The Protest Makers

The British Nuclear Disarmament Movement of 1958-1965, Twenty Years On

Richard J K Taylor, Colin Pritchar

• Publisher: Pergamon
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781483150598
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: International Relations
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The Protest Makers: The British Nuclear Disarmament Movement of 1958-1965, Twenty Years On discusses issues regarding the British nuclear disarmament movement. The book is comprised of four parts that covers specific topic related to the movement, such as the political and ideological aspects of the movement. The text discusses the problems faced by the movement that prevented it in making a significant change in modern Britain. The book also analyzes the future activities and attitude of the movement. The text will be of great interest to individuals who are concerned with the trends of anti-nuclear movements, particularly in Britain.

PART I

“Something Ought to be Done”: the Rise and Decline of the Nuclear Disarmament Movement

Publisher Summary

This chapter discusses the rise and decline of the nuclear disarmament movement in Britain from 1958 to 1965. Socially, the 1950s was a watershed decade in a number of ways. The prolonged economic growth, which characterized all the industrialised economies of the capitalist world from 1945 to the early 1970s, was less marked in Britain than elsewhere but was nevertheless the major underlying determinant of social change. Politically, the early 1950s was a period of confusion, retrenchment, and disillusion on the left and of quiet but fundamental adjustment on the right. The 1950s was a time of both acclimatization and consolidation. The conservative party had to come to terms with a changed domestic structure —principally the mixed economy and the welfare state and, internationally, with the even more fundamental process of rapidly dismantling the British empire in Africa and Asia. However, the placid progress of the conservative rule was interrupted by two events of major importance in 1956: the Suez invasion and the suppression of the Hungarian uprising. Both, in their very different ways, were key events in the process leading to the formation of the nuclear disarmament movement.

Britain in the 1950s

The 1950s is too recent a decade for a comprehensive and authoritative ‘history’ to have yet been written. However, despite its nearness in time, the pace of change in modern society—at all levels — is such that it is very difficult to recapture and evoke the ethos of the period. In social, political, economic, and cultural terms the society of the 1950s belongs to a different age from our own. At the most obvious and superficial level, the only head of state of a major nation spanning the decade is Queen Elizabeth II!

At the outset of the decade Britain was only just beginning to emerge from the period of austerity and post-war reconstruction, and the war leader, Sir Winston Churchill, headed the new Conservative administration.¹ Perhaps most significant of all, in terms of mass political psychology, Britain still retained an extensive Empire: only India, of the Third World countries, had attained full independence² — and no sovereign black African state yet existed.³

On the international scene the frenetic wheeling and dealing between the two ‘Super Powers’ —and the other nations involved in the war—had been concluded and the world divided into Eastern and Western ‘spheres of influence’. The Cold War stalemate between East and West was becoming an accepted and permanent feature of the international scene, embodied in the West by the formation of NATO and in the East by the Warsaw Pact. The Korean War marked the first full-blooded test of ideological and economic will between the two ‘Super Powers’ and was a grim portent of the pattern of international conflict which was to ensue in the coming decades.⁴

Britain, although fast fading as a major world power, kept in touch with the two ‘Super Powers’ by virtue of her central role in the War and hence the post-war settlements. An indication of Britain’s self-image and of her determination to keep in the ‘top league’ was her development of nuclear weapons. For the political leaders of the UK — Labour as well as Conservative — the Bomb was demonstrable proof of her status as a world power and guaranteed her a ‘seat at the top table’. In both political and psychological terms the British Independent Nuclear Deterrent was always more important as a virility symbol than as a serious strategic arm of the West’s ‘defensive system’.⁵

Socially, the 1950s was a watershed in a number of ways. The prolonged economic growth, which characterised all the industrialised economies of the capitalist world from 1945 to the early 1970s, was less marked in Britain than elsewhere⁶ but was nevertheless the major underlying determinant of social change. A new, ordered and systematic economic system appeared to have replaced the chaotic and harsh ‘bad old days’ of 1920s and 1930s capitalism where everything had seemed subject to the vagaries of ‘boom and slump’.⁷ Keynesian techniques of economic management appeared to have secured permanent full employment, economic growth and slow but sure expansion through a centrally managed economy.⁸ The material affluence which resulted from this economic success had profound consequences for the social and political structure, and the attitudes, of all classes in all Western societies.⁹ Not least amongst these consequences, and particularly important in our context, was the growth of a new and unique youth culture: for the first time in industrial society the young wage-earners had the economic basis for independence which enabled them to reach out and build their own cultural autonomy. Coupled with the rapid technological development of the media¹⁰ this produced, from the mid-1950s onwards, the now familiar institutions of pop culture —pop music, teenage fashion, and a general move towards debunking ‘high culture’.¹¹

