The end of the Thatcher era in Britain coincided both with the dissolution of the Cold War and with the collapse of the system of white-minority rule in South Africa. The practice of apartheid (legally-enforced “separate development”) in that country went completely counter to the liberalising trends which had dominated the West since 1945, and the system of dividing races and cultures had been under hostile international scrutiny for over 40 years. Massive pressure was exerted in the post-World War II period, primarily by the African and Asian countries in the United Nations. But the U.S., Britain and Western Europe were themselves committed (as one aspect of the Western Cold War strategy) to the goal of the equality of peoples and cultures, and this would lead, albeit more gradually, to more telling forms of economic pressure on the white South African government. Step by step the South Africans became increasingly isolated on the international stage. These efforts, combined with spreading unrest within South Africa itself, finally bore fruit with the release of Nelson Mandela in 1990 and the beginning of negotiations to install a system of one person, one vote. Given the relative size of the different races and cultures, the electoral outcome of this process was certain.

The irony in these developments was that South Africa had projected itself throughout the period since the Nationalist Party had won control in 1948 as the chief defender of the West in Africa, as the power which, in alliance with Western democracies, would lead the struggle against the spread of Communism in the African continent. But from the American and British perspective, by contrast with their stance on the Franco dictatorship in Spain, South Africa fairly swiftly had come to be seen as more of a liability than an asset in the Cold War struggle. The importance on the world stage of being seen to be in active support of the liberation and advancement of indigenous peoples was central to Western Cold War strategy. With the hardening of this view over the years, it became clear that white South Africa’s long-term fate was sealed. The reckoning was to come in the late 1980s when the change in mood in Central and Eastern Europe brought not only the rapid conclusion of the Cold War but the collapse of the Soviet idea itself.

Simultaneously, in South Africa, the view took hold amongst significant sections of the white population that Communism was not the only alternative to white rule. A majority amongst the people of European descent in South Africa gradually came to see a way out of the country’s plight as “lepers” on the world stage. Thus it was that the movement in Eastern Europe and that in South Africa went hand in hand. When the representatives of the Soviet Union informed both their own comrades in the liberation movement and the white Nationalist government of South Africa that the revolution was “indefinitely postponed”, it became easier for white South Africans to see the possibility of a liberal path forward which would be open to all cultures in the country. At that time the example of Zimbabwe seemed to augur well for a working partnership between the races which would create stability and bring prosperity. The Anti-Apartheid Movement in Britain symbolically changed its name in 1994 in the belief that the struggle (at least concerning their leading campaigning issue) had been won. The establishing of a Truth and Reconciliation Committee for South Africa as a consequence of the racial settlement was to become emblematic of the new order. The idea was being established in peoples’ minds, not only in South Africa but in the West as a whole, that the climactic events of 1989-91 had indeed ushered in a new age, a less divided, co-operative and, above all, post-ideological era. What was, in fact, assumed in these hopeful sentiments was that the world would be made safe for the modern liberal capitalism that had made such an impact worldwide since the late 1940s. However, only a few years were to pass before the utopian gloss on the post Cold War vision began to fade. As it turned out, the years of the 1990s would be left hanging in history, a tribute to the readiness of human beings to neglect past lessons, and to keep believing in “new beginnings” which evaporate when one tries to take hold of them.

It is true that for many of those living at the time, the immediate post-Cold War period was dominated by a feeling that the big conflicts were now a thing of the past. Though most people decried the hubris of the philosopher who spoke of the “end of history”, there was a general feeling that liberalism had won and that an era of international co-operation beckoned. This collective self-deception was heightened by the fact that while Mr. Yeltsin, the new Russian leader, adopted a policy of opening up friendly contacts with former enemies in the West, there was also the (mistaken) hope that the passing of old-style revolutionary doctrine in China would lead over time to a liberalising of the whole Chinese system. Contemporaneously, there existed a celebratory atmosphere surrounding the establishment in 1994 of a black government for the new “rainbow” South African nation led now, on behalf of the majority, by Nelson Mandela. In the following year the rugby World Cup became the focus for a poignant piece of symbolism when President Mandela performed the ultimate gesture of reconciliation, wearing the shirt of the victorious national team in what had traditionally been seen as the white man’s game. The overall ideology of the time, a mixture of liberalism, a conscious kind-hearted universalism, and wishful thinking, was now clearly established and, was rapidly (and dangerously) becoming almost compulsory for enlightened Western young people. Symbolic of the period also was the fact that while the occupant of the White House was the disarming, agreeable and youthful Mr. Clinton, 1997 was to bring a partner in the task of Western leadership in the form of Britain’s Mr. Blair, famous also for his equally optimistic and winning ways.

The end of the formal communist/capitalist division was welcome news to those who had so thoroughly brought about the cultural revolution in Britain. The liberating ideas of the 60s and 70s, of tearing down borders, of “one race the human race”, and of the hope for universal equality, all of these received a fillip with the end of the Cold War. The downfall both of the Soviets and of the apartheid concept appeared to prove that closed systems of society, where it was difficult for change to occur or light to enter from outside, and where there were severe restrictions on the freedom of the individual, had been shown not to work and had been rightly rejected. This was intended to be a time not only for the “peace dividend” but also an era for embracing the modern, and for shedding the legacies which remained from the past. This would include all that stood in the way of the equal society, and would bring to the fore the campaigns for feminism, anti-racism, sexual freedoms, and for universal human rights.

But the naive optimism of this period was not to last. By the end of the century it was becoming evident not only that international terrorism was on the increase but that across the continents fundamental differences of world-view continued unabated and were, in many cases, hardening. Divergences were particularly noticeable in the Middle and Far East and in Africa. The civilisations which prevailed in these parts of the world had their own histories and inheritance, in which Western notions of liberalism had been mostly absent. Outside the small proportion who had taken on Western ideas, their populations felt little need to discard age-old cultural forms, and often found renewed pride in these same forms in a world increasingly dominated by Western capital. At the same time as Europeans were withdrawing from the role of acting as suzerains, overseeing the development of many of the nations of Africa and Asia, an ever increasing number of individuals from these countries were moving to settle and work in Europe itself. Underpinning the new conflicts was a clash of cultures, both within the “third world” itself, and between the civilisation of Europe and the very different civilisations of all those places which Britons and other Europeans had sought out for purposes of trade, economic opportunity, development and colonisation over the previous 4-500 years. Further, as this clash of cultures developed and increasingly affected the everyday lives of people in the West, a new clash, internal to society in Britain and other Western countries, began to develop, in which the buoyant and all-conquering liberalism which had carried all before it since the 1950s began to be challenged by ideas originating within the traditions of the West itself, ideas which had been to an extent lost or overlooked under the steamroller of this 40-50 year headlong cultural change. Before examining this phenomenon, which began to grow in the early 2000s, and which was cast as counter revolutionary, regressive or, more insultingly, as simply backward, further description of the changes of the 1990s is needed to establish the context.

In its early years the Conservative Major government of the 1990s was able to benefit from a moderation of the shrill tone of Mrs Thatcher’s last years as Prime Minister, and also from the adoption of a more emollient approach towards the electorate. The war in the Gulf, spearheaded by the Americans, should have been a warning of deeper problems to come, but British support was given, with little effect on a general public which was more concerned with British domestic affairs. A general election could not be delayed beyond 1992, and, contrary to the expectations of many in the media and on the liberal-left, was won fairly easily by Mr. Major, giving the Conservatives their fourth successive election victory. There was, evidently, still insufficient trust on the part of the electorate for a Labour Party which had been linked strongly with class war ideas and postures in the 1970s and early 80s. The Conservative Party’s main concern lay with finding the best possible path for the economy in the context of a European Community which was clearly set on moving towards an integrated union and a common currency. This would prove to be the Conservative Party’s Achilles heel. Raised afresh, now with renewed vigour, were the long-held doubts over European integration and the belief, held by many, that for Britain to properly follow her own path forward she needed to recover the status of a fully sovereign state which she had held and defended against many powerful enemies for centuries. The divide which began to grow in the Conservative Party quickly reached a severity unknown since the free trade/Imperial preference arguments which had dogged the Conservatives in the early 20th Century.

This internal blood-letting on the right served only to underline the appeal of a Labour Party undertaking thoroughgoing transformation. By the early 1990s dedication to continuous modernising had led to an almost complete shedding of its straightforwardly socialist ideas. By this time the Labour Party was busy re-fashioning itself to become the political and governmental expression of the post-Cold War “spirit of the age”. Its aim now was to incorporate the successfully embedded new cultural world-view into a New Labour political programme for government. The political arena could thereby finally be colonised, wrested not only from the divided Conservatives, but from all those guilty of the parochialism and prejudices of the old Britain. The new order to be constructed would amount to what would later be described as a “new dawn”, a politics beyond ideology, one that would fit with the enlightened, open system of life that no sensible person could doubt was what the vast majority of the population wanted. This new order would overcome divisions in society and supersede the era in which class had been a decisive factor in British society. At the same time as the country would become increasingly equal, it would also become more prosperous and progressive in outlook.

This vision was intoxicating. Its success would mean the sweeping away of the Tories and their interminable quarrels over Britain’s place in Europe, their elitism, their lack of care about or comprehension of the lives of “ordinary people”. But there was little self-awareness amongst the new visionaries, little readiness to see themselves as others saw them, or to even consider that their evaluation of human nature might be wrong. Perhaps it was for this reason that, in their elation at the prospect of power, no one in the modernising movement saw that their dream of the future was hopelessly utopian, that it was but the latest expression of the dangerous seductive trick which had, from time to time in the story of Europe, brought to the fore the promise of the millennium, the hope that, with passion, a new generation could “change the world”.

