture within which they lived owed much to the dissident strains inherent in Christian nonconformism. Their outlook on life, while often politically radical, could also be described as being, in many ways, conservative with a small ‘c’.
We need to look elsewhere for the wellsprings of the new culture which was rapidly filling the 1950s vacuum. These had their origin in the idea of the perfectibility of man, a state which would become possible when all the artificial barriers which constrained man’s progress had been removed. The antecedents of the new world-view are to be found in the thoughts of some of the French philosophers who had been an inspiration to the social and political revolutions which took place across the continent from 1789 onwards and through the 19th Century. Remove the crushing weight of oppression, remove the demeaning hierarchy, and the individual citizen would develop his or her talents, would flourish. This world-view was a false god, based as it was on the utopian concept of the innate goodness of the human being, yet it was to be the foundation both of the many failed social experiments of the 19th and 20th Century and of the liberal-left perspective which began to seize the imagination of young Britons in the 1950s.
The Utopian fallacy was the key to the events of this 1955-1970 period. Shorn increasingly of the Christianity which had formerly underpinned the culture, the replacement idea of the innate goodness, or rightness, of “natural” human feelings lay at the heart of the world-view which was to do so well in a Britain which had been cut adrift from its roots in the late 1950s and 60s. Whilst the historical record of utopian-inspired movements – speaking here of their actions in the real world, as opposed to their ideas – has been not only extremely bloody but self-defeating for all involved, this was of little account in this post-war period. The attractions of perfectibility, of spontaneity, of open expression and of the equal society, especially when these elements were mixed with the promise of the inexorable progress which would come about through science, were massive, and succeeded in enveloping much of the youth of the period. Science was always breaking through old barriers in all aspects of life, from explaining criminality to child rearing and to our understanding of relationship breakdown. The idea of social institutions (e.g. the family, the school) as necessarily having a structure, based on traditional life-roles, was now anathema. And with the help of idealistic teachers, many young people became so blinded to the achievements and accumulated wisdom of previous centuries and to the possibility of error that their reaction to challenge and disagreement would increasingly be to block their ears, shout down, and attempt to ban whatever appeared to threaten their adopted world-view. This led to the desire to control the public space and to exclude from it ideas that were “wrong” or intolerable. This lurch towards a new and frightening totalitarianism would take time to develop, but in the 21st Century it would assume the frightening characteristics long associated with perfectionist ideologies.
But this is go too far ahead. At first, all was hope, excitement and a strong sense of pride in the way young people were carving out new ideas and new territory. A strong element in the new cultural departure was the attack on the key, but now old-fashioned, virtue of restraint. Restraint instinctively went against spontaneous feeling, and the creative impulse. Because of innate goodness, what was genuinely and sincerely (in the new jargon, passionately) felt must always trump age-old wisdom, practices and rules. Indeed to be “in touch with your feelings”, to trust these, appeared to be a way in which the individual could sidestep all the dross of so-called civilisation which they, without choosing, had inherited. It was no coincidence that the world of drama and the arts was to play such a central role in what was unfolding. One inspiration was the ideas and outlook associated with the Bloomsbury Group; unconventional, creative, expressive of the individual personality, and intellectually scornful of existing rules and constraints in the way in which society worked. “Bloomsbury” had been on the whole friendly to pacifism while at the same time being careless of the social obligation grounded in Christian tradition. When this outlook was transmitted through liberal left ideas to the vast mass of the population, it brought untold damage to the coherence and centrality of the family unit (including, for example, to the continuing care of the older members of the family). It also weakened the belief in a predictable and ordered life path amongst many of the nation’s young. Crime rates and drug-taking increased dramatically from the end of the 1950s, worsening further as the integrated culture of former times fractured with the passing of time.
With the celebration of the rise to nationhood of so many peoples around the world, the whole concept of Britain’s historic role abroad, formerly thought of in terms of “civilising mission”, came to be questioned. For much of the British population, intellectual acceptance of the change did not prevent it being experienced as a sudden jarring shock to their sense of collective self. No guidance seemed to be available from the upper echelons of society, no announcements were made by government indicating what the new set of ideas were to be, but it was noticeable by the late 1950s that in representations of Britain in film, historical novels, children’s comics and in the press, the former air of patriotic pride was being phased out, to be replaced by a greater self-criticism, even self-mockery, directed towards the country and its past. The cultural changes taking place at this time were certainly on a grand scale. The Bloomsbury blueprint combined with a revival (in a new form) of the old tradition of “cocking a snook” at existing attitudes and ways of doing things. All the institutions of Britain, especially those which could be linked with the popular concept of the establishment – a term introduced into general use in 1955 – came under withering attack. Apart from the family (now labelled rather disparagingly as the “nuclear family – mother, father and 2.4 children”), targets of attack included the military, the middle class with their “twinsets and pearls”, the traditional school environment and the well-established hierarchical relationship between old and young and between parents and children. No satire was pointed enough for Britain’s notorious “stiff upper lip” past. With the new openness and freedom to create and thrive as individuals, this past would, thankfully, be consigned to the dustbin of history.
Underpinning everything was the assault on the role Christianity played in framing British life and culture, and especially its organisational expression in church and chapel. This was fitting precisely because it was the Judaeo-Christian set of ideas and beliefs, as expressed in various English, Scottish, Welsh and Irish forms, which had enabled Britain successfully to explore, trade and build new societies and forms of life worldwide. What the transformation was doing was to replace this set of ideas and beliefs with the new egalitarian world-view of liberal-leftism. And, as the years passed, this new “liberating” ideology would began to develop its own set of rules, obligations, its own catechism and punishments for nonconformity.
In the late 1950s and in the 1960s, the bastions of the old ideas and standards, of the old way of doing things, seemed defenceless. The culture of liberation carried everything before it; the defenders of deference, respect, obligation and restraint were everywhere in retreat, with few weapons in their armoury. Politicians knew that to be other than “progressive” was to guarantee almost certain defeat at the hands of the public. Most danced (literally) to the new tunes. Many who considered resistance had watched the humiliating defeat of the conservative Barry Goldwater at the hands of the civil rights advocate Lyndon Johnson in the US presidential election of 1964. The size of the defeat was massive, while Goldwater’s message, especially as far as the young were concerned, seemed to belong in the past. Few at the time could doubt that the future would belong to the new icons of youth, such as Robert Kennedy and Eugene McCarthy.
How long was this triumph of the liberal-left, which had so rapidly taken root, going to last? Was this a case of permanent revolution?
Junius 2 