Jo Grimond and the Unservile State

Abstract

It was not merely the Socialist Left which was exploring a republican politics of participation. In an interview in the Observer immediately after the 1959 election, Jo Grimond, the Liberal leader, called for radicals in the Liberal and Labour Parties to make a new appeal to ordinary people to take an active part in political life. Asked how a Socialist party could cooperate with a non-Socialist one, he replied that ‘there might be a bridge between Socialism and the Liberal policy of co-ownership in industry through a type of syndicalism coupled with a nonconformist outlook such as was propounded on many issues by George Orwell’.¹ Industrial democracy and a tolerance of dissent, which were also distinctive marks of the New Left, were symptoms of a change in ideological thinking in Britain which was not confined to the socialist movement.