Events definitely seemed to conspire against the Conservatives and in favour of Labour’s vision of a transformed Britain. From 1992 onwards a series of humiliations shook the solidity of British institutions. In October 1992 a tousle-haired Chancellor of the Exchequer appeared before cameras to announce that intense Treasury activity had failed to prevent what amounted to Britain’ s ejection from the European Monetary System (through which the British pound was to be tightly aligned with other European currencies). Though few amongst the population fully understood the financial comings and goings, it was clear that large amounts of public money had been expended to no effect, and that incompetence had been revealed at the highest level. Conservative governments had always based their reputation on reliability in money matters. That this had occurred under a Conservative government which sought to build a reputation on these skills only reinforced the sense of shock.

In the 1980s the Labour Party had not fared well in their bruising confrontation with a Tory party that had reverted to classical economic ideas and broken free from the constraints of all-encompassing state “management” of the economy which had been hailed as the answer in the post-war years. The success over a decade of Mrs. Thatcher’s new course had not been expected. While a large proportion of Conservatives MPs had opposed her tough stance, many on the Left denied that there had been any success at all (though by the late 1980s there were clearly considerably increased employment opportunities, while Britain itself had regained much of her reputation on the world stage). But now, in late 1992, all was changed, and the supposed gains of Thatcher’s economic revolution appeared at first to have been lost. It would take time for the general realisation to sink in that, in fact, the reverse was true, that Britain’s freedom of action and rising prosperity founded on entrepreneurialism had actually been enhanced by the debacle of 1992.

The Conservatives were both confused and divided following their failure with the European Monetary System. This frustrating period coincided with the trend under which old institutions as well as old certainties seemed to be crumbling before the eyes of the public across a wide field. In the new post-Cold War climate the public was clearly hungry for something new. The Labour Party had been led by John Smith, a reasonable and cautious Scottish lawyer. When he died at a young age early in 1994, the way seemed open for a bright new shining star. Just 40, engaging, attractive, frank and friendly in manner, Tony Blair was the very embodiment of Cool Britannia. In his person he seemed to represent the new youthful order which would sweep away all the stuffiness and incompetence of poorly-performing Britain, chiefly by launching a new social compact in which all sections of society would be respected and honoured, A vision was laid out which embraced vast social change. Prominent amongst the target topics were education, healthcare, equal opportunities, and an end to discrimination against long-oppressed categories of the population, But the overriding, self-consciously moral, message was the promotion of an open and welcoming internationalism. This would have replace the inward-looking, narrow Britain-centred world outlook which, according to the Labour Party, had dominated national for too long.

The early 1990s also saw what must be described as a proliferation of scandals centring on the Conservatives and on that famous layer of society still labelled as “the Establishment”. Chief amongst these were the personal problems affecting several members of the Royal family, the worst being the details of the breakdown of the marriage of the heir to the throne and Princess Diana. Their wedding in 1981 had been both widely publicised and celebrated. Now, in the mid-1990s, painful and unpleasant information was leaking out gradually, to be eagerly consumed by a public ever-keen on royal news. The inclusion of agonising television interviews with the respective parties only increased the mood of scepticism which had spread about much of what had been seen as traditional British life. The death of the Princess later in a car crash in Paris together with the events surrounding the period of mourning and the public funeral only confirmed the existence of this new more sardonic mood

Another branch of the Establishment was the social world of the Conservative Party in power, and in this period the public was entertained at regular intervals by various new scandals involving Conservative MPs, the accumulation of which was described, in a phrase which tended to stick in the mind, as “Tory sleaze”. Little wonder that the Conservatives rapidly came, for many, to seem weary and outdated. By 1994 and for the rest of the period of the Conservative Major government, Mr. Blair’s “New Labour” enjoyed levels of public support unknown to any party since the National government coalitions of the 1930s, with consistently massive opinion poll leads.

A longstanding element of British life had been the association of Christianity, the Church of England and the monarchy, all linked as supposedly stable, constant and reliable features of the social and constitutional landscape. The Conservatives derived some of their reputation with the public from their belief in and support of all these institutions. The scandals of the 1990s seemed only to confirm that the long battle to dislodge all of these components of national life from their previous position of general respect and acceptance had been well and truly won. For the new generation entering adulthood, their experience of life, which included their immersion in the now accepted child-centred world of primary and secondary education in which the individual child was king/queen and in which creativity, innovation, experimentation and personal autonomy were key features, the arguments for a free and inclusive secular society seemed very convincing. The fruits of this upbringing would be carried over to the ever-expanding and proliferating university sector. And with the historic decline in the size of the former fairly homogenous class of factory workers, it was precisely this generation and its sense of modernity that would be the target and focus of New Labour ambitions.

For an increasing proportion of the young, the ideas and tenets of Christianity, as well as of the ways of church and chapel, were no longer even a memory. The notion of a God-fearing way of life had gone, along with the belief in authority and structure in society. A process had developed since the end of the 1950s through which new generations were increasingly divorced both from the moral principles (especially of self-reliance) built up over centuries and from a proper understanding of their own cultural and national past. With the growing influence of new educational theory, under which pupils and students came more and more to see themselves as the focus of attention and rights, while at the same time losing touch with much of what would formerly have been seen as common sense, the ground was laid for the potential takeover of young minds by utopian dreams. According to these dreams, human beings were universally and innately good. Where the educators’ aim of nurturing the potential and creativity of the individual student failed and where, therefore, a good result was not obtained, the answer lay not within the individual but in home conditions, “society” and poverty. The social sciences would provide the way forward by identifying the inadequacies that were responsible for individual failure and by defining what was needed to solve the problem. In the end it would be the government that was always responsible, and the government, through continuing large injections of resources, that would be expected to solve the problem.

Here lay a fundamental flaw with the utopian vision. If things went wrong for any individual or family or group in society, it was at base the government’s (or, as the phrasing went “successive governments’”) fault. This world-outlook was born not of open minded enquiry or of trial and error; it was the result of the dogma of the new cultural world-view. No facts “on the ground” could sway the certainty that it was, at bottom, oppressive forces and governments that caused individual failure or misfortune. It was evident here that the new culture had, consciously or not, echoed the Marxist view that the proletariat were the oppressed and that the system of capitalism was, at base, always responsible for their plight.

The consequence for society was clear. Each individual and each family would now be encouraged to see “the government” as responsible for the problems of life, and urged therefore to complain, campaign and claim their “rights”. The failure of the government to sort out problems led to the conclusion that we lived in an “unjust”, or “unfair, society”. Previously, governments had been concerned with equality of opportunity, with creating conditions where all could, as far as they were able, flourish. Now it was inequality of itself, (a condition deeply rooted in human nature and in social intercourse) which became an injustice which the government needed to “rectify”.

Few seemed to notice that, rather than ushering in a new era of co-operation and concern for the underprivileged, the effect of this overall process would be the erosion and demoralisation of the individual and the autonomous family in a trajectory which seemed destined to bring forward a new form of hellish totalitarianism, in which “approved” ideas and intentions would replace free thinking and open-mindedness.

For what was certainly true, and borne out daily by the character of events, was that while the new liberal order promised “inclusion”, the end of discrimination, the end of hate and social conflict, the reality was inevitably very different. None of the sins that the individual was prey to, of pride, envy, self-centredness, of desiring what others had, of seeing oneself always as a victim, of not noticing the plank in one’s own eye, had gone away. The old evils, so well known in human conduct, of wanting one’s own way against the other, of seeking to control and impose, of self-deceit as to the nature of one’s intentions, of using professed concern for others as a cover to gain power, continued to flourish as always. What was different was the way in which negative consequences were handed over to be sorted out by planners, counsellors, social psychologists and other experts. In reality the failure to face up to human nature would give the whole modern cultural movement an air of hopeless infantilism. This was an age in which while the ideas and wisdom of children were invariably held up for all to praise, adults looked, behaved, and were increasingly treated, like children, bereft, so often, of status, character or authority.

There was a sub-text of the period 1994-7, largely overlooked in the media, which was thoroughly absorbed with Royal goings-on and new stories of Tory wickedness. This was the half-accidental recovery of the economy following Britain’s exit from the European monetary straitjacket mentioned above. From 1993 onwards the country was given fairly clear evidence of new life and energy in British commerce and trade of a kind presaged in the 1980s but not seen in such relative strength for many decades. Britain had lagged behind all her major Western competitors during Europe’s “golden” period of capitalist expansion between the late 1940s and the Oil Price Crisis. Mrs. Thatcher’s drastic measures of the early 1980s effected an economic revolution, but with further malaise from 1989-92, the fruits of her strict policies had been only partially evident. Now it was different. The Western post-war boom had largely played out by the 1990s. Economic expansion had slowed, particularly in European countries and in Japan. Against this background British business appeared to have acquired a new imagination and vitality. The gloom and “decline” surrounding British fortunes seemed for the time being to have lifted.

None of this suited the propagandists of the liberal-left. Nor did the good news of Britain’s economic turnaround make any impact on the huge popularity of the new future promised by Mr. Blair. News of expansion and better times seemed only to reinforce the desire for a more modern, younger and exciting hand on the tiller. These trends fitted in completely with a Blair-led Labour Party which, having discarded the pretentious (and failed) “revolutionary” ideas of the 1960s and 70s, were able to persuade a willing public that they were best able to lead the way on the many hopes and aspirations that had built up in the post Cold War atmosphere. Slogans abounded, proclaiming a new Britain, free of all the old prejudice and stuffiness, a Britain where “things” would always be “getting better”, where the privileged and affluent would “reach out” to the not-so-privileged, where rising numbers of immigrants would be integrated happily with the existing populations of the four home nations, and where prosperity would be assured by co-operation and collaboration. Would it work out like this? And, if so, would it last?

