At key junctures in British political history, the most gifted politicians have exerted a decisive influence on the future direction of their parties. This book examines the impact of one political figure and socialist theoretician, the former Cabinet Minister, Anthony Crosland, now best remembered as the author of The Future of Socialism. Crosland played a pivotal role in recasting the Labour party’s identity and doctrine in the decades following the Second World War. Sixty years on, the re-examination of Crosland’s ideas is particularly apposite as the current Labour party undergoes a dramatic change in its philosophy and political trajectory from New Labour under Tony Blair and Gordon Brown in the 1990s to fresh leadership in the 2010s and beyond. The scale of Labour’s 2015 poll disaster plunged the party into despair, but the crisis in Labour’s fortunes was evident as the financial crash in 2008 and subsequent electoral defeats underlined the party’s abject failure to revitalise the social democratic project.

Against that backdrop, this book addresses Crosland’s influence on ideological change in the Labour party over the last 60 years. His effort to remake the party was inevitably a contentious and fraught process while the impact of revisionism was uneven and provisional. At crucial turning-points in the 1970s and 1980s, the party chose to ignore Crosland’s most resounding message: Labour must retain an original ‘cast of mind’ distinguishing between ‘means’ and ‘ends’, facing up to the consequences of a changing economy and society. At times, the fault lay squarely with Crosland’s generation who were unwilling to confront the ‘forces of conservatism’ within the British labour movement. Their deferential attitude towards the organised working class encapsulated in the symbols and myths of Labour’s ‘proletarian sectionalism’ hindered the full development of the revisionist project. The willingness to speak truth to power with unflinching honesty captured in Crosland’s confrontation with the Fabian legacy of Sidney and Beatrice Webb was qualified by abiding affection for, and loyalty towards, the ascendant institutions and prevailing cultures of the labour movement. This contradiction inhibited ongoing revision of the party’s doctrine and policies, preventing Labour from evolving into a social democratic party at the cutting edge of the new society. Any historian of the labour movement must be alive to subtleties and contradictions.