Equality of Outcome

Crosland wanted to see a ‘classless society’ in place of the ‘deep-seated class stratification’ that was, in his view, so powerful a cause of ‘social resentment’, so great an obstacle to ‘uninhibited mingling’.1 Expressing his regret that Britain despite the Attlee Government remained ‘the most class-ridden country in the world’,2 he set out in the contented ‘50s to design a socialist future in which the national unity of the spirit of Dunkirk could flourish even without the equalising randomness of the bombing and the evacuation. Crosland made much of the extent to which wartime conflict had fostered the sensation of sharing and belonging in place of the ‘feelings of envy and inferiority’3 that a less egalitarian environment is capable so easily of exciting. Taking the view that ‘the basic philosophy is the right one in peace as well as in war’,4 he put forward proposals for reform such as would make British society less divided by past privilege, more integrated by a nationhood that transcended class.