It was not only the overwhelming presence of Mrs. Thatcher that dominated the 1980s. From the day she entered Downing Street, the public increasingly became aware of Thatcherism as an idea, a view of the world which spread rapidly beyond the political arena to the regions and nations of Britain. From the start, a huge proportion of the population despised everything she represented, but she sailed on nevertheless, benefitting from the opposition split between Labour, Liberal and, from 1981, Social Democratic Parties. Spurning the centrism and circumspection of her post-1950 predecessors, she set about the immediate transformation of the British political landscape. Britain’s ageing and often uncompetitive industries were to be shocked into the harsh realities of the law and of the marketplace. It was to be this market power and a willingness to put restrictions on the supply of money, that were to be the chief weapons in bringing about a sea change in the role of the Trade Unions, and especially of Trade Union leaders, in Britain’s economic life.

While Mrs. Thatcher determinedly applied her strict prescription for the national economy, vilification mounted in tandem with the speedy and relentless rise in the unemployment rate which inevitably followed. It took courage to stick to her transformative approach, which sought to bring new life to a business climate which had too often become listless, fearful and unable to compete on the world stage. In reverting to what were unfashionable classical economic ideas, where successful enterprise was rewarded and where continuous loss-making would lead inexorably to shut-down and closure, she had little support from economists and by no means full backing from within the leadership of her own party. The harshest test of Mrs. Thatcher’s stamina and endurance arose from the repeated news of large-scale redundancy that fell heavily on local communities which had been built on particular industries over long periods of time. Mrs. Thatcher’s confrontation with the way of doing things that had become established between the 1950s and the 1970s came to a head with the miners’ strike of 1984/5. The miners’ union had won twice in clashes with a Conservative government, in 1972 and 1973/4, on the latter occasion with the added bonus of replacing the mildly conservative Heath government with a familiar and more congenial Labour one led again by Harold Wilson. The scenario of 1984 was quite different. Now it was Mrs. Thatcher and the government which had stockpiled in readiness, which had planned ahead, and which would not compromise.

The recovery of the economy from 1982/3 was a signal event in Britain’s post-war history. At the same time, there were signs of movement on the world stage that suggested movement in what was widely felt to be the stalemate of the Cold War. From the outset, the new United States president, Ronald Reagan, displayed a confidence and panache that had been missing during America’s agony of disentanglement from Vietnam over the previous decade. In Britain Mrs Thatcher was called upon to fight openly for the principles of sovereignty and the rule of law following the invasion of the Falkland Islands in 1982. Given the willingness of Reagan’s US to engage in a relentless programme of arms expenditure, the circumstances developed in which this key alliance of Western leaders was able to exert influence on a financially pressed, and newly flexible, Soviet leadership. The programme of radical reform that ensued was to mushroom rapidly into a large-scale dismantling of the entire Soviet edifice over the period 1986 to 1990. This was an outcome which was astonishing in itself, and one which had not been predicted by those who had accustomed themselves to the prospect of a semi-permanent division of the world between capitalism and communism. The need for reform and renewal which was felt widely in the Soviet world became linked to an appreciation felt by many in the Iron Curtain countries for the openness and innovation evident in the daily life of the West. The key fact about the Soviet collapse was that, following the dismantling of the Soviet system in 1990/91, there were few who sought to replace the system with some form of improved communism. All of the states involved embarked fairly rapidly on reforms which opened the the way to private enterprise. Not least in her various journeys to what had become the Soviet Empire in the 1980s, in which she herself represented this different message and spirit to the Russian public, Mrs. Thatcher had played a significant and historic role.

While it is granted that dramatic changes took place on the world scene in this period, in what way had the nature of everyday life in Britain and the US been changed? To answer, it would not be unfair to point out that in the period 1979-1990, while Mrs Thatcher provided the spark for economic revitalisation, and while the spirit of enterprise and risk was rediscovered, her efforts did little at all to reverse or even halt the advance of the cultural revolution that had been so successful since the mid- to late-1950s.

The liberal-left leaning transformation in the way of life continued as before, with the hatred felt widely towards Mrs. Thatcher serving, if anything, to embed the new guidelines for the national culture, especially amongst the many young people who viewed the increasingly imperious prime minister as being “out of touch” with the times. This had major social consequences. By the beginning of the 1990’s, a situation had developed, helped enormously by the all-pervasive modernising trends in education and child-rearing, in which much of the youth of the country had either forgotten (or never ingested) what had by now become the former dominant culture. The change had involved not just the gradual erosion of the Christian underpinning of social life. It also affected the prevailing and shared sense of everyday irony and humour, the beliefs regarding individual obligation and responsibility both to family and community, and the willing participation in the longstanding hierarchies of social life. All of these had contributed massively to the former sense of belonging.

The victory in the Cold War, unexpected at the end as it was, had been the product of a long-term strategy, in which belief in the Soviet system as a workable and sustainable system for the organisation of society had been largely discredited in Central and Eastern Europe, and in Russia itself. Its quick collapse was a testament to the shakiness of its foundations, a fact which had been missed by many in the Western commentariat over several decades. But, as it turned out, the effort, risk and long-term planning on the part of the West which had made possible the defeat of an entire social system, one which had spread over half of Europe, and which had presented a living threat to all aspects of Western life, meant little in the short months in which the old order was dissolved. There was, now, no dramatic storming of the Winter Palace as in 1917, only the opening of a hole in the city-wide wall which allowed people to flow freely through and across. In the West, apart from the rather academic musings from one historian who pronounced on “the end of history”, this shattering of the Cold War produced both surprise and a vague anticipation of an ideology-free era where a sense of there being only “one world” would replace the confrontation of opposing systems of life. In Britain itself, it rapidly became clear that the new cultural world-view had proved itself capable of coping easily both with the overthrow of Communism as a world system and also with Mrs. Thatcher’s radical attempt to transform Britain’s long-suffering post-war economy and cure its social malaise. Not only did it cope: it continued to thrive. How could this be?

For many, the new culture appeared to have little to do with the major world events. Rather, it appeared to represent simply an extension of personal freedoms, with fairness for all, coupled with a drawing of the curtains across the stuffiness of old England. And it was true that, for the majority of people, the new social order, the new guidelines for how to think and act, how to detect good from bad, were not directed specifically against capitalism, or against socialism. The new world-view was, however, most definitely at odds with Mrs. Thatcher, and all that she represented. Her departure from office late in 1990 coincided with the closing down of the Soviet Union and seemed to mark the turning of a page in Britain’s national life. Of greater significance historically (given the nature of the struggles over identity and the nation-state which were to come) was the fact that her resignation was directly linked to her objection to and rising irritation with the growing power and ambitions for control of the (then) European Community.

The new cultural order welcomed the overturning of the totalitarian Soviet regimes in Europe, and it also welcomed the simultaneous (and connected) movement in South Africa towards majority black rule. Now settled and “embedded” in Western society, it became evident that this new world-view and code of conduct were intended as replacements in toto for the way of life and attitudes and assumptions inherited from parents and grandparents. The new social outlook can best be described as the latest, and, arguably, most ambitious expression of liberal Utopianism, one which, sadly but characteristically, would find no place for doubt, questioning, or the kind of common-sense reflection still common amongst the mass of people. The belief in human rights, non-discrimination, and the equality of all races and peoples (“one race, the human race”) were cardinal elements in this new order, but so too was the guilt (on the part specifically of white British and American people), a guilt which would only increase with the constant and easy association of the colonial era with criminal brutality, theft and exploitation.

Individual emotion played a big part in the new, a world in which self-expression, creativity, passionate feelings, and “finding your true self” predominated. These feelings on the part of the individual extended, through the education handed down, to an appreciation of the horrors of the world of our ancestors, where inequality, racism and sexism, mass poverty and straightforward greed abounded. Worse still was the message that many of the ideas underpinning these historic realities persisted today, either expressed openly or cloaked behind politeness and “good manners”. The active response to all of this seemed a curious one (though, on reflection, it was in line with the theme of Utopianism). As part of the contemporaneous rise in academia of the “social sciences”, there grew an all-pervasive tendency to place great faith in the essentially scientific basis of the new order of ideas. The unpleasant and inhumane elements of social life which lay in our past but which had continued in some form in the present, were open to rectification through the advance of science, which would come to be our guiding light in the secular society now being forged. This belief placed in a world of objective science (something not notably shared by the many millenarian movements of previous eras) added a dangerous element to the newly-supreme utopian world-view. A social climate was created where, for example, the tendency for individuals to stray from the path of right thinking, or to fall into the world of crime, would perforce become a subject for scientific examination and rectification. The consequent discovery of scientific “truths” would then translate into doctrines about the “right” way to raise and treat children and about the effects of growing up in deprived circumstances. “Evidence-based research” would be adduced to “prove”, for example, that unequal societies were more unhappy, conflict-ridden and liable to civil discord.

This aspect of the new culture owed much to Marx’s belief that his work involved uncovering the scientific truth of human conflict and social change. The echoes of Marx’s categorical pronouncements and resolute certainty are to be found sprinkled liberally across the different aspects of the new culture. Whether it be the nature of family life, the question of discriminatory behaviour, of educational practice, or a hundred other social issues, the new way or view was always to be presented as an advance based on expert analysis, and therefore, in its essentials, unchallengeable. Debate then became relegated to the details alone, and we find the situation frequently arising where all the people on a panel discussing a current social or political topic hold fundamentally the same world-view. What is most telling about these kind of discussions is the way that no-one amongst those holding the majority or dominant outlook seems to notice the absence of any fundamentally contrary view. It is not surprising then, when young people, encouraged by their education into seeing these situations as normal, become horrified when a genuinely different opinion is expressed, and we find the lurch to the practice of shouting-down, to “no-platforming” and to the creation of “safe spaces”.

