While twenty, or thirty, thousand people were marching on Trafalgar Square ~ depending upon whom you rely for your information = and while the Young Socialists were scandalising the national press by omphasising their socialism as well as their youth, television viewers who stayed at home were watching dour-f.ced commentators march up and down on the sidelines of what has become known as the "battle of Clacton,"
Teenage punchups are not new to this country, Scandals on football trains and slashed seats in cinemas have been routine stories in the popular press for as long as most of us can remember. But the extreme ferocity of the Clacton affair, where "mods" and "rockers" clashed to batter both one another and the rain~sodden amenities of the town, should provoke thought among socialists no less than among the clerics and cheer—leaders whose social task it is to nobble the young. The first self-conscious explanation made ‘One young mod in answer to the inquiries of the interviewers, was that “wetre bored." To the ratepayer of Clacton, writing in anguish to The Times, this is unimportant: what matters is the valuable property which has been wrecked. But to anyone who is interested in the human condition, leave alone to any socialist, the scandal is not at all in smashed seats and broken windows, but in the appallin mistreatment of young people which the incident reveals. How strange someone aged 18 could possibly “be bored" will, one hopes, be a total mystery to the people in the none-too—distant future. Rt today, as one watches young people being evicted from a prison called school and then, if they are lucky, swallowed up into another prison called work, one is almost persuaded that boredom is “natural."
The good thing about this Easter was that many times more youngsters were arrested for demonstrating outside a NATO base, than were nobbled in the Clacton bist-up. (Although careful readers of the daily papers could be excused for missing this fact.) But the bad thing was, and remains, that the socialist alternative, which alone can liberate young people from the moral desert which stretches around them on all sides is presented only in a halting and desultry manner by a handful of people.
Socialism as a key to the opening of all prisons; as the liberator of initiative and still on a scalo unprecadented and full of delights, as a new human landscape in which a profusion of beautiful relationships and things may grow with perplexing richness; socialism as the final death of boredom: this is a vista which is 100 seldom sketched out by its adherents. It is a vista which is needed by the young.
For some people in Pisce in the Labour Party to talk of disbanding the Young Socialists in this situation is not merely absurd: it is culpable. While Clactons can take place at all, Labour needs, and can build, a mass youth movement numbering hundreds of thousands, But not if it chooses as its organising tools the muzzle and the halter. N.B.o Reports of the Young Socialist Annual Conference arrived too late to be included in this issuee We will publish these next weck.
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