Britain’s New Left drew its base from people moving between classes

Evidence

I am not trying to present the New Left as wider, in its social composition, than it actually was. But it is not true that at its high point it was composed exclusively of students and intellectuals, in an American sense. Remember, in Britain, universities were never large enough to form the autonomous space of politics. So, for a long time, the New Left had a wider formation. It emerged in that very moment of the 1960s, when there was a major shift in class formation going on. There were a lot of people in transition between the traditional classes. There were people with working-class backgrounds, who were scholarship boys going to colleges and art schools for the first time, beginning to get professional jobs, training to be teachers, and so on. The New Left was in touch with people who were themselves moving between classes. A lot of our clubs were in new towns where people had parents who might have been manual workers, but they themselves got a better education, had gone to university, and come back as teachers. Hoggart and Williams, who both were from working-class backgrounds and became intellectuals through the adult education movement, are the classic members of the New Left, representatives of the audiences for the New Left Clubs of readers of the New Left journals. We were more a “new social movement” than a proto-political party. — Stuart Hall, Essential Essays, Volume 2, 783

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the class-formation and cultural-studies genealogy that later Islamophobia analyses inherit — New Left’s class-transition membership prefigures how race/religion overlapped with class mobility in later British sociology.