Lurking in the undergrowth of the new culture is Marx’s concept of false consciousness. If people insist on holding views or taking actions which have been shown, according to the appropriate scientific opinion, to be incorrect, then there must be something wrong with them. If they think the wrong way then, at best, they must have been misled. Better education generally and re-education (for those of advancing years) are required. In extreme situations , the verdict will be that the individuals or groups concerned are simply not “keeping up”, are easily hoodwinked, or are basically ignorant or wilful. A case in point was the way in which the British working-class (formerly praised as “the salt of the earth” when they overwhelmingly cast their votes for the Labour Party) were traduced when many amongst them started embracing what the new culture defined as unacceptable attitudes. The false consciousness explanation was, of course, to find its full flourishing a generation after Mrs. Thatcher, in the period before and after the landmark European referendum of 2016. The long-term danger of this drift into the strange world of liberal-left totalitarianism was then to be exposed for all to see.

The yawning gap left when the Christian framework for national life was dismantled needed to be filled. The fact that in the course of everyday life, the new culture was so reliant on superficiality, on instant reactions and on celebrity contributed to its underlying problem. It was, essentially, brittle. Being fundamentally less sure of its position meant that it soon became more intolerant and authoritarian than Christianity had been in recent times in Britain. The rejection of the Christian concepts of the impossibility of human perfection, of sin, of judgment, and of the belief that something existed beyond the secular activity of human beings brought about a predicament of massive proportions. Without the need to lead a “god-fearing” life (given there was now nothing to “fear”), the only feasible way forward lay in re-establishing coherence and integrity through a new orthodoxy, a new set of “correct” ideas. Genuine freedom of thought and a real diversity of opinion, as replacements for the old social forms and manners, would be nothing but a pipe-dream.

The reasons why Mrs Thatcher’s radical policies had failed to undermine or slow the onward march of this new culture are perhaps linked with the way both her policies and style tended to concentrate attention much more on the individual than on the links which bind people together in families, neighbourhoods and through spontaneous shared interests. Her attempt to focus attention on the importance of individuals and families taking responsibility for their actions was, it is true, unfairly caricatured by the twisting of her comment that “there is no such thing as society”. But it was nevertheless evident that that the long-standing cultural virtues of restraint, quietness, modesty and above all the readiness to listen, to understand and to debate, continued to wither away through the 1980s. And while Mrs. Thatcher was right to point repeatedly to the need for the individual and the family to take responsibility for their lives, and not to look to others to blame, many of the central questions concerning the community and nation as a whole, matters which in turn affected the morale and outlook of the individual and family, were neglected.

By 1990/91 it was becoming clear that a new era was beginning on the international stage. The great divide between the capitalist world and all those societies “behind the Iron Curtain” was, apparently, over. Given the mixture of surprise and shock felt by many, it took time to digest and to get used to life post-Cold War. The task for the new social order in countries such as Britain and the US was to adapt to geopolitical change in ways that would preserve and foster the key features of their ongoing cultural revolution. The end of the Cold War seemed to represent a victory for liberalism and this assessment served only to feed the Utopianism that already underpinned the now-dominant world view. The way was open for a new era in which all the divisions of the postwar period could be set aside in favour of an altogether more co-operative world where emphasis could be placed on long-standing problems of world poverty and deprivation. In Britain and the US, the reality was that the way was clear for a continuance of the cultural revolution. With radical division over economic systems (apparently) in the past, focus could now be placed on identifying and battling discrimination, on promoting individual dignity, self-expression and human and “group” rights. Modernisation in religion had meant the promotion of love and good and the phasing out of evil and judgement. With the cultural transformation, rights and feelings became the watchwords at the expense of duties and obligations.

The end of East-West confrontation would make possible the world of the creative self-organising personality who lived according to the ideal of the equality of all people and of the freedom of the individual to move “without borders”. Both the old adherence to the nation-state and to patriotic feeling could be safely wheeled off the stage, to join the now largely discarded Christian religion. All had played out their role. Even the intractable ideological conflict in South Africa, where a Calvinist-dominated Afrikaner nationalism had stubbornly resisted the liberalising trends in Western policy for 40 years, seemed now to be resolving itself with the the initiating of a new ‘rainbow” social order in which the liberal individual would be given free rein.

In the world of British politics, the radical reforms taking place within the Labour Party in the second part of the 80s, coupled with the emergence of new younger political figures, seemed in the early 1990s to herald a period in which, for the first time, the political order could itself be at one with the new culture and the new code of behaviour and belief. But with John Major taking the helm of a Conservative Party which was still well installed in government, would this new era in British political life come to pass?

By 1970 the essentials had been laid for the West’s victory over Soviet Communism. This was not, however, the perception held by the majority of people in the West at the time. The 70s opened with strikes on the increase in Britain, with what seemed like endless government/trades union talks in Downing Street, the biggest economic crisis since the war looming, rising agitation against the Vietnam War in the United States, and student/youth rebellion evident right across the West. Given this context it is not surprising that confidence regarding the outcome of the Cold War seemed, if anything, to be at a low ebb.

Amidst the turbulence generated by the overturning of many of the elements of traditional Western culture, there was a re-discovery and revival of Marxist ideas in Western Europe and the United States. But at the same time (and little noticed, given the rising socialist enthusiasm among students in the West), these same ideas were on the wane in the Soviet satellite states of Central and Eastern Europe. In 1968 Dubcek’s experiment with a “freer” form of socialism in Czechoslovakia had been quickly stifled by a combination of Russian diktat and Warsaw Pact tanks. This had provided a clear signal for all who wished to see: the doctrine of “limited sovereignty” for the countries of the Warsaw Pact spelt out clearly that what people on the ground actually wanted was of little consequence in the grand strategy for world revolution which was constantly being updated and re-programmed In Moscow. On the one hand there was, in fact, very little likelihood that now-prosperous Western Europe would turn voluntarily towards the Soviet system. On the other hand it was telling that the Soviets did not seem to recognise the absurdity of a strategy in which the bright promise of the future Communist society was to be imposed by the relentless use of force and the snuffing-out of dissent. Where the truth was recognised by activists in Western Europe and the United States, the failures of the Soviet system were put down to what was viewed as “Stalinist degeneration”, and not to Marxist theory itself.

In the West itself, particularly in Britain and the U.S., there seemed little of substance to celebrate. Defensiveness and a wariness about world developments seemed to be the order of the day. In the U.S. the bloody wars in Indo-China seemed gradually to be moving towards an end, but with nothing like the promised victory over Communism in sight. The traditional character of Western society, with its hierarchies and its God-fearing base (what would now be called social conservatism) was, after a short culture war (approximately 1956-1970), already largely in ruins. “Youth” in the form of students and “activists” had taken over the headlines and were delightedly attempting to turn the universities upside down in the name of pretend-revolutionary ardour. Elsewhere workers, skilfully organised in Trade Unions, were relentlessly using the strike weapon to try to improve their standard of living, the only problem being that the condition of the economy, outmanoeuvred in competition by Continental powers and by Japan, was deteriorating. Nevertheless most strikes were being won by the Unions, in the face of a flattened and dispirited middle class. By the early 1970s it had become difficult to imagine that this was the class which had shown such courage and endeavour in the contribution it had made in the building of modern economies across the world. Now, in Britain itself, it seemed baffled, bemused and immobilised. In the post-war atmosphere, the liberal instinct and the guilt reflex had become so deeply embedded that the members of this world-famous social class seemed to have lost the ability to defend either themselves or the guidelines for life in which they had always believed.

What was actually going on, and why? Yes, there were deep problems developing, not only in Britain but in the world economy, which would culminate in the OPEC oil price rises of 1973 and in the United States abandonment of the post-war Brettonwoods currency arrangements. There was also the important fact that while the Soviet system seemed to have become sclerotic in Europe, revolutionary Left ideas were spreading rapidly in Latin America, Africa, and, of course, in South-East Asia, where all of Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos were to fall to armed Communist takeovers in the space of a few years in the mid-1970s. The struggle for Communism had now very definitely moved its focus away from its original home territory in Europe towards the hope and plans for “world revolution”. During the next decade and a half many of the “revolutionary” youth of the West would make their pilgrimage to places such as Nicaragua in Latin America, where experiments in a more modern Communism were reputed to be occurring.

In countries such as Britain and the United States the most substantial reason for the climate of pessimism and defensiveness lay deeper, in the disruption to collective life wrought by the campaign (made inevitable by Cold War strategy) against all the elements which had previously provided the glue for social life in the various national cultures of the West. It was not simply a question of the organic change to which all cultures were subject. What had happened in a few short years resembled more the shock to the social order experienced at the time of the religious Reformation of the mid-1500s. In the late 1950s and 60s the opportunities had been taken by the cultural warriors who had seen a vacuum emerging in the mid-1950s, and the old ways had been swept away, including the old deference to form and all the elements of the old Christian underpinning.

What was achieved was truly remarkable. Substituted for the now-defunct reference points of cultural life was the astonishing belief that the individual could make up their ethical framework as they went along, that they needed no roots, no rules, no given responsibilities, no obligations or ties that they did not themselves construct and want, no cultural history and certainly no national belonging, with its patriotic associations and its threats to the pacifist world-view. Instead there were to be only rights, and the requirements that the State was obliged to fulfil. And there was also to be shame and guilt for an imagined past, of which the new cultural pioneers actually knew little, but which existed as a pall over British (and European and American) collective memory, a stain which apology and self-punishment could never fully remove.

In this context there is little surprise that British society in the 1970s seemed nonplussed, torn and demoralised. By 1973 economic crisis of a kind not known through the 25 years of post-war expansion affected much of the West, in some countries more than others. While the rate of inflation rose unprecedentedly, Britain appeared weak and in decline. Books were written by clever observers such as Ralf Dahrendorf, Andrew Gamble, Louis Heren in which the phenomenon of the “British disease” was dissected and analysed and the entirety of British culture subjected to different forms of collective psychoanalysis. Most British people recognised that something was radically wrong, and while there were stirrings in some quarters insisting that action of some kind be taken, there was little in-depth understanding of the way in which the Cold War tactics of prosperity and decolonisation had turned out to have side-effects which affected the entire civilisation of the country.

