NUMBER 17 NOW OUT Price E1.40 + 15p Postage & Packing The Road to 1945 British Politics and the Second World War This is a brilliant book. It is probably the most intelligent monograph on a recent period of British politics' - New Society Illustrated Revolutionaries E.J. Hobsbawm The State in Capitalist Society Ralph Miliband The History and Practice of the Political Police in Britain Tony Bunyan Available from all major bookshops or from the publisher:
Quartet Books Limited, 27 Goodge Street, London W1P 1FD well-integrated and adaptable bourgeois intelligentsia was the political equibbrium established after 1945. The self-evident truths that explained its seemingly natural world were those of Keynesian economics, Fabian reformism and the British Constitution. Today, as British capital fights its way worst recession in over forty years, amidst social crisis and constitutional tremors that may yet break up the old Great-British state, that "natural" world is visibly coming apart. The current crisis has burst into this complacent Fabian universe much as proletarian insurgency and imperialist competition shattered the calm of Edwardian Liberalism - and with comparably drastic ideological effects. For the second time this century the Idea of Progress has been confounded.
The most spectacular ideological effect has been the rise of the Right. In the TLS, there are clear signs of an anti-Marxist mobilisation. Whereas the first Black Paper was shrugged off as a reactionary curiosity. the most recent found itself in the vanguard of a concerted press campaign against progressive education. The liberal social reforms of the Sixties are now threatened by powerful obscurantist currents which £2.95 £2.50 £0.60 E2.50 as the recent Gay News case shows — are prepared to overturn even the most basic bourgeois freedoms of speech and publica tion in pursuit of their aims. Reaction 1s again respectable.
The Fabian intelligentsia, sapped by years of "reasonableness', has proved quite inadequate to the new situation. Disorientation and have been its main responses. The wholesale involution of Fabian culture is manifest in the pages of its traditional mouthpiece, the New Statesman. The leader-writers of the NS have for some time now been quite unable to distinguish between a sober grasp of political conjunctures and their own spurious sense of occasion. Its main articles, zigzagging wildly from week to week, belie all residual claims to political coherence. And its reviews section is now edited by Martin Amis who, believing the front of the to be dominated by left-wing opinion, intends to open the back pages to
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THE ROAD TO 1945 Paul Addison