Crosland's Missing Link

Here's something that caught my eye:
Society's decisions impinge heavily on people's private lives as well as on their social and economic welfare; and now they impinge, in my view, in too restrictive and puritanical a manner. I should like to see action taken both to widen opportunities for enjoyment and relaxation, and to diminish existing restrictions on personal freedom .... This becomes manifest when we turn to the more serious question of socially-imposed restrictions on the individual's private life and liberty ... most of these are intolerable, and should be highly offensive to socialists, in whose blood there should always run a trace of the anarchist and the libertarian, and not too much of the prig and the prude.*
The extract is from Anthony Crosland*; it struck me as incongruous in a book called New Labour's Old Roots: Revisionist Thinkers in Labour's History 1930-1997. If Crosland didn't really 'get it' on the question of socialism, New Labour also missed the memo on personal freedom.




*'Liberty and Gaiety in Private Life: the Need for a Reaction Against the Fabian Tradition' (from 'The Meaning of Socialism' in The Future of Socialism (Cape, 1956) reprinted in Diamond, p93.