The new culture focussed on:

1) the equality of all people, a notion which seemed always to be linked to a preoccupation with the historic oppression and disadvantage suffered by many identifiable groups in society. These in turn led to a shared requirement (in which all participated) to “make-up”, to recompense, and to put a stop to the age-old discrimination against the groups which, when including women, added up to a significant proportion of the population. Indeed the only group left, it turned out, which had not suffered historically was that increasingly infamous category: that of the heterosexual, non-disabled young to middle-aged white man.

2) the elimination of patriotism, which went hand in hand with a complete overturning in understanding of the past. Western, particularly British, people were no longer to be told of heroism and achievement in the national story. Instead positive perspectives on the past were to be described as “myths”, or simply undermined (e.g. “The myth of the Blitz”, the “real truth” about Winston Churchill, Cecil Rhodes, Baden-Powell, etc.) The young were encouraged to be ashamed of a national past which was predominantly a tale of superiority, spoliation, simple theft of resources and, in different ways (including slavery), suppression of other peoples. The aim here was to establish in growing minds a) that the people of Britain had no clear origins, roots, or culture to be proud of and b) that the right way forward was to adopt the internationalist principle that only one thing really mattered: everyone who chose to live in Britain shared, by definition, a common humanity and should be treated the same without any distinction based on background, culture or history. England, or The English, were themselves to be seen as unreal and dubious concepts, based as they were on myths about genetics and muddle over history. Apart from being labels for football or cricket teams, the terms were intended gradually to cease to have any real meaning for everyday life. To concentrate on them was to commit a sin against the new culture insofar as one was excluding all the increasing numbers of people around one who did not see themselves as being English. (Scottish, Welsh, and Irish people, having a history of oppression, fell into a quite different category)

3) the establishing of a secular liberal outlook as the unifying factor in society, while allowing for the private observation of religious faith, as long as this did not conflict with the anti-discrimination goals of the secular order. “Faith-groups” themselves were to have equality of status, with no recognition of any distinctive religious tradition rooted in the English, Scottish, Welsh and Irish past.

What provided the new secular culture with its essential “glue”, what gave it coherence, from the late 1950s was the willingness of huge swathes of the British population to fall in with this basically utopian world-view, and simply to ignore reasoned objections. While, for example, equality before God and equality in a court of law can be seen as feasible propositions, the establishment of equality in everyday life can be argued as representing an impossible dream, a state of affairs which has never existed, nor could ever exist in human society. Over the decades this point of view has been little considered. It has, rather, been simply discarded. Also ignored has been the point that while equality has never existed, many millions of people have been killed when groups and nations have sought unsuccessfully to impose it. Many factors made for this dive into utopianism, but what stands out is the need, felt by those who have sought to build an entirely secular order, for a clear system of ideas which would replace the Christian world-view and its attendant beliefs.

In 1970 there took place the Stop the ’70 Tour agitation, (which included putting playing fields out of action) intended to prevent sporting contacts with South Africa and to highlight the social system of apartheid which provided for official race classification and which specified that the different races should live in different “group” areas. While this system had been been promulgated into law in the years following the victory of the (primarily Afrikaans-speaking) National Party in the elections of 1948, it was true to say that most cities and towns in the country had grown over previous centuries on the principle that the cultures of the peoples who inhabited South Africa were very different from each other and that the races for the most part lived separate lives. This was so despite the fact that people of all backgrounds usually met up with each other on a daily basis in the workplace and in the street. This principle embraced also the belief that the South Africa of modern times, while incorporating the large-scale use of African labour, was a concept and design of the white racial group (English and Afrikaans-speaking) and that the electoral franchise would be strictly limited. While there had been longstanding arguments as to where this limit should be set, with old concepts of educational and other qualifications coming into play, few people of European origin doubted that the white peoples of the South Africa, despite being a significant minority in terms of numbers, represented the most advanced (at least in the technical sense) of the various cultures and should be the clearly predominant force in determining the central government of the country.

Why all of this was important was that the issues raised by the situation in South Africa connected closely with the ideas at the heart of the cultural transformation in Britain and the West at the time. The developing situation in South Africa was to be a running sore in European life throughout the 1970s and early 80s and became a symbol for Western perspectives on the world situation of the time. The need for economic and electoral equality for all races and peoples appeared so obvious to the young people of the West that any kind of disagreement with the now dominant outlook seemed incomprehensible. The resistance, over a considerable period, to the new cultural imperative of the equality of all was seen and portrayed as no more than a clinging to outdated and semi-fascist notions of race superiority. This applied both to the majority of Europeans in South Africa and to the significant numbers, particularly of the older generation in Britain itself, who were unwilling to “move with the times” and accustom themselves to the new and triumphant liberal world-view.

It was easy for those growing up in Britain, who had no direct knowledge of the complex historical web of quite different cultures in South Africa to see the stance taken by what were millions of people of European background living in that country, many of whom had been there for centuries, as being simply malign in the extreme. What worsened the situation and reinforced the utopianism at the heart of the newly hegemonic culture of the West was the picture, built and projected by teachers and activists, of a society based on interracial harmony free of the master-servant attitudes brought to Africa by the European colonists. This was to be the future which would be constructed once the backward and vicious attitudes of the white people of Africa had been swept away. In this new order inequality would begin to fall away as the indigenous people, less afflicted by hierarchic and capitalistic attitudes to life,, gradually exerted their sway over the country. To young minds in Britain, robbed by now of admiration for their own cultural inheritance and, by definition, of their morale, all of this proved to be meat and drink and served only to reinforce and amplify the shame they felt over their own country and its past.

The message from South Africa was clear. By the late 1980s, under extreme international pressure, the mood in the country had changed sufficiently to allow for the release from his 27-year imprisonment in 1990 of the African nationalist leader Nelson Mandela. In his person he seemed to embody all the ideas that the youth of Britain had ingested over the previous three decades. Mandela’s generous-spirited and gentle personality seemed to offer a blueprint not only for South Africa, but for the over-sophisticated societies of the West. Rightness and happiness belonged with those countries which could work on the principle of the equality of all in all areas of life. This would, quite properly, require rigorous anti-discrimination policies to deal with those who failed to comply, for those who had failed to keep up with the change in the country’s belief-system, for those who had been, for whatever reason, “left-behind”. With the spread of progressive ideas, the psychological adherence to the nation-state would gradually fall away in importance in the minds of the young, thus opening the way to a world-view based on the loosening of borders between countries and the freer flow of peoples of all continents. With the realisation of these ideas and the wholesale transformation of outlook which would occur, some correction would at least be achieved for the (unforgivable) cruelty and inhumanity of European colonisation over the previous five hundred years. South Africa and its malign social order of separation and hierarchy would therefore have served as a launch pad for the thoroughly transformative ideas which would become the inheritance for the new generations of Western youth.

It was into this social atmosphere that Margaret Thatcher was to sweep to power in 1979. Her preoccupations were completely out of kilter with those of the new cultural revolution. The Conservative Party that she led had, over the previous thirty years, come to see its role as that of managing the economy and the welfare state, and, increasingly, of dismantling British influence abroad and managing Britain’s decline. The clearest feature of the Thatcher phenomenon of the 1980s was that she was determined to put a stop to what she saw as the defeatism and miserabilism afflicting the country. What was to be the outcome of the collision of political and social forces (which included both rebellious youth and the buoyant Trade Union movement) that was bound to come to a head with the 1979 victory obtained at the polls by Mrs Thatcher?

Between the mid-1950s and 1970 a revolution took place in the character of everyday life, at least as far-reaching as the social change which occurred between 1910 and the 1920s. In large part the latter had been a response to the trials, suffering and social levelling of what was then called the “Great War”. But in the late ’50s and ’60s, despite the conflict in Vietnam, the changes which occurred were not the direct consequence of war on an equally catastrophic scale. No, on this occasion the social transformation had a more deliberate, planned flavour.

In 1919/20 the hope, both in the United States and in Britain, had been for a “return to normalcy” (to use the phrase reputedly invented by Warren Harding in his campaign to win the presidency). What this meant was a return to the tried and trusted free enterprise system. During World War 2, however, the idea of planning came to the fore as the way to build up the country post-war and it was undoubtedly true that in the Britain of 1945 the pre-eminent emphasis on the capitalist entrepreneur and on the individual as such had lost favour. By contrast, the State, and the planners associated with it, occupied centre-stage, as did the idea of “constructing” a new, fairer social order, where all would be looked after. And given the unemployment and living conditions of the inter-war years, few demurred at the prospect of the State taking more responsibility for matters such as the growth of prosperity, the provision of nationally-organised healthcare, the expansion of education for all, and the overhaul of family housing. The feeling amongst individuals and families of being better off, of having more opportunities in life, together with the increasingly liberal social atmosphere which accompanied it, grew directly out of the relative success of Britain’s post-war planning.

These developments were also in line with the capitalist world’s Cold War combat strategy to deal with the attraction of Communism as an alternative world system. The trend of spreading prosperity and liberalism was shared across the Western world as well as in the colonies, where steps were being initiated to bring greater and greater self-determination. In these areas, many of which had come to be regarded as “trust territories” or “protectorates”, rather than as having simply a colonial status, the relationship between Europeans and the indigenous people was being steadily transformed.

By 1970

1) the aim of securing prosperity, of achieving a “better life for all”, for the peoples of what was now termed the West (as well as of Japan) had been massively successful. Britain’s economy had improved significantly less than the others, due, in part, to a determination and sense of purpose born of defeat in war in countries such as France, Germany and Italy. Nevertheless, by the late 1950s, the facts of Britain’s stuttering post-war recovery did not prevent Harold Macmillan’s electioneering cry of “You’ve never had it so good” from striking a chord with the general populace.

