The Radical Fifties: Activist Politics in Cold War Britain. By SophieScott‐Brown. Oxford University Press, 2025. 198 pp. £84.

Britain in the 1950s was not, on the face of it, a propitious time for radical activists. Victory in the Second World War had entrenched the public's faith in the nation's institutions; the social and political victories of the post-war Labour governments had addressed many long-standing concerns regarding workers’ rights; and rising real wages, buoyed by a global capitalist boom, further deepened the sense of many that the system was largely working. Yet, for the subjects of this book, this cosy image masked deep-seated inequalities, dangers and flaws. For the anarchist left, post-war democracy was eroding people's freedoms; for the New Left emerging after 1956, the Labour Party's revisionism left socialism receding in the rear-view mirror; for the Direct Action Committee (DAC), the whole system was built on Cold War divisions that left the world perilously close to nuclear war. Sophie Scott-Brown's book focuses on these three groups in an intriguing way, examining not only their politics and responses, but, crucially, the way they conducted politics. Rightly, she stresses that for these groups, the political act was also a radical path to building communities and creating political selves. If at first glance some of the discussions of meetings or demonstrations – reaching at best a dozen or so people – might seem rather of niche importance, then I would urge a second glance: the very marginality of some of this work helps us understand the heavy weight of consensus conformity which shaped the decade. The work on the DAC is particularly relevant here: far less well known than not only the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) but also the later Committee of 100, the DAC pioneered anti-nuclear protest and did so in ways which sought to genuinely engage those who worked and operated within the nuclear state. These groups had to contend with more than an oppressive and antagonistic political culture; they were often working in juxtaposition, and at times in opposition, to other radical groups. For the anarchists and the New Left, their work was unimaginable without the existence of the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) or the myriad Trotskyist groups. For the DAC, it was the much more famous CND. They all existed within a world in which anti-colonial activism – whether organized under the umbrella of the Movement for Colonial Freedom or discussed within multiple student groups in London – was a key part of leftist politics. It would have been interesting to see a more sustained discussion of these contexts, particularly the obvious relationship of two of the groups to the CPGB. The New Left, for example, was not like the sun rising at its appointed time: the CPGP was present at its making. And not just in a negative sense. We hear some points of departure between the CPGB and the anarchists and New Left crowd, but less about what was clearly the great debt owed to the street-level work of the Party (the ‘mass work’ fetishized by its leaders in King Street). There is a broader point that the overwhelming majority of radical activists in 1950s Britain belonged to the Communist Party, and worked in factories, sold the Daily Worker, went on protests, chalked slogans and collected signatures. Most of them would remain in the Party after 1956 as well. A discussion of the links between the groups may have allowed a tribute to the work of these activists and a proper understanding of the genuinely radical nature of the Party members’ work—without having the subject of the book dominated. At times, the sense of the CPGB as a monolithic problem rather entrenches the Cold War divisions the book explicitly seeks to critique. As mentioned, however, the real strength of the book is its focus on groups that rejected the top-down model of other organizations like the CPGB, with its Moscow-inspired leadership and obsession with discipline. Likewise, the DAC's ways of working could hardly have been more different from the almost quaint, drawing-room elite direction of CND – an organization which only adopted a membership model after several years. The groups investigated in the book earnestly discussed what mass radicalism could mean in 1950s Britain, what small groups could hope to achieve in the sphere of formal politics, and how they should organize themselves as exemplars of radical democracy. That could manifest in biting self-criticism, as in the pages of Freedom; in the painstaking processes of decision-making designed to both train and include DAC activists; or in the at-times grandiloquent plans of the New Left. Crucially, the book gives us a taste of the internecine disputes and arid navel-gazing that could occur, while never losing sight of why these groups mattered. The book offers a unique and indispensable insight into the attempts to create a different sort of politics and a different sort of Britain. Their success, Scott-Brown shows, was not a political victory in the formal sense, but rather in their ability to live political lives on their own terms. Scott-Brown's achievement is to bring this work into view and ask us to remember what was at stake at the time.