The Protest Makers by Richard Taylor and Colin Pritchard, Pergamon Press, 1980, £5.75 paperback £10.00 hardback.
From Protest to Resistance, Peace News Pamphlet Number Two, 1981, £1.25.
The CND Story, ed by John Minnion and Philip Bolsover, Allison and Busby, 1983. £1.95 paperback £5.95 hardback.
The massive explosion of CND in the 1980s has spawned a modest growth in the literature on the movement's history. This concentrates especially on the period 1958-65 when anti bomb activity was headline news, and which produced the biggest mass movement in Britain since the Suffragettes. This period was key in radicalising a whole generation of young people, like myself, for whom it was their first political experience.
Yet this first wave brought few victories. Perhaps the ending of atmospheric testing by the then 'big three' in 1963 was partly a result of our efforts but there was little else to show.
The arms race continued despite the 1972 Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty and has now produced in the 1980s a still more massive escalation in weaponry. Our movement now is bigger. Before we stood almost alone in Britain. Now there are similar campaigns all around Western Europe. Most significantly, the US 'freeze' movement that brought a million people onto the streets in New York last year showed that we have even begun to affect the most politically stable of imperialist states.
In 1983 our movement will do well to analyse its past. That's because this year we have a real chance of breaking the logjam by actually forcing governments in Western Europe to backpedal on the planned arms build-up.
As I write this, US Vice President George Bush is hopping around Europe desperately trying to shore up the NATO alliance. His message is no longer about the need for an armed response to the supposed Soviet threat. No longer are Afghanistan or Poland waved in our faces. No, Bush's trip is aimed mainly at convincing us that the Reagan administration is serious about negotiations, thus hoping to ensure the re-election of Kohl's West German government in March, and to aid Thatcher's forthcoming campaign.
Let us be clear. Two years ago Reagan's line was offensive: Cruise and Pershing were a necessary response to the Soviet threat. In 1983 nine tenths of every utterance is defensive and devoted to proving the West's commitment to peace. That change is down to us. This 'peace offensive' is designed to derail the mass movements of the past couple of years. Now we are the ones setting the terms of the debate. If we can get it right in 1983 we can win victories that will open the road to blocking and even reversing the war drive.
These new books about CND's history must be judged by today's activists from a concrete standpoint. How far do they help us to understand why we haven't succeeded before and prepare us to play a winning hand this time?
By this criterion the most recent and apparently comprehensive of these books is the most disappointing. The CND Story is aimed, according to its editors, at giving readers 'a better understanding of the movement's first twenty-five years. If this helps us all to work out our opposition to nuclear weapons more effectively in the years ahead, it will have been worth while'. Unfortunately the desperate intent of Minnion and Bolsover to let everyone have their say and the unwillingness of contributors to draw lessons from their experiences makes it unlikely that this book will help most members of our movement to work out anything at all.
A thirty page introduction is the most substantial and potentially valuable part. It gives a quick, relatively impartial, rundown of the movement's history since 1958. The next one hundred pages consist of thirty three different pieces by the same number of authors purporting to give a broad view of the campaign's development.
Building any mass movement involves a lot of hard work and routine tasks and this selection reflects this reality. But when CND's first major publication in this critical year includes such gems as Jo Richardson's descriptions of the catering arrangements at Aldermaston marches, or Adrian Henri's rambling account of various musical incidents over the ten years, it's surely time to call a halt!
Discussion that has anything to do with how we are going to win in 1983 is limited to a few contributions. Joan Ruddock gives a brief summary of last November's conference decisions. Having explained that we voted to make work around the labour movement a priority and agreeing that this is because 'we must capture a government', she appears unwilling or unable to explain how CND should give resources to this work now.
Similar hesitation comes in David Griffiths' piece 'CND and the Labour Party'. He insists that we need a government to achieve our aims, that Labour is 'the only serious candidate' and that this is a 'vital area of work'. Equally importantly he says that 'the way to win the party and hold it on course in government is not to become absorbed in the intricacies of its internal processes, still less to insist that CND must wed itself to socialist politics and enter any kind of formal relationship with the party'. But we have to go further than this. CND should remain outside of party alignments. But it also needs to decide what particular areas and projects. We passed such a resolution at conference but little has been done to implement it. [illegible] nor at the trade union conference on 29 January were serious steps proposed to prepare for a massive turnout on the projected Day of Action in August. Out of 26 full time staff only one half is currently assigned to trade union work and none to Labour Party work.
A careful reading of this book helps to explain why. CND's leaders are afraid to make political choices and when they get near them, they pull back from the brink. Most of the contributions by influential figures show an obsession with preserving the movement in the 1980s as all-embracing and tolerant. Against this it would be equally wrong to accept Hugh Jenkin's advice that: 'CND's task is to get ... (unilateralism) ... into Labour's general election manifesto and then to get Labour elected. Anything after that ... is ultimately a diversion'. Such a line would split the movement from top to bottom. It would make it much less likely in fact that we would ever achieve a unilateralist Labour government. The only reason we have got as far as we have in the Party is that an independent mass movement, which on certain issues now has majority public support, has existed as a permanent source of pressure. Right now, far from collapsing CND into the party, we have to maintain and further develop mass actions like last year's Glasgow and London demonstrations, Greenham Common in December, and so on. But an essential complement to this will be for CND to strengthen its orientation to the labour movement: that means giving adequate resources to our Labour and trade union sections, having a regular publication that, unlike Sanity, can be sold to rank and file trade unionists and party members, publishing pamphlets that educate the labour movement about why it cannot beat Thatcher without a clear unilateralist programme. These are urgent tasks if we are to consolidate our position in the labour movement. At the moment the Right in the Labour Party is manoeuvring to take our programme out of the manifesto. Even if we can defend this position and win the election an even more gigantic task will face us to force a Labour government to carry it out. It is unfortunate that the editors of The CND Story have on the whole missed the opportunity to prepare us for these political fights ahead.
Taylor and Pritchard's book was first published at the beginning of the 'new wave'. They have taken the opportunity of its paperback publication to take account of developments over the last two years. The main body of the book is based on a social and political survey of a selection of activists of the 'first wave' twenty years on. These have mostly continued their political activity, but have diversified into wider fields, tending to ignore disarmament. The authors conclude that we collapsed because neither of the two competing strategies of 1958-65 measured up to our needs. The Labour Party option failed because its proponents didn't see that conference has never controlled policy. The sit-down strategy was equally useless because it needed quick results. Self-sacrifice of the kind demanded could not be continued indefinitely. While their epilogue acknowledges that the 1980s are different from the 1960s they refuse to see that this is because the labour movement is in a very different state.
Their conclusion is that CND needs to attach itself to a global 'third way', a society based on the precepts of humanistic socialism', and that the European Nuclear Disarmament Campaign is the most hopeful way forward to this goal. Although this is a mildly interesting historical account, its pessimistic political conclusions are far removed from the reality of the opportunities open to us in 1983.
From Protest to Resistance contains a series of articles by veterans of direct action from the first wave. It is intended, in its editors' words, to 'give us the feeling that we have to take personal responsibility for lives and actions, not trusting in distant leaders to do it for us'. Most instructive for us is to appreciate the timelessness and the essentially individualistic nature of the direct action. It may be a recipe for inner contentment, it may provide the occasional mass demonstration as at Greenham, but in no way will it win the victory that is in our grasp this year.
TONY SOUTHALL was involved in Youth CND in Croyden in 1959, chairperson of Cambridge University CND 1960-2 and a full time worker for the Committee of 100 during 1961. He is now secretary of Scottish Labour CND and a committee member of Glasgow West CND.