Those who search diligently enough through the dust-covered boxes in the lumber room of old Labour ideas will generally find what they came looking for. Writers of almost every disposition – from hopeful flat-earthers to scheme-mongering crypto-fascists – have at some time or another ventured an essay on ‘Labour and the way forward’. Whether these are hidden treasures or well deserving of their long-standing neglect, there is plenty to choose from. As with all Labour Party history, this rather selective searching is almost always undertaken with a very presentist and political intent. This chapter is one more example. I do not pretend that the story I tell is the true story of Labour's ideational past, though I would say that the contrasting Blair-Giddens account of ‘old Labour’ is something of a caricature. I will argue that, for all their failings, many earlier Labour thinkers (and not just those on the fringes of the party) were well aware of the challenges of effecting gradual change in a capitalist economy and society. They often recognised that wealth was more important than income. They saw that there were limits to what a progressive taxation system could do. They did not think that a slowly expanding welfare state could go on indefinitely eroding (class) privilege, if prevailing patterns of ownership were left untouched. In government, and for completely understandable reasons, Labour almost always ended up doing, rather messily, what it incrementally could – and tended to tell itself a comforting story about how this made things (at least a little bit) better. In this most unbookish of parties, if it needed a source it might well turn to Crosland's Future of Socialism (without looking too closely at the text). But there was much more and else in the Labour backstory and, despite our very changed times, that something else matters as much now as it ever has.

‘Old’ Labour

The attitude to state ownership and to state welfare that critics advocating a Third Way see as the abiding weakness of an ‘old’ Labour way can certainly be found.