The Arts of Life: Crosland’s Culture

Abstract

‘The words of the dead are modified in the guts of the living’: to read Anthony Crosland’s The Future of Socialism, in Blair’s Britain, is to recognise the justice of Auden’s words on the death of W.B. Yeats. It is uncanny how easy it is to read parts of Crosland’s classic book as a commentary on New Labour’s project. At times it seems he is simply Our Man in the 1950s, conjugating arguments and debates that are still unresolved. This is of course not to pretend that there are not major differences between now and then. The Future of Socialism was first a matter of very urgent debate within the Labour Party in the second half of the 1950s, a time when the Party had been out of power for some years; when the UK was overwhelmingly working class, at least in numerical terms (72% as late as 1951); when the Cold War was at its height, with the brutal suppression of the Hungarian uprising; and when Britain was trying (and failing) to negotiate a post-colonial identity, in the aftermath of the Suez debâcle.