A World Without Escape: Prison and the Making of the British New Left

Abstract

The idea of imprisonment played a central role in the development of the British New Left during the late 1950s and 1960s. This has been critically overlooked, in part because most commentators focus exclusively on the small circle of intellectuals around the journal New Left Review. The New Left is better understood as a broad historical bloc. As well as university students and academics, other groups like trade unionists and radical Christians were also included in the network of alliances realised through the Fife Socialist League, the New Left Clubs and a number of unilateralist organisations. In addition to these political initiatives, the New Left's engagement in cultural production, too, helped constitute it as a movement, linking it to institutions and formations like the New Wave in cinema, the 'Angry Young Men' and Joan Littlewood's Theatre Workshop. It is here, in the work of what might be called the New Left's artistic wing, that the preoccupation with imprisonment can be seen most clearly. The unfairly forgotten writing of Frank Norman, Phoebe Willetts, Jane Buxton, Margaret Turner and Pat Arrowsmith is especially significant in this regard, as is Alan Sillitoe's short story 'The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner'. To understand the deeper resonances of this material, though, it has to be placed in dialogue with other New Left texts that address incarceration, particularly the translations and analysis of prison writing from the Eastern Bloc produced by figures such as Raymond Williams, Robin Blackburn, Peter Sedgwick and Nicolas Krasso. A key trope that this approach then reveals is the re-imagining of post-war Britain itself as a jail. Through its artistic output, the New Left established a complex set of affinities between the prison and society as a whole, using incarceration as a lens through which to view the latter, and thereby presenting this as a prison society, a world without escape. At the same time, however, the prison emerges here as a locus of resistance. Because it made tangible what New Leftists often saw as the fundamentally coercive, authoritarian nature of modern Britain, imprisonment was sometimes regarded as a radicalising experience. Moreover, the austerity of the prison meant that it could provide a vantage point from which to critically assess what Richard Hoggart called the 'candy-floss world' of mass consumerism, while simultaneously preserving older and apparently more authentic forms of working-class culture. In various ways, then, centring imprisonment allows us to see both the New Left and the society that produced it from a fresh perspective.

Date of Award	1 Aug 2024
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	The University of Manchester
Supervisor	Eloise Moss (Supervisor) & Ben Harker (Supervisor)