In the early twentieth century, R. H. Tawney argued that questions of ideology go against the grain of our national psyche. As a country we are “incurious to theory, take fundamentals for granted, and are more interested in the state of the roads than in their place on a map”, he wrote in The Acquisitive Society (1920).

There’s much about our present political moment that further strengthens these practical instincts. The pace of Labour’s political turnaround in recent years means there has not been much space for reflective conversations about the nature of social democracy. But as Tawney went on to say, “it is not enough to follow the road. It is necessary to know where it leads.” 

This maxim is particularly important when in government. At the end of Labour’s last period in office, James Purnell and Graeme Cooke, writing in a 2010 paper for Demos, reflected that New Labour’s “ideological flexibility” brought the party “three major disadvantages in government”. It didn’t help prioritise when faced with difficult choices. It created “blind spots” that left important issues on the back burner. And, with no clear thread to connect policies together, it made it hard to create an enduring electoral coalition.

Keir Starmer himself is dispositionally disinclined towards the ideological – he has repeatedly said there is no such thing as “Starmerism”. What’s more, his government is now under huge and urgent pressure to “deliver change” in the most challenging of circumstances. As such, the bandwidth for big ideas feels even more constrained. 

However, it’s not that the wider party doesn’t have them. The Fabian Society – where I used to work – has always been a key source, home to a rich intellectual tradition that has been central to Labour thinking over the course of its 140-year history. The Fabians are most associated with the big state, ‘democratic collectivism’ of Sidney and Beatrice Webb. However, in a recent Fabian pamphlet, I argued that there are two other strands of the Fabian tradition that are more relevant for the Left today. 

The first is revisionism, whereby each generation of social democrats has sought to consider the appropriate ‘means’ by which their ultimate ‘ends’ can be achieved in modern conditions.

The second strand is the Fabian communitarians – most notably G. D. H. Cole and R. H. Tawney – whose theory of change was rooted in the power of local people and the relationships they form with each other. While communitarianism has long been part of the Fabian story, it has tended to be a subplot. But the big state has been struggling for some time to get to grips with the complex nature of contemporary problems. So the time has come to reverse the balance of history and make the communitarians the mainstream of social democratic ideas today.   

The Case For Revisionism

Anthony Crosland remains a heroic figure for social democrats nearly 70 years after he published what still endures as the apotheosis of revisionist social democracy – The Future of Socialism.

Crosland was writing after the seismic impact of Clement Attlee’s Labour government, which had transformed Britain and brought it to a point of broadly social democratic political consensus. In Crosland’s view, “a rather high proportion of traditional objectives” were now “substantially achieved” – such as the elimination of “primary poverty” and the achievement of full employment.

This meant the Left was wasting energy fighting battles that were already won. Crosland bemoaned “conservative or indolent-minded people on the left, [who,] finding the contemporary scene too puzzling and unable to mould it into the old familiar categories, are inclined to seek refuge in the slogans and ideas of 50 years ago.” There was, therefore, “the need for a restatement”. For Crosland, this famously reframed social democracy around the “ends” of equality over the “means” of nationalisation.

There have been endless debates about the ongoing applicability of Crosland’s ideas. But, most of all, what he teaches us is the need for precise thinking. The great triumph of The Future of Socialism is that it provides social democrats with a framework for thinking through what they want to achieve and how best to do it in the times they live in. 

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Crosland trawled the “traditions of British socialism” to pull out five “basic socialist aspirations” by which the creed and its correct contemporary focus can be comprehensively assessed. He put his focus on two aspirations in particular – social welfare and greater equality – but less often discussed is what he calls “the co-operative aspiration…a rejection of competitive antagonism, and an ideal of fraternity and co-operation”. 

As he explains, he tackles it first “in order to get it out the way – not because I think its content less important, but simply because I find it impossible to reach a definite conclusion about its relevance in contemporary conditions”. 

This lack of certainty was because Crosland could not be sure how the changing nature of the post-war economy was playing out. He clearly had his suspicions about the extent to which nationalisation was really putting power in people’s hands; he wrote that “the scale is too large, and the distances too remote”. He recognised that “public ownership is not enough. We might even require a complete devolution and fragmentation of economic activity down to a local scale”. Yet he backed away from developing this thought on grounds of practicality, along with the telltale fear of the managerialist that small groups will act in self-serving and uncooperative ways. 

Crosland would have liked to be able to “harness the group instinct in such a way as to create the desired social and co-operative atmosphere”, lamenting that, “unfortunately, we scarcely know in detail how this is to be done”.

The good news for social democrats today is that we do now know lots about this. There is a distinctive intellectual tradition to draw on, developed over the years within the Fabian Society. We have good examples of how the last Labour government put some of it into practice. What’s more, during Labour’s time in opposition from 2010, there was a rich seam of ideas development, policy thinking, and practical experimentation, which makes a strong case that it is a community-centred social democracy that is the most appropriate focus for the Left today. If writing now, I’d argue Crosland would surely have thought much harder about the communitarian aspect of The Future of Socialism. 

