How Not To Reappraise the New Left

Abstract

In Hungary in 1956 Stalin's tanks blew apart the Left in the rest of the world. Old complacencies were shattered. . .' So opens the half-title page introduction to David Widgery's compendium on The Left in Britain, providing the first words one meets in a labour of 549 pages. Discriminating readers soon discover how appropriate it is that even the blurb is wrong. Stalin was safely dead, and the tanks were Khrushchev's. Khrushchev himself had already 'blown apart the left' six months earlier, with his liberating speech to the closed session of the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, which had, according to the brothers Medvedev, been the result of a purely personal initiative, launched at the end of the Congress, while the General Secretary temporarily held isolated power, before the new Central Committee had been convened to elect the other members of the leadership.' It is hardly accidental that this book opens with such a mistake: not only is the whole compilation slipshod to a remarkable degree, but this particular error is not the only one which arises from a desire to establish a special reading of the events in question. It is mainly for this reason that it is worthwhile to pay some attention to the work.