Luxury and necessity, vice and virtue, use and abuse, productive and unproductive – these traditional dichotomies all continued to inform debates about consumption throughout the twentieth century, particularly those of the British Left. While necessity implied a set of rights to a basic standard of living around which citizenship and socialism could be built, luxury remained more problematic. It could either represent, in the classical sense, the vampirism of the aristocracy and futile status seeking of the bourgeoisie, else it connoted the dehumanising standardisation and compensatory pleasures of the mass market ‘culture industry’. If the former moulded political prejudices, the latter, for many left-wing intellectuals at least, only weakened the class struggle through distraction and false consciousness. Yet throughout the 1940s the politics of consumption underwent a number of important changes, where such polarised divisions lost their social validity. Firstly, wartime controls saw unprecedented state intervention in supply, distribution and consumption, stretching the sphere of government activity well beyond the usual boundaries of bread and milk. Secondly, if this really was a ‘people's war’, then the consuming desires of these people had to be considered. Even before the spread of affluence in the 1950s, politicians had to address the issue of wants not needs, and of the rights of consumers to the cheap luxuries, conveniences, customs and simple pleasures of the mass market which they had enjoyed for at least half a century.