‍Communitarianism and the Fabian Tradition

Crosland’s ultimate dismissal of the messiness of community helps us explain why the dominant Fabian tradition has been – to follow David Marquand’s formulation – the ‘democratic collectivism’ of the Webbs, over the ‘democratic republicanism’ of G. D. H. Cole and R. H. Tawney. As Marquand explains in Britain Since 1918 (2008): “Most democratic collectivists were content with the existing state… for them it was an agent of social transformation, guided by science, reason and their own grasp of the dynamics of historical change”. 

The democratic republicans, on the other hand, were “the awkward squad of British democracy”. While they shared the democratic collectivists’ commitment to equality, “they interpreted that slippery term in a different way. They were for fellowship and dignity more than economic equality. They put their faith in the kinetic energy of ordinary citizens, and rejected the determinism that lay at the heart of the democratic collectivist tradition”. 

If the Webbs are emblematic of the democratic collectivists, then G. D. H. Cole is the figurehead for the democratic republicans within the Fabian tradition. As his biographer Tony Wright puts it, Cole combined a critique of an overbearing state with the trade union movement’s assault on capitalism, to produce “an exciting and innovative synthesis … It was a world in which people would not have things done to them or for them, whether by capitalists or bureaucrats, but one in which they would organise things for themselves.” 

Here the role of the state is still important and proactive, but it is to shape and support, rather than control and deliver. Wright explains that, for Cole, the state is “an agency of expression for the organised will of the community”, but it is “one functional association amongst others”; part of the mixture, rather than the whole of the cake. 

The other key Fabian communitarian, R. H. Tawney, wrote in his 1944 essay, ‘We Mean Freedom’, that freedom can only be understood “as part of the prose of everyday life”. It can’t be conceived “in the abstract, divorced from the realities of time and place.” It means being able to make real choices, in real life, in the context of relationships with other people. 

As James Purnell and Graeme Cooke explain, Tawney’s goal is “real freedom, the power to do”, and his crucial insight is that “we can only reach our potential if we help each other”. 

So while the dominant strain of Fabian thinking is the democratic collectivism of the Webbs, its main intellectual opposition came from within the Society itself. I believe it is this second strain of thought that social democrats should draw on most clearly today. 

Cometh the Communitarians 

Since 2010, there has been a growing sense that communitarianism’s time has come. New Labour dabbled in it – neighbourhood renewal, support for community ownership, double devolution – but as Guy Lodge and Rick Muir described for Political Quarterly, its essential character was “centralist, statist and top down.” However, in opposition, a communitarian critique emerged, as discussed by Purnell and Cooke, arguing that New Labour had been “too hands off with the market and too hands on with the state”. They argued that twenty-first-century revisionists should be looking to Tawney and keeping equality as social democracy’s lodestar, but reframing it around equality of power. 

From this, a new communitarian vision began to develop. Blue Labour lit the touchpaper of the debate. Over time, it tended to foreground its social conservatism, but this often obscured the richness and breadth of the ideas, such as Maurice Glasman’s critique of capitalism and the limitations of New Labour’s reliance on “the state as the exclusive instrument of economic regulation”, and Marc Stears’ radical democratic agenda.  

Stears went on to help shape the idea of a more “relational state”, which understood that states may be good at providing standardised solutions at scale, but are less useful when nuance and flexibility are required. In a world of complex problems, the state therefore needed to reshape itself to harness the catalytic energy of local communities, rather than maintain the command and control of New Public Management. 

Communitarianism also shaped innovative thinking on the economy during Labour’s long years in opposition. The ‘foundational economy’ pulled focus towards improving the large number of jobs across foundational sectors like retail, hospitality, and care, rather than a strategy that’s solely focused on shiny new infrastructure or big tech innovation. ‘Community wealth building’ saw Labour councils harness the spending power of their local ‘anchor institutions’ and direct it to community benefit. 

The Shape of Things to Come

It is increasingly argued that the Labour government needs a clearer ideological direction, something to bring together disparate policies and tell a bigger story about what it wants to do with power. While the pace and pressures of office militate against deep ideas debates, there is a clear roadmap that’s ready to go. It draws on a long Labour lineage, in the communitarian thinking of G. D. H. Cole and R. H. Tawney. It was there in the background of New Labour in office, and then went on to lead the way in opposition. 

It is now well-placed to shape a practical policy agenda that responds to the big challenges of our times, spreading power across the foundations of our economy, our public services, and our democracy.  

It’s time the Left moved communitarianism from the margins to the mainstream to make it the core means of achieving its mission in 2025 and beyond.    

This is an extracted version of ‘Social Democracy Now: Why communitarianism provides the roadmap the left needs today’, published by the Fabian Society in April 2025.

Ed Wallis is director of policy and engagement at Locality. He was previously editorial director and senior research fellow at the Fabian Society. He writes here in a personal capacity.