Imagining an Ideal Britain

Abstract

Writing in early 1964 Perry Anderson argued that ‘British society is in the throes of a profound, pervasive but cryptic crisis, undramatic in appearance, but ubiquitous in its reverberations.’1 Anderson was not alone in his assessment of a crisis pervading British society. He was responding to a spate of literature that had been published over the preceding approximately six years which bemoaned the ‘decline’ or ‘stagnation’ of Britain. Many authors have pointed to the ‘state of the nation’ literature, as Matthew Grant terms it, published most notably by Penguin in the late 1950s and early 1960s for creating a ‘public mood’ of criticism or ‘declinism’.2 But as Grant, and Paul Addison, have rightly pointed out, it is incredibly difficult, if not impossible, to discern a ‘public mood’.3 While the concentration of this literature certainly does tell us something about the attitudes and ideas of left-wing intellectuals at the time, the extent to which they represent or reflect a ‘popular mood’ is questionable. Bill Schwarz has also highlighted a sense of ‘disorder’ among the right wing in the late 1960s which he attributes to the ‘end of empire at “home” ’.4 This chapter does not attempt to discern such a mood but instead explores how left-wing activists, many of whom were intellectuals to some degree, were responding to this sort of literature, the press coverage and public debate that it produced.