2) Cold War strategy was working, at least in Europe. By 1970 it was abundantly clear that standards of living in the East bore little comparison with those in the West, whatever the hopes had been on the part of Mr. Krushchev of “catching up” and surpassing the United States. Following the move out of the Indian sub-continent in 1947/8, Britain had continued to decolonise throughout the 50s and 60s (in line with the self-determination provision of the 1941 US-UK Atlantic Charter). She was also contributing significantly to the military defence of Western Europe against the Soviet Union. In the United States the Civil Rights movement was growing and thriving. Opposition to the advance in the status of black people in the United States received bad publicity worldwide. When the Federal government was able successfully to outflank Arkansas governor Orval Faubus when he opposed de-segregation measures in his state, this seemed to point to a US population at large that was willing to take seriously the idea and practice of racial equality and the need for the black people of the US to have greater opportunities in society. In a related development, South Africa’s policy of separating the races/cultures and of restricting opportunities for black people in white society was condemned by all Western nations. In terms of overall strategy these policies and beliefs not only represented a more progressive and liberal outlook, but also signalled to people worldwide that the West was offering a way forward which involved openness and democratic elections. A future in which there would be freedom and self-determination was possible within the world free enterprise system. This, it was hoped, would be decisive in the struggle to limit the advance of Communism, particularly in the Afro-Asian and Latin American world.

3) While the West did appear to be winning in those aspects of life which concerned the freedom of the individual in the conduct of his/her everyday life, the leading Western nations in 1970 did nevertheless seem to be on the defensive. Communist strategy had moved its centre of gravity heavily in favour of the materially poorer world and away from Europe. Here the message of Western liberalism could be portrayed as one which favoured the rich, and Europeans in particular, while the indigenous masses remained exploited and oppressed. Even if formally independent local peoples remained subject, it was asserted, to neo-colonialism. In its stead the promise of societal freedom and the plan for the collective building of a new society made for a powerful argument, especially when supplemented by the widespread intimidatory exhortation which was carried out by many of the activists in the “liberation struggle”. In the 1960s, parts of Latin America were affected by these transformative movements, including in Cuba, where a Cold War crisis of worldwide significance was provoked. At the same time Southern Africa, including the longstanding Portuguese colonies, became a new focus for fundamental political change. The major centre of the Communist struggle for revolutionary change, however, was undoubtedly South-East Asia and in particular, Indo-China and Indonesia. In the former, the United States found itself becoming embroiled more and more in a shooting war to stave off the overthrow of nascent capitalist states by dedicated and disciplined Communist revolutionaries, a war which they, arguably, would be unable to win.

4) While Western society was, therefore, materially better off than it had ever been, with freedoms and spending-power beyond the dreams of former generations, at a deeper level a more general demoralisation had set in. The fulfilment of Cold War imperatives, especially where these involved both a process of liberalisation and equalising and, at the same time, the overturning of existing patterns of thought and behaviour, had led to a new weakness and uncertainty at all levels of society. As Britain moved rapidly to its new position as a post-imperial power, her crisis of identity and sense of collective identity were famous abroad. The phrase British Empire, used frequently and normally with a sense of pride during the previous century, was now dropped from polite conversation, and became redundant in a few short years.

Those particularly affected by a growing demoralisation were the middle classes, who had for two centuries led in the construction, both at home and abroad, of the multifold features, political, constitutional and social, of what we now take for granted as the modern world. The working classes, who were experiencing a long-overdue improvement in living standards, seemed at first less affected, but over the long run they were to be the chief losers, not so much materially, but rather in the area of collective self-consciousness and in their sense of satisfaction and well-being. In the decade and a half since 1955 the imperative for British society seemed to be the universalising of an ever-increasing liberal world-view. This brought an undermining of authority at work, at home and in society at large. with the familiar structures of everyday life being set aside to allow for greater informality and the new social free-for-all.

At the heart of this process was the new secularism, which sought to do away with the idea, long-held by many, that Britain was a Christian country. Their aim was to supplant the Christian belief that people were beholden to something greater than themselves, something to which all owed allegiance, something by which people would be judged. Now it was the requirements, aspirations and creativity of the individual who was to be all, free from fear of God, free to construct his or her own life opinions, ethics and universe, beholden to no one, and free from judgment. In place of the Christian notion of sin, the individual was to be free to construct his or her own sets of rights and demands and to complain when these were not fulfilled.

This was the new world of the liberal-left from which few would be able to escape and which few could ignore. Here was the framework for the steady whittling away, and mocking, of the Judaeo-Christian inheritance which had formerly underpinned all elements of social life. These latter were the underlying ideas which had provided the glue for all of the achievements of European peoples, and which had been so important to the wider world as a whole since Europe’s late Middle Ages. Yet now those who considered themselves Conservatives increasingly gave the impression that they were somewhat ashamed of these achievements, ashamed of everything that was traditionally English or British. At best the self-consciousness of the national culture was expressed in ironic terms, as if the dismantling which had taken place through the Cold War had damaged something vital in the sense of collective self.

By the late 1960s the United States seemed to be sinking into a Vietnamese bog. Britain, despite the very exciting “swinging sixties”, with its all-pervasive display of popular musical talent, could nevertheless reasonably be described as a place which “had lost an Empire and not found a role”. Students (rapidly increasing in number and volubility) had picked up on the weakness and loss of confidence of those in authority, both in the universities and in society at large. By the late 1960s, they were in semi-permanent revolt against their elders. This was true not only in the United States and Britain, but in France, Germany, Italy and other Western societies. British workers, organised in ever-growing numbers in Trades Unions, were buoyant, seeing the opportunity for the far-reaching gains in wages and status which had so long been denied them. Such was the loss of confidence suffered by the middle classes that not only were they unable to stem the tide of agitation but they found themselves largely ignored when some of them tried to warn of the dangers of a wholesale undermining of Britain’s traditionally stable network of beliefs. As the 1970s progressed, the consequences not just for general well-being but also for the prospects for employment in an increasingly competitive world market were to become increasingly evident.

What then were the prospects for the Cold War in 1970? On the question of the nuclear threat there was a process of detente. But the worldwide struggle for, as Marx would have put it, the future of mankind, was very much a live issue in many countries. There were undoubtedly signs of demoralisation and self-doubt in the West despite the massive improvement in living standards. Would the Soviet Union and China, who were in the forefront of synchronising the world revolution, be able to take advantage of this? With the humiliation of the United States during the period in which the Vietnamese Communists took complete control (1972-1975), some thought it possible. The incessant practice of self-torture in the West appeared to be doing the work of the Communists for them. Would the collapse of confidence in its historic role mean that the West would now meekly hand the baton to the younger generation of the Left, in the hope that they really would build the classless, egalitarian, better society that they supposedly believed in?

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?

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?

Prosperity, its rapid development, the technological innovation necessarily involved, the massive organisational structures required for its accomplishment, and, above all, the physical security and order which were needed across the entire world of capitalist trade and industry: these were the prominent and obvious signs, the keys to understanding and living in the post-war world of the West. In Cold War terms, this was an era of opportunity, unmatched in previous eras, to be contrasted with the grey, drab, unfree life endured by those who had been sucked into the system of Soviet Communism, particularly in Central and Eastern Europe.

But for the free world, as it was then called, to be more than a slogan, for it to become the bulwark against Communism that was desired, the movement towards self-rule in the lands beyond Europe (already begun with the independence of the Indian sub-continent in 1947) was not enough. A fundamental change in attitude was required on the part of the peoples of Britain and Western Europe – and the United States, despite the fact that they did not think of themselves as an “imperialist” power. This change in attitude would focus on the way in which the peoples of Asia, Africa and other parts of the world controlled by European powers, were viewed.

The hierarchical outlook held by Europeans had built up over centuries and was based on what by the 19th Century was a self-conscious sense of superiority, not only in the practical matters of economic life and technology, but also in the area of individual freedom and political system. This outlook had been re-emphasised during the peacemaking at Versailles in 1919, when the countries which had formerly been part of the now defeated German and Ottoman Empires were placed in three separate categories to indicate the degree to which each country was deemed capable of taking on self-rule in a modern setting, and also to forecast in general terms the time period which would be needed for this point to be reached. The cultural attitudes regarding different peoples and civilisations around the world which prevailed generally in the Britain of 1945 had been shaped by the fact that for many generations, extending over a period longer than that covered by family memories, Britain had been a base from which people had set out either to settle in what became European-dominated countries such as America, Australia and New Zealand, or to take up positions in places where the indigenous people were in the vast majority, but where the British were the controlling power.

Hierarchy as an inherent part of daily life, as an unconsidered assumption, was at the heart of cultural life in 1945, both in the West and in other civilisations. There are grounds for considering that some form of inequality in the practice of daily life has always been fundamental to social intercourse. What is at issue here is much more than what would today be seen as the unpleasantness involved in doffing caps, touching forelocks, or having to defer to someone for reasons solely of the prevailing social arrangements. Hierarchy, it can be argued, is something universal, obvious. It exists as much in nature, work and family as in society as a whole. It is linked unconsciously with the order and structure of life, which is inconceivable without it. This does not mean that there have not always been struggles, exceptional cases, explosions and revolutions, but despite the fact that life has always been characterised by an incessant tension, hierarchy and role remain. And just as they existed in all cultures, so, it was believed, they existed between cultures. An Indian rajah and his family were not on the same level as someone of the lowest caste. And in Britain it was assumed that, in the modern era, the British people as a whole, due to the role they had played in the development of worldwide capitalist trade and industry, in innovation and in the advanced methods of economic, social and political life, had acquired a position which placed their culture and civilisation above those of other peoples around the globe. Nor was this unusual; at the time of the first contacts with European traders, China thought of itself as being at the pinnacle of civilisations then in existence.

Though many in those times spoke of this in terms of the achievements and endeavour of the British “race”, what was normally meant was British culture, the culture then prevailing in the British Isles (multi-variant as it was between Scots, Irish, Welsh, English and between classes and occupations). And while this culture embraced a pride in recent achievements in many areas of life, all of which contributed to what is today taken for granted as constituting modern life (with all its advantages), it has also been understood that in the longer past the position had been very different. There had, of course, been times when at the same time as much was being accomplished by other civilisations, Britain had been very far from the heartlands of innovation and advance. Awareness of this did not, however, dent the assumption that hierarchy was inherent in life. Rather the opposite.

