ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that the problem was not Labour's understanding of contemporary Britain, but rather the difficulties that the party experienced in trying to choose an appropriate response to the 'age of affluence'. It illustrates the diversity of Labour's reactions to affluence through the work of one of the party's most influential thinkers, Anthony Crosland. Crosland's significance to the study of the 'affluent society' was the marriage of affluence and socialism. Crosland saw an opportunity to use the resources of the affluent society to enrich Britons both culturally and materially. During the 1950s and early 1960s, there were real differences among British socialists over appropriate responses to the 'affluent society'. Many socialists, Crosland again lamented, still believed that the road to the New Jerusalem was marked out by 'total abstinence and a good filing-system.' Webb tradition is a tradition of total indifference to art and beauty and freedom and radical individualism, a tradition of unnatural morality and priggish Puritanism.
