WHAT ANTHONY CROSLAND CAN TEACH LABOUR DAN HARRISON
Today, the Labour Party suffers from a blatant deficiency. We lack a moral mission. Our leader lacks a clear goal that he seeks to achieve. Sir Keir Starmer often quotes his favourite Labour Party leader Harold Wilson when he says that "The Labour Party is a moral crusade or it is nothing", but there is still insufficient evidence that Starmer is leading a moral crusade. Starmer should draw attention to another Wilson quote. During the Labour Party conference in 1963 Wilson, using exciting rhetoric, spoke of the need to forge a new Britain in the "white heat of this revolution". Boldly declaring that 'we are redefining and redefining our socialism in terms of scientific revolution', Wilson illustrated how the Labour Party could be nimble and adaptable, not by trying to stem the tide of change, but by shaping it so that those changes reflected our socialist values.
But in this article I want to focus not on Wilson but on Anthony Crosland, Labour's greatest intellectual and author of The Future of Socialism, published in 1956. I believe that Crosland offers relevant lessons to today's party. Crosland may not have been a serial election winner like Wilson or Blair, but he was a profound thinker who thought about the Labour Party not only in political or economic terms but also in cultural, sociological and anthropological terms. He combined his fierce intellectualism with practical ministerial experience, holding posts as minister of education, environment, local government and foreign affairs. After the Second World War, he graduated with a first-class honours degree in PPE in just twelve months and became a professor at Oxford, teaching economics. In 1959, 8
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he became MP for Great Grimsby and served that constituency until his sudden death in 1977. He was the epitome of the coalition that held the Labour Party together, the Hull-Hampstead alliance, as this Oxford don represented the industrial fishing port of Grimsby. His seminal work, ‘The Future of Socialism,’ must be re-examined today so that Labour can restate its socialism and make it a doctrine of ideas fit for the twenty-first century.
Firstly, Crosland demanded that the party adopt a revisionist way of thinking. He wrote that "revisionism draws attention to a new reality. When society lacks "certainty" and "simplicity", and mistakes are no longer as obvious as before, and the problems facing society are "complex" and "ambiguous", Crosland believed that the response of the left should not be to "seek refuge in the slogans and ideas of 50 years ago", but to face up to the new reality. This approach can be applied to Britain today. The country faces daunting challenges: a
