ABSTRACT
Socialism has gained breadth by picking up interesting and important parts of various of the nineteenth- and twentieth-century schools of thought. Ideologies are more akin to political parties than to philosophies, and the ideology of the British Labour Party is, like the party itself, a tumultuous alliance of diverse parts. Since 1906, the Labour Party has been committed to parliamentary politics; it has been committed to the long chain of reasoning which leads from working people voting Labour to the establishment of socialism in Britain by a Labour government. The truth is that Labour showed little resistance to Liberal economic doctrine. In 1945, the first majority Labour government inherited machinery, part of which accorded with venerated socialist sympathies. Governments have taken over responsibility for financing some heads of expenditure about which there is no non-arbitrary way of measuring success. The operation of the national health service provides additional examples of the problems of rationally planning government expenditure.
