342
RAYMOND WILLIAMS
-still mainly the valuable organ of the older Left Establishment,
but sometimes including the thinking and feeling of the younger
Left, sometimes reviving, in spectacular ways, the features which
drove this younger Left away from it. The
Observer
has a settled
if
filleted mixture of the most improbable page-fellows, but man–
ages to look pretty young and radical (it certainly isn't the latter)
beside the monumentally aged
Sunday Times.
In several of the
best periodicals there is a characteristic contemporary tone, which
ought to be relevant evidence, but that particular flavor, com–
pounded of London and international contacts, seems oddly to
have very little to do with Britain, at least the Britain I am
interested in. I watch people I have known disappearing into that
world, and there it is. I get an occasional message back that I am
insular (it used to be "provincial" but too many writers in demand
now live in the provinces) , and I interpret this as meaning that
I route my international contacts other than through London, and
also that I have as many friends in the Soviet Union .as in the
United States, which is not at all a civilised and cosmopolitan
thing to do. But also I am frankly insular in the sense that I am
primarily interested in British society and in what manages to get
culturally expressed of
that,
and Port Talbot
~d
Manchester and
places like that seem to me -more really productive of evidence.
Anyway, through these cross-currents, the difference between
generations still emerges quite strongly, and everyone under forty
believes the tide is flowing his way. But what way? In politics,
for example, there are two important young groups: the Bow
Group of Conservatives, who are interestingly liberal on colonial
matters
in
ways that have little to do with solid Conservative
opinion, and the New Left, which I think I belong to myself. It
may be that British politics in fifteen or twenty years will consist
of the conflict now existing between these two new approaches,
but a lot can happen to start other directions. Broadly, the Bow
Group seems to be the expression of a progressive pragmatism
within the terms of the existing society: easier and more open
about class, tired of the old Imperialism but rather liking the
new, full of appetite for a fast-moving and affluent commercial
society. To get any fair account of it you would have to ask one
of its people
j
what I have seen and heard of it is pretty mixed,
