Britain was still undergoing post-war reconstruction when Tony Crosland wrote The Future of Socialism. The West European economies had benefited from American assistance through the European Recovery Program (the ‘Marshall Plan’) in rebuilding their shattered economies. The balance between state-led and market-led initiatives differed from nation to nation: more nationalisation and state intervention in France, more reliance on private enterprise in West Germany, for instance.

In Britain the government took on new responsibilities, both in promoting prosperity and in supporting social change as our ‘mixed economy’ emerged. For instance, it built record numbers of council houses and regulated consumer credit through controls on hire purchase and mortgage lending. Fortunately for Britain the terms of trade (how much we had to export to pay for a given volume of imports) moved in our favour during the 1950s, helping the economy to grow and giving living standards a boost as a consumer boom began, with ordinary families getting cars, fridges, TV sets and washing machines for the first time.

The part played by government continued to evolve in the decades that followed. Crosland would have approved of how the pattern of government spending changed under New Labour between 1997 and 2010, and of how it illustrated government’s key role in pursuing socialist objectives.

According to the Institute for Fiscal Studies, over the period 1998–99 to 2010–11, there was a doubling in real terms of spending on health from £63 billion to £121 billion – an average annual real growth of 5.6 per cent as New Labour raised UK health spending closer to international levels, dramatically improved service standards like waiting times, and dealt with demographic and relative inflation pressures: all completely consistent with the socialist values espoused by Crosland.

New Labour also managed to switch spending from the costs of failure to investing in success. The big increases in shares of total public spending were health and education. The main falls were debt interest, defence and social protection (ie social security benefits, including tax credits and state pensions, whose combined share fell by 1.3 per cent, due in part to record employment levels).

However, in common with all governments since the late 1970s, there were cuts in the shares of total public spending on social housing (aggravating housing shortages), trade, industry, energy, employment and the environment (all key to economic progress).