CND: as bourgeois as ever
Richard Brent
According to the Sunday Times last week's 150,000 strong CND rally in London was a demonstration that the antinuclear movement had lost its 'middle class' character. Certainly, as the Sunday Telegraph was all too eager to point out, a quarter of the CND National Committee are communists, and the Scottish miners' leader, Mick McGahey, made it quite clear that he addressed the rally less as a pacifist than as a communist. Some, moreover, tried to turn the rally into an attack on the Government's economic policies, using such slogans as 'Jobs not Bombs' and 'Fallout with Thatcher'. And the leading speakers — Foot, Benn and E. P. Thompson — all regard themselves as socialists.
However, in reality last Saturday's spectacular was no more socialist, working class or subversive than previous events. The Socialist Workers' Party, well aware of this, warned those who boarded the coaches to London, that the march was a distraction from the main struggle, namely the fight against capital. The truth of the SWP analysis was borne out in the composition of the crowd. This was heavily, although by no means exclusively, dominated by the southern counties of England and Wales and there was a large proportionof students. The continuing radical tradition of the 'cider counties' in the south west was also strongly in evidence, the Great Rebellion of 1689 and the agitation for Wilkes and Liberty transformed into the demand for Peace. Virtually the only miners' banner came from Kent. A more Impressive display of working class solidarity might have been found in the Ulster Loyalist march that processed through Oxford the previous week, containing groups from the Liverpool districts of Toxteth and St Paul's. Indeed, in the CND rally, despite Obvious problems of transport, representatives from Scotland and Northern Ireland Were more numerous than those from the Industrial north of England.
Images of misrule were also largely absent. The exceptions were a few punks in brightly coloured hair and a mock outsized Judge to whom was appended the legend Bombs 4 me'. This lack was partly the result of the police's ban on live music in Hyde Park. Hence what was billed as a festival as well as a political event never really materialised. The demonstration .was characterised rather by an earnest sobriety, a fairly humourless occasion in which participants were exhorted to pick up litter, and alcohol flowed only in distant pubs. Anarchy displayed itself in the guise of a lone, albeit drunken punk who chanted in dissent, 'Fascists can be fun' and 'Maggie is an angel'. The march itself was noticeably institutionalised — this was not a straggly and unruly parade. Highly organised, drilled by megaphones, the marchers walked cordoned off from spectators and wellwishers into Hyde Park, where most of the entrances seemed to be closed. There was scarcely any barracking during the meeting and due deference was paid to the seniority of such life-long pacifists as Fenner Brockway. Unsurprisingly the police made no arrests.
This sobriety was not unplanned. It was the consequence of the organisers' touching liberal faith in the democratic process. Middle-class respectability was seen as a necessary concession if the meeting was to be treated respectfully by the politicians at whom the rally was directed. Michael Foot, the defender of parliamentary privilege, saw the meeting in this light, as did Tony Benn who viewed his speech as a means of communication not so much with his supporters as with his opponents. The purpose of the meeting was not subversive. It was not an undermining of the democratic process, an indication that the ballot box had failed, but a traditional part of that process. The assumption was that the numerical weight of the opinion expressed was bound morally to influence political decisions. The reality of course is very different. As on the issue of hanging, notoriously popular in the country, little will be achieved. Nevertheless thousands turned up to brave drizzling rain and cold weather to express their solidarity in a manner that was neither convenient nor particularly entertaining.
Indeed radical explanations of the nuclear arms race tended to be safely Freudian. Many slogans saw nuclear war as the expression of frustrated male potency, reducing the current conflict to sexual personality disorders. One placard read, 'Neuter not Neutrons, Castrate the World Leaders', a more jokey version of which was 'Drop Trousers not Bombs'. A traditional male Freudian explanation resided in the guise of Mrs Thatcher sitting astride a Cruise missile, but this was countered by a feminist-inverted Freudianism with the legend, 'Nuclear war is menstruation envy'. Such explanations are of course completely safe: a course of psycho-analysis is the prescribed remedy. There is no need for social or political upheaval. Last Saturday's march owed its greatest intellectual debt however to secularised liberalism. Freudian reductionism might be seen as part of the same phenomenon in its implicit assertion that nuclear war is the product of individual personality disorders which might be cured individually. But the dominant tendency of the movement was the plea for the panacea, 'peace', which would remove the ills of the world bringing prosperity in its train. The abolition of nuclear weaponry, it was argued, would cure starvation in the Third World and unemployment at home. Like Cobden and Bright, ghosts from the 19th century, 'peace' was seen as the means to establish a new moral order: the future necessarily meant 'a better tomorrow'.
The rhetoric of last week's event was millenarian. The possibility of nuclear war was to be understood as man's capacity for sin, the actuality of its occurrence the descent into hell. The old-fashioned deathimage of a skeleton abounded and one slogan described the existence of nuclear weaponry as 'Satan's pact'. The abolition of nuclear war was to be seen as the overcoming of sin, making possible the entry into paradise. The Father of St Francis Roman Catholic Church in Notting Hill carried the banner 'Love your enemy — the final solution' and another proclaimed 'God is on our side'. Christianity and the CND campaign, it was suggested, were inseparable. Small wonder, therefore, that Quakers for Peace, Anglican Pacifists, the Alliance of Radical Methodists and something known as the Urban Theology Unit all marched to Hyde Park. Christianity was collapsed into the liberal demand for peace and marchers referred to the day's event as a pilgrimage. The march was a tribute to the theology of liberalism.
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