All of this changed with the spreading of the Cold War post-1945, and the growing awareness of the challenge posed by Soviet-led Communism. In the working out of the Cold War struggle, it became realised quite rapidly that hierarchy, especially that which was assumed to exist between cultures, was not only an embarrassment, but a fatal flaw. What kind of post-war free world was it, in which indigenous peoples were being told by Britain’s rulers that they were not yet ready to take control of their own affairs? And while the United States agreed that the system of colonial control then existing in what was then the British Empire was no longer tenable, what kind of opportunities for the individual were being offered to American citizens in the United States when some black children were not being allowed to attend the same schools as white children? This is why the confrontation of Governor Faubus and President Eisenhower in 1957 over schooling in Little Rock, Arkansas (when federal forces were used to impose federal decisions on the issue of equal treatment) was much more than a local issue, and became an international marker in the world-wide Cold War political struggle. The opportunities created for Communist agitation by these situations, especially in the way they provided indicators as to the way the West thought about non-Western peoples, was obvious.

Thus it was that, as the 1950s progressed, decisions were made that, while it had long been an integral part of the generally-accepted British world-view, the assumption of hierarchy as between cultures would have to go. But, at a time when everyday social life was already beginning to be transformed by the availability of more money and credit, by new fashions, and by new more informal kinds of music and dancing, little attention was paid to of the scale of the shock that was being delivered to the people of all classes in Britain by the fairly rapid abandonment of the hierarchical principle. The essential links between hierarchy, order, structure and predictability in everyday life and the role these all played in generating and maintaining morale did not seem to be properly understood. The idea that by breaking with the essential elements of the national way of life, one may be promoting a more general disintegration of culture, appears to have been little considered. One possibility may be that the buoyancy, even excitement, that began to emerge in the mid-1950s with the evident rise in prosperity and the emergence of new cultural trends combined with the growing hope that the new world war, which had been anticipated in the difficult aftermath of 1945, was not now going to break out. The preoccupations of the general public were being shifted. A new more apparently optimistic, lighter mood was being ushered in, and serious thought about where the national culture was going became increasingly unpopular.

Was this dismantling of the existing system of cultural ideas and practices, which began its inexorable forward movement in the mid 1950s, a conscious and deliberate act? If so, who was behind it, and who would benefit? Or was it a thoughtless accident, a by-product of Cold War politics and the new opportunities being made available by economic progress? Further, what was the character of this dismantling? – who/what was going out and who/what was coming in?

The first goal of Cold War strategy was the drive for prosperity which, if successful, would enable the West to pre-empt and outflank Communist expansionary plans.

Once hostilities had ended in 1945, the initial instinct to prevent Germany from ever again becoming a mortal threat to her neighbours was accompanied, almost immediately, by plans to help her people, many of whom were facing starvation in the first post-war winters. Next, in the shadow of the rapidly escalating Soviet threat, the target was adopted of rebuilding the economies and societies of both Germany and Western Europe as a whole.

The phenomenon of mass consumer capitalism, which over time was to have great influence on the national cultures of Western Europe was as yet unknown to the public at large, even as a concept. The situation almost everywhere in Europe in the later 1940s was, rather, one of general scarcity, and it was the way in which these conditions allowed for and even encouraged Communist ideas that was the chief concern. The preoccupation with rebuilding occurred in response to the left-wing theory that it was only extensive state control that could alleviate poverty and bring about a contented society. Prosperity thus became the priority, to be effected as widely and as rapidly as could securely be achieved, with the requisite support being provided by the Allied victors of the recent fight against fascism (in particular, the United States). The Cold War strategic imperative was to show the average person in non-Soviet Europe that life under a free-market capitalist system could be better, and that the poverty and depression remembered from pre-war times could be overcome. New opportunities could and would be opened up to the individual citizen, and this without the wholesale state takeover of the economy and society which was then occurring in Soviet-dominated Central and Eastern Europe.

While the threat of Communism as an expanding world-system was only too evident in the wars in Greece (from 1944), Malaya (from 1948) and Korea (from 1950), the biggest blow, certainly in the eyes of the Americans, was the military takeover of China by the Chinese Communist Party in 1949. But it was Western Europe itself, lying as it did in the shadow of what was now an immensely powerful Soviet Union, that was initially the chief focus of the East-West struggle. Here Marshall Aid provided by the USA played a major role in the reconstruction of the many battered economies of Western Europe. The United States had emerged least damaged by far of all the major combatant nations, and made the significant decision in 1948 to provide the massive financial assistance which helped to trigger an economic renaissance particularly in West Germany, Italy, France and the Benelux countries. Though Britain herself was the largest recipient, she did, however, have commitments arising from a world role which had existed before, during and after the war. Some critics charge that Britain after 1945, instead of recognising her now substantially reduced importance in the world, suffered from “delusions of grandeur”, which served only to hold back her economic development. But the rapid onset of the Cold War (which had, in fact begun even before the German surrender of May 1945) and the gradual appreciation on both sides of the Atlantic of the threat which the new expanding totalitarian system posed all over the world, meant that Britain, of necessity, continued to have a central role in the immediate post-war order. The United States was now far stronger in resources and military power terms but the partnership was crucial, as seen in Britain’s significant role in nurturing the growth of a new constitutional, free-market state in West Germany, in her response to the launching in 1948 of an attempted Communist takeover in British-controlled Malaya, and in her role in blocking the advance of the Greek Communists.

In 1947, the nature of the post-war military confrontation between what was now seen as “East” and “West” was formalised by the framing by the United States of the Truman Doctrine, under which the USA would, in effect, take the lead in action, both by persuasion and by military means, to stifle and outflank both Communist influence and the physical expansion of the Communist system of life. What was confirmed in 1947 was that the Western Allies of World War 2 were already in a new world conflict, one that, thankfully, had not had recourse so far to the post-war equivalent of unrestricted panzer division warfare. The aim of blocking the Communists, and simultaneously encouraging economic prosperity, was obviously only a long-term goal. In part this was because of the attachment felt by many towards the system pioneered by the Soviets, the system which had been successful in the herculean task of crushing Nazism, and in part because for the populations concerned, it was results not promises that mattered. But by now the paymaster United States was committed, was in it for the long term, and ready to develop the measures necessary to the task.

The Cold War goal of ever-widening prosperity was not possible without security. For trade and industry to thrive in Western Europe a secure and stable social and political atmosphere, long missing from European affairs, needed to be embedded, assured and predictable in the long-term. And for those growing up in the 1950s, despite the fear of nuclear war, this defence umbrella was crucially successful in promoting long-term economic development. Landmarks in the establishing of a secure Western (liberal capitalist) Europe separate from the now Communist-dominated eastern sphere, included the Berlin Airlift of 1948/9, as a result of which the non-Soviet sectors of Berlin remained free from the control exerted by the Soviet Union over East Germany as a whole, the creation of NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organisation) in 1949 and the establishment of a new state in the West of Germany, the Federal German Republic, in the same year. The latter was to be the chief economic and social bulwark against Communist advance in Central Europe during the key period of the Cold War in Europe, which extended through the 1950s and 60s. The Federal Republic’s long-term success was therefore essential. Britain and the United States played a central role in forging this infrastructure of free-market Europe, while the United States was, from the start, by far the most important guarantor of military resistance to the Soviets through NATO.

Little considered at the time, the cultural repercussions of this Cold War strategy were to be enormous, even revolutionary, to a degree unmatched even by those which famously ensued as a result of the fighting of World War 1. While the structures of society and the formality of class divisions were certainly shaken after 1918, and while the death toll of both First and Second World Wars was greater than any waged in Europe before, it was the very fact that military combat was at the heart of these conflicts that separates them from the Cold War and accounts for the difference in cultural effects. After 1945, and particularly after 1949, when the Soviet Union brought their own atom bombs to the table, straightforward military onslaught became less likely to be the way in which the contradictions between the mutually-exclusive systems based on Communism and Capitalism would be resolved. Essential now was the winning of hearts and minds, through propaganda, manipulation of the media, economic development and the selective use of force. With echoes of Europe’s religious wars of the 16th and 17th centuries, the new “Cold” war was to be waged to a significant degree at a social, psychological and cultural level.

Some major questions remain at this point. Due to the relative absence of all-out war, life for the bulk of Western populations in the Cold War was able to proceed largely along “normal” lines. In World War 1 practically every family in the combatant countries was affected by the blood-letting. Why then is it asserted that the cultural implications of the Cold War were so great for those so relatively untouched?

And, most importantly, why was it that, despite the magnitude of the changes in European and American life wrought by the economic development post-1945, it was the second of the points of Cold War strategy listed above, the point which deals with decolonisation and the expansion of liberty world-wide, that was, in fact, to have the most explosive and long-lasting effect on the national culture, not only in Britain and the United States, but across Europe and in the continents outside Europe?

To be continued.

Largely forgotten now, the decade after 1945 in Britain witnessed much more than the “austerity and rationing” favoured by the history books. A pre-war atmosphere prevailed, based on the news of Communist expansion both in Europe and beyond. Demobilisation was followed quite quickly by the resumption of military conscription, news of which affected most families in the land. Alongside the rapid Sovietisation of much of Central Europe the public became aware of the effort to oust the Western Allies from Berlin, of the Communist-inspired civil war in Greece, of the outbreak of the particularly bloody uprising against British rule in Malaya and, in mid 1950, of the full-scale war on the Korean Peninsula. China itself, which would become directly involved in Korea, had fallen to the Chinese Communist Party in 1949. From that year onward no opposition of any kind would be tolerated there, nor would there be any chance for the Chinese people to freely choose their own governmental path or social system. A further quarter of the world’s population had at a stroke been joined with Stalin’s Soviet Union and its satellites in the Communist orbit. Many people felt that it was only a matter of time before hostilities of some sort would break out directly between the major players, the Soviet Union and the United States, and that Britain would undoubtedly be involved in defence of the West.