Politically, the early 1950s was a period of confusion, retrenchment and disillusion on the Left, and of quiet but fundamental adjustment on the Right.¹² The 1945-51 Labour governments, arguably the greatest reforming administrations in twentieth-century Britain, had seemingly ushered in a new ‘mixed economy’ structure in which the State, acting, it was argued, on behalf of the people, was to take a far greater role in the rational planning and control of the economy. Of equal if not of more importance, the foundations of the ‘Welfare State’ were laid and there was, in the late 1940s, the feeling in the Labour Movement that a new, socialist system based on different structures and different ideological criteria to the old capitalist society, was in the process of construction.¹³ The lack of advance through 1948 to 1951 and the subsequent electoral defeat was a rude shock to Labour activists, ¹⁴ and paved the way for years of internal division in the Party and the Movement between the ‘Bevanite’ Left and the ‘Gaitskellite’ Right.¹⁵ By the mid-1950s the heady optimism of the late 1940s amongst socialist activists within the Labour Movement had evaporated: there was a realisation that the undoubtedly great achievements of the Labour government had not brought about a socialist society, that the new mixed economy was not the first stage on the road to a socialist transformation, and, perhaps most important of all in our context, the new material affluence and economic security had not induced an ideological commitment to socialist principles amongst the mass of the people.¹⁶ By 1956 the time was indeed ripe for ‘a new kind of politics’ to rekindle the idealism and commitment of the radical strata in British society.

On the Right, on the other hand, the 1950s was a time of both acclimatisation and consolidation. The Conservative Party had to come to terms with a changed domestic structure–principally the mixed economy and the Welfare State, ¹⁷ and, internationally, with the even more fundamental process of rapidly dismantling the British Empire in Africa and Asia. With an ease and expertise acquired through numerous volte faces over the centuries, the Conservative Party achieved this remarkable ideological (and psychological) adjustment with relatively little effective dissension.¹⁸ The Right also consolidated its ideological hold through the period of economic growth and affluence – and of course maintained its directly political hold through three successive General Election victories (in 1951, 1955, and 1959).

The placid progress of Conservative rule was, however, rudely interrupted by two events of major importance in 1956: the Suez invasion and the suppression of the Hungarian uprising.¹⁹ Both, in their very different ways, were key events in the process leading to the formation of the Nuclear Disarmament Movement. Suez was the last convulsive fling of the old imperial ‘gunboat’ style of diplomacy–and the degrading failure of the whole preposterous episode demonstrated once and for all that Britain could no longer act alone as a world power. Psychologically, this was a devastating message for a population nurtured on the imperialist propaganda of a predominantly jingoistic press and still resting on the assumption that Britain, as the victor of World War II, was a ‘Super Power’. Equally important, the reaction against the Suez invasion not only united the Labour Movement but created a new mood of idealistic purpose on the Left. A crusading spirit was born, and this commitment –more moral in inspiration than political – carried over into the Nuclear Disarmament Movement. The impact of the brutal Russian repression of the Hungarian uprising had no less profound an effect. Most immediately, of course, it brought home to everyone in the starkest possible way the new realities of the ‘Super Power’ stalemate: as the West stood helplessly by whilst the Russians imposed their rule by undisguised military force, it became apparent that within the implicitly understood respective ‘spheres of influence’ the ‘Super Powers’ could operate as they wished. The only effective form of Western intervention –certainly in the European context–would rapidly have escalated to nuclear war. The effect on those who had supported, or had at least had sympathy for, the USSR as a genuinely Communist society was dramatic. There was, at that time, little firm and detailed information about the Stalinist repression of the 1930s and 1940s, but Hungary provided irrefutable evidence of the totalitarian, authoritarian, and brutally repressive nature of the Russian régime.²⁰ The result was a mass exodus from the Communist Party (in Britain as elsewhere in the West) of intellectuals and workers who were committed to humanistic socialism, ²¹ and thus an upsurge of discussion and activity on the Left.

The combined result of these two crises was to produce a heightened political atmosphere but, simultaneously, an increased scepticism and mistrust of the old ideologies and the old institutions. After 1956 a new idealism was in the air but, as with Osborne’s ‘Jimmy Porter’, it seemed that there were ‘no good, brave causes left’:²² there was political interest, political will and political and moral commitment, but no political issue (and certainly no political party or movement) around which this newly created political mood could crystallize. The new drama of the mid-1950s expressed this mood succinctly: passionate but cynical, idealistic but ...