Britain: Prospects for the Seventies

Abstract

Until the last three months before the General Election of June 1970 most observers would have predicted, without much hesitation, a defeat for the Labour Government. It is, after all, normal for reforming Governments in Britain, actual or self-styled, to refuse to satisfy their own supporters because of a too tender susceptibility towards the claims of property; they find themselves overtaken by feelings of popular revulsion and are succeeded by solidly based Tory administrations. The shift to the Right among sections of the population has been widely observed in the last few years : it has been much encouraged, among a variety of reasons, by the issues of racialism as well as by the anti-trade union attitudes of the Labour Government. Yet at the same time there is a good deal of radical thinking of a general and often very diffuse kind, and among some groups of the younger generations there is, in varying degree, a rejection of the values and the institutions of bourgeois society. It is, of course, easy to exaggerate the extent of these radical positions and attitudes, and historical experience strongly suggests that the processes of containment and adaptation are very powerful once a living has to be earned and family responsibilities come to be assumed. But whatever the future holds in this regard for the present generations of radical youth, at the present time these radical attitudes co-exist with a marked feebleness of aim and purpose among the political groupings of the Left in terms of any significant impact upon the political scene.