Even at the height of New Labour’s ascendancy in 1998, Tony Crosland’s writing still carried significance. As the Labour historian Ben Pimlott wrote then: ‘To describe yourself as a “Crosland socialist” still carries meaning … For if much of the Crosland canon seems dated, there remains a core which has increased in relevance with the passage of time.’

In 2013 David Sainsbury, though very much a New Labourite, argued: ‘the recent Labour government suffered from not having a credible, alternative political economy to neoliberalism … no one had produced a new progressive political economy since Tony Crosland wrote The Future of Socialism in 1956.’ Sainsbury argued that New Labour settled for ‘neoliberalism plus an enhanced welfare state’ and by implication owed little to Crosland – although, like many others, Sainsbury oversimplified his message, reducing Crosland’s view of social justice to one word, equality, which he dismissed as not being useful in practical politics.

So how important was Tony Crosland to understanding Labour’s soul, and what if anything has he got to offer that can help Labour’s future and Britain’s future?

Crosland’s most important ministerial achievements were probably in the 1960s. He championed both comprehensive secondary education over a bitterly divisive system of ‘11-plus’ selection, and a binary system of higher education which, alongside traditional universities, featured over 30 polytechnics offering professional vocational education and academic education.

Perhaps more pertinent to Labour’s future – and key to an alternative to contemporary austerity, the central thrust of this book – was his opposition within two separate Labour Cabinets to what he saw as two fatal misjudgements that undermined Labour’s mission by curtailing economic growth. First, in the mid-1960s, what he believed were futile efforts by Harold Wilson, George Brown and Jim Callaghan to shore up sterling and stave off devaluation by deflating the economy through tax rises, a temporary surcharge on imports, and public spending cuts – rendering Labour’s 4 per cent annual economic growth target unattainable.

Crosland insisted that Britain faced a chronic balance of payments deficit, with imports far in excess of exports, and he was emphatic that this could not be corrected at the prevailing exchange rate, because there was a fundamental lack of UK competitiveness.