The Security Apparatus and the British Left, 1950s-2000s (Part II)

摘要

In the years from the late 1950s to the early 1960s, the discontent of the British political Left found its expression in the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND), a nonviolent organization formed in 1958 that aimed to pressure the United Kingdom's government to abandon nuclear weapons. The CND had a middle-class outlook and often sought to work within established political parameters, particularly by maintaining connections with the Labour Party, but it eventually ended up being used as "a platform and a stalking-horse by almost all the dissident groups." The largely peaceful organization enjoyed support from leading clergy members and such prominent cultural figures as Bertrand Russell. The CND's flirtatious relationship with the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) and the Soviet organization World Council of Peace made it suspect to some anti-nuclear weapons activists, but "did not dent the organization as much as its ineffectual marches and rallies and its increasingly hidebound administration, which was strangling itself with bureaucracy even as early as the mid-1960s." Fringe militants, usually anarchists, brought violence to one of CND's annual "Aldermaston marches" in 1963, leading the UK's Special Branch to keep a watching brief on these marches, but it allegedly devoted "little time to covering the activities of the organisation or its individual members." A markedly more violent organization and offshoot of the CND was the Committee of 100. Formed in 1960 by Russell and former CND members, it soon attracted the attention of Special Branch. The Committee of 100 made full use of the tactics of civil disobedience. For example, over 1000 people were arrested in Trafalgar Square and more than 350 at Holy Loch in 1961. Several people were arrested at a violent demonstration instigated during the visit to the United Kingdom by King Paul and Queen Frederica of the Hellenes in 1963.