A new totalitarian threat to the way of life which the British and American peoples had done so much to defend so few years before, had very rapidly overtaken Western Europe. What was the public reaction?While Britain had not been misled as to the antagonistic and expansionary intentions of Stalin’s Russia in the last years of World War II , as had the Roosevelt administration, there did remain a significant feeling of admiration for the Soviet fighters who had taken on, and eventually beaten back, the massive Nazi invasion of their homeland. Everyone knew of the shocking level of casualties and the extent of sacrifice made by the Soviet people. This awareness of what a Communist state had done and how it had contributed to victory for the Allies as a whole was to be a factor in the cultural transformation of Britain that was to occur from the mid-1950s.

In the critical years from 1947 to 1952, this awareness was overshadowed by the threat posed, the threat of yet another major war to follow those of 1914 and 1939. Many observations are made about the Britain of this time. One description, popular especially in the academic and theatrical world, is of ubiquitous greyness, of shortages, boredom, of a country tired after the exertions of the war, a country to all intents and purposes in a rut. On the other hand, I myself once met a market trader in central London in the 1970s who told me that this period was the best time of his life, the last time he had felt a genuine sense of community in his workaday life. And while assessments of the period are clearly subjective, it does seem that, despite huge political shifts at home and abroad, social conservatism in everyday life was generally dominant. There was a reversion to the well-understood features of British life which had “got us through the war”: a sense of national community which included all the easily-recognisable classes and a reliance on the qualities of modesty, reserve, and quietness (Don’t show off!) which were played out against a backdrop of shared ironic humour and understatement. Most people in the late 1940s and early 1950s would have agreed with the observation that Britain, and especially England, did not have an expressive culture. The national mood and the associated world view were projected across the continents by the BBC General Overseas Service, and by the pre-television Pathe and Movietone News. The excitement associated with the election of the first majority Labour government in 1945 had very little effect at this time in moving the culture away from its well-trodden path. It was the defensive posture, as in 1939, but because the culture was so well known, and despite dissidents on the extremes, the country was, on the whole, comfortable with it. The kind of films and shows that were popular, and the length of the cinema queues of the time, provide considerable evidence of the social mood.

Rather than the shortcomings of the Labour government it was probably a re-assertion of this underlying national conservatism and individualism that led to the big improvement in Conservative Party support in the election of early 1950 and later to their eventual re-election at the end of 1951. And while the population as a whole continued to rebuild their lives after the ravages of the war, it was the new world struggle with totalitarianism that was to determine the direction in which the national culture would develop. Already dubbed the Cold War the new conflict was at the time raging particularly in Korea, Malaya and in what was then still French Indo-China. The policy of the West was to attempt to block the progress of what the Soviets saw as the Communist world revolution wherever it exhibited aggressive tendencies. This had been done in Greece, where the Americans had become involved, and by the early 1950s progress was being achieved by the British in Malaya.

The intensity of the fighting between the liberal capitalist (in Communist parlance imperialist) countries of the West and Soviet-led Communism began to lessen – at least for the time being – in 1952 and 1953 and even in French Indo-China there was a a ceasefire in 1954. The ensuing Geneva Conference of that year, at which compromises were made and agreements reached, ushered in a feeling that perhaps the worst was over, and that a new world war had been postponed, if not avoided altogether. Coupled with the ending of wartime rationing this brought about a general lightening of the mood, and greater optimism. While the attention of the public moved more to the conventional problems of life, the massive underlying issues remained unsolved. Founded on the achievements of the Soviet Union, not least on the determination shown in defeating the Nazis, but also on their success in improving the Soviet people’s standard of living, there was no doubt that communism as a system was potentially popular in vast swathes of Asia, Africa and Latin America, as well as in Europe itself.

The Communist approach was to combine propaganda with ruthless and brutal direct action. Given a situation where in 1945 much of the less-developed world was either under the direct or indirect control of European empires, the Communist message was idyllic and utopian. Modern science and invention gave all peoples the possibility of constructing prosperous, co-operative and peace-loving societies. This could only be accomplished by collective struggle on the part of the local people, led by a disciplined Communist Party, which had been schooled to understand the forces at work and the nature of the task at hand. Such a goal was obviously impossible to achieve as long as European countries remained in control, and while mainly European capitalists owned much of the economy. The prospect of sweeping this away wholesale was a tempting one for many, while the propaganda emanating from the tightly-knit groups of determined fighters would only serve to further brighten the image of the future. The brutal aspect of the struggle included the deliberate killing of those previously respected local people who worked for or with the colonisers and took positions of responsibility. The message given was clear to all, supporters, converts, or neither: the old social order was passing and a new one was about to be built.

These post-war developments spelt out an immense challenge to the West. Any pause in the West’s struggle with Soviet expansionism was a signal only of the planning of some newly identified area for Communist or Communist-front advance. Inherent in the theory, with which all Communist leaders were familiar, was the dialectical nature of history. Things were always in flux. Struggle was an unavoidable component of life, with movement and change tending over a period towards human progress. There was, however, the possibility, as Marx pointed out, of universal barbarism; all the more reason for Communist militants never to give up on the struggle.

The policy makers of the West were by now only too aware of all of this themselves. While many of them had foolishly placed some hope in a constructive building of the post-war world where the USA and the Soviet Union at least co-operated, it was clear by the end of the 1940s that a long-term strategy was required which might go beyond the policy of containment which only sought to dam up further Communist gains. This strategy obviously included counter-propaganda to dismantle many of the myths spread by the Soviets. But the kernel of the Western response was to involve the twin aims of

a) establishing a growing prosperity in all the countries within the capitalist sphere around the world, a development which would mean that the average person would feel that life was getting better and

b) making good on the features of life that Western leaders had always stressed. The freedom of the individual to think, express, create, build for him/herself as each person desired, had always been central to the free market society. And this would be impossible as long as enormous areas of the world were politically under the control of European powers, principally Britain and France. Large-scale decolonisation and liberalisation were now not only desirable but essential if hearts and minds were to be won and the temptations of the Communist message outflanked.

To the policy makers in the West these aims were not optional. The dimensions of the threat of Communism as a competing world system that sought to supersede capitalism and the free market were too great. Inasmuch as they raised the spectre of totalitarianism (again), of the end of freedom of speech and endeavour, of the closing down of different sides of an argument, they went to the essence of life. The cultural repercussions of the policies as set out were also enormous, even revolutionary, but they have been radically underestimated (or overlooked) both in the interpretations of post-1945 history and probably by those living at the time. What was the true nature and extent of these repercussions?

to be continued.

The overwhelming fact of everyday life is the arrival of the modern liberal-leftist cultural mores.

All-pervasive, unavoidable, and self-consciously triumphant, it has given us the rule book on how to live and, increasingly, it makes clear its intolerance of dissent.

At the same time, people living in Britain, and probably (though I don’t live there) in the United States and other countries of “the West”, know that this gigantic cultural experiment is in trouble. This only makes it more important that we write about it and sensibly debate it.

---

Cultural life as we know it today is new, at least in historical terms. The rules for life have not always been like this. Between the end of the war in 1945 and 1955, social life and attitudes carried on very much the same as in the 1930s. The reaction of many will be: jobs and the economy change and develop, people become more prosperous, and with this attitudes change. It is covered by the concept of “keeping up with the times”, not getting out-of-date. It is not surprising if there was a period of hiatus after 1945, given the sacrifice and suffering of World War II.

My purpose is to assert that this interpretation is wrong. While there clearly was economic development, the cause of the change in cultural attitudes, which began to bed in from around 1955 onwards, arose from much deeper corners of the national psyche. The cultural change itself, especially as it developed with very little check through the following decades, was enormous and socially transforming (the Thatcherite episode of the 1980s, which was itself contradictory, provided only a minor dent in the headlong process of progressive social change). Overall, the upheaval which has occurred was not something heralded or expected, so much so that many now in the last period of their lives find themselves unable to recognise or feel themselves part of the prevailing social mores.

No. My view is that the massive change in everyday attitudes, in world view, in individual and collective sense of self has not been the accidental corollary of prosperity or consumer capitalism. What occurred from the mid 1950s was a growing liberalisation of social ideas, the beginnings of a breakdown of the formality and the inbuilt hierarchy of life alongside the increasing popularity of what came to be regarded as the progressive or liberal attitude to life. This revolution in outlook was, in fact, deliberate, the expression of a major requirement of Cold War strategy.

The all-absorbing struggle of what has, misleadingly, been called the Cold War, had emerged from the war, had penetrated Europe as a whole and, very rapidly, had spread in one way or another to every other continent. Though not widely appreciated, it represented at least as great, if not greater, a threat to the free-thinking, constitutional culture of the West as Nazi aggression had done. The United States, fully intending rapidly to return home after the crushing of the Nazis in 1945, reversed this policy entirely within years. Britain, in response to events in Europe and beyond, installed peacetime conscription for the first time ever. The US and the UK took steps to help ensure that two major states of Western Europe, France and Italy, both heavily under the influence of the popular partisan fighters who had engaged the Nazi occupiers in World War II , did not bring Communist governments to power in the post-war period

A pre-war atmosphere settled on the US and the UK in the late 1940s, especially when it became clear that the states of Central and Southern Europe, which had actually been occupied by the Soviets, were all themselves being forcibly transformed into Communist societies, with all that implied for freedom of thought and expression. The expansionist tendencies of Communism, led by the Soviet Union, seemed clear. How far would this go, and what strategy was needed by the West, led by the World War II allies, the US and the UK, for the longer-term struggle?

To be continued.

Junius 2