The Re-Emergence of Ideological Politics in Great Britain: the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament

Abstract

N ACCORD with our own peculiar zeitgeist, writers of a liberal, empiricist, and reformist disposition have enthusiastically hailed the end of ideology. 1 There is no disputing that old-style ideological politics are quite dead. Evidence accumulates, however, to suggest that we are now witnessing the birth of a new style of ideological politics. In this country, the new moods are expressed in several new socialist journals, in the Peace Movement, and most sharply in the militant segments of the anti-segregation movement. In Gaullist France, there has been a slight rejuvenation of an ideological temper, most noticeably in the Parti Socialist Unifie and the intellectuals, publicists, and discussion groups connected with it. The earliest expression of this renaissance occurred in Great Britain where the rapid emergence of a ban the Bomb movement, the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND), signaled the revival of ideological politics in the West. Even now CND is the largest ban the Bomb movement in the West.2 Certainly in its heyday its unique demand that Britain unilaterally renounce the manufacture, use, and possession of the H-Bomb and pursue a policy of positive neutralism and its characteristic technique the annual Easter week-end march between the Atomic Weapons Research Establishment at Aldermaston and Trafalgar Square had a profound influence on British political debate. Altogether, the activities of CND and its off-shoots have come as a surprise to those Americans who have long admired the British propensity for quietly staying within the political boundaries and playing the game according to the rules. In this paper, my concern will be with the British context of the formation of CND as a mass movement. More specifically, I will deal with (1) the relative absence of organized protest to atomic policies prior to 1957 and the emergence in 1957 of the broadly based opposition to these policies which led to the creation of CND; and (2) the political and social factors which allowed CND to grow so rapidly.