Identities

Abstract

Socialist culture in the 1950s witnessed a revival of a moral emphasis and ethical language. This was encouraged by perceptions of its absence from the Attlee governments. As early as 1950 Richard Crossman wrote in Socialist Values in a Changing Civilisation, that the Labour government had finished sometime in 1948 or 1949 the job which the Fabians had laid down.’ Whilst the welfare state and nationalized industries had created the means for the good life’, so far as Crossman was concerned, Britain’s values were not as yet socialist. The Attlee governments’ failing had been to be so Fabian: We were all such good organisers’, he judged, but What the ordinary man meant by the socialism of the spirit, the pattern of values, did not occur.’ It was on this, he ventured, Labour now needed to focus.¹