Fifty years ago, Labour produced its only complete work of political theory: The Future of Socialism by Anthony Crosland. It sought, over 500 pages, to create a synthesis of economic and political theory and pragmatic policy proposals in a way that no Labour politician had tried before or since.
Compared to today's Labour cabinet, which has only one intellectual in it (see News & Curiosities), the Labour cabinets of the 1960s were studded with Oxford dons, serious thinkers and fully qualified economists, of whom Crosland was a star example. In contrast to European social democracy, where sociology was the discipline that held the key to left politics, British Labour in the 20th century remained wedded to economics. Hugh Dalton, Harold Wilson, Hugh Gaitskell and Crosland were all trained economists. Michael Young tried to get the postwar left interested in sociology, but his writing had little direct influence on policy in the 1960s and 1970s, when Labour held office for five-year periods.
The success of New Labour lay in part in its willingness to stop listening to economists and start listening to sociologists like Anthony Giddens. The closest we have to a contemporary Michael Young is Geoff Mulgan, who trained as a structuralist under Colin MacCabe at Cambridge (as, curiously, did the brilliant rightist ideologue, Simon Heffer). Mulgan's endless sociological curiosity informed much of Gordon Brown's writing in the key years after 1990, during which Mulgan worked for him. Mulgan went on to run the Downing Street policy unit for Tony Blair. Labour's success in winning and holding power lies in the triumph of Weber over the Webbs.
Not so in the 1950s. Back then there was still something called socialism, which not only had a future but could be arrived at if the correct policies were followed. Nonetheless, Crosland was cross with militants, quoting Strindberg's Olof at them in his book: "It was not victory I wanted, it was the battle!" and noting that, "Labour governments… found responsibility harsher and quite different from anything they expected." Blair and Brown might say "amen" to that, as former cabinet ministers fill the Today programme with appeals to return to battle. In 1956, it was Crosland's task not to warn of the difficulties of power but to exult in how Labour might advance to socialism. So he devotes hundreds of pages to the need for redistributive taxation and for greater government regulation of business. But at the time, Crosland was seeking to educate Labour out of its 1940s worldview, which saw state ownership and planning as the only way forward. "We no doubt want more nationalisation than we now have. But I at least do not want a steadily extending chain of state monopolies, believing this to be bad for liberty," he wrote.
Crosland's book remains a pleasure to read, even over 500 pages. He has a discursive style that has since disappeared—modern political writing resembles books of sermons, hectoring readers and telling them what to think and do. Crosland is Panglossian, almost proto-Cameronite in his dismissal of economic growth and his embrace of happiness as the goal of politics. "We stand, in Britain, on the threshold of mass abundance; and within a decade the average family will enjoy a standard of living which… will certainly convince the reformer that he should turn his main attention elsewhere." Alas, poor Tony. In the 1960s, it was precisely the absence of that growth which allows for extra public spending without raising taxes that derailed both Labour governments Crosland served in. In 1960, a worker on average wages paid 8 per cent of his income in tax. By 1970, workers paid 20 per cent of their income in tax. Labour voters moved from the "You've never had it so good" decade of Macmillan to the "You've never been so highly taxed" decade of Wilson. Today, a socialist theory of tax cuts is urgently needed, as there is growing European and international evidence that reducing tax on earned income is one of the surest ways of increasing growth and getting money flowing into the public sector.
In the 1950s, British Labour did not need to learn from abroad. One of the oddest absences from The Future of Socialism is any discussion of what is happening in other countries. Island Britain still existed alone unto itself.
But in a marvellous section entitled "Liberty and Gaiety in Private Life; the Need for a Reaction against the Fabian Tradition," Crosland called for "more open-air cafés, brighter and gayer streets at night, later closing hours for public houses… better designs for furniture and women's clothes." He also called for relaxed divorce laws and the legalisation of homosexual relationships, which at the time were not high Labour priorities. In the drab, waistcoated and pipe-smoking Labour party of the 1950s, this was shocking stuff.
Crosland's other sustained argument was on secondary education, which he saw then, as it is now, as the Achilles heel of building a reformist, classless, creative Britain. In his book, he called for 75 per cent of all places in private schools to be given to a range of pupils from all backgrounds. Comprehensive schools should be based on streaming by ability. Crosland would turn theory into practice when he became education secretary in 1965. His famous circular 10/65, which "requested" local education authorities to move toward comprehensive education, is today widely recognised as a disaster. His junior minister, the much tougher, more experienced Reg Prentice, begged Crosland to make the verb "required," not "requested"—an order, not a plea. Crosland refused. As a result, instead of a major reorganisation of education on a par with the creation of the NHS after 1945, the move to comprehensive schooling was a long drawn-out agony, with a leakage of richer families to private schools.
Today we have an apartheid secondary education system as a result of Crosland's botched reform. The metropolitan elites reject state secondary education for their own children. So in the one area where Crosland did try to lead Labour away from the economism that dominated Labourist ideology until the 1990s, his theory was excellent but his practice was a disaster.
Harold Wilson used to boast he had more Oxford firsts in his cabinet than any previous administration. Today's Labour government has no one who has written anything of the sweep and power of Crosland's The Future of Socialism. But even with current local difficulties, Labour ministers appear to be making a better fist of reforming and running the country than their intellectually more distinguished predecessors. The half century of The Future of Socialism will be celebrated with conferences, lectures and seminars. But the end of the reign of economists in Labour's top ranks liberated the party by 1997 to become more reformist and innovative and, paradoxically, able to run the economy better than Crosland ever managed. As we enter the post-New Labour era, though, it would be good to have any book on Labour's future with half the ambition and style of The Future of Socialism.
