346
RAYMOND WILLIAMS
Review
had already begun an extremely successful meeting-club,
and also a coffee-house,
The Partisan)
in London. In recent
months, New Left Clubs have been opening in many places all
over Britain, and there are also many
New Left Review
readers'
groups meeting regularly in different parts of the country-a form
of organization that has not existed in Britain since the Left Book
Club groups of the 1930's. Some breadth has also been added by
three other developments: the Free Cinema movement (now dis–
banded as a group but spreading its influence as its directors
establish themselves elsewhere); the encouraging revival of plays
and novels about areas of ordinary British life which the cultural
Establishment had neglected-the obvious names are Arnold
Wesker, John Braine, Shelagh Delaney, but there are many others;
and, above all, the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, which is
in no way a creation of the New Left, but which,
in
the wonder–
fully successful marches from Aldermaston and in scores of
crowded meetings, is bringing thousands of young people into
politics, but politics of a new and independent kind which the
traditional parties are hardly in touch with. It is all a glorious
and lively muddle, changing in character continuously, full of
serious differeJtces within itself, but recognizable as a social mood
absolutely dilft rent from that obtaining at the beginning of the
1950's. The main thing is that a good many people under thirty
have bypassed or recovered from the real failure of nerve which
deadened social and intellectual argument in Britain between
1945 and 1955.
If
the New Left does its job in the provision of
the solid thinking which must succeed its lively evocation of a
mood, the general effect could be considerable. A library of social–
ist books is now being started, which over five years could amount
to a new
statem~nt
of democratic socialist theory and policy
in
Britain. This could be of some international importance.
What are the relations between the New Left and the Labour
Party? Distinctly odd, I think, though most New Left people work
in the Labour Party, and some of its emphases have already passed
into official Labour policy, particularly on the less minestrewn
cultural sector. The fact
is
that most young socialists and radicals
regard the Labour Party as a part of the Establishment they are
against and will have to change. The conditions for healthy
