Tempora mutantur, et nos mutamur in illis (‘Times change and we will change with them’). (Revisionist credo)

Socialism, as I see it, is a society where everyone starts equal with an equal chance and there are no upper and lower classes…it should mean a state of affairs in which every single citizen has the chance to live the same sort of graceful, cultured and comfortable life that only the lucky few can live today: a life with beauty in it, with leisure in it, with art in it, the sort of life that William Morris wrote about and longed for: in which people can forget about all these miserable economic problems and concentrate on the things that really matter. (Anthony Crosland, 19501)

The most fundamental ideal of those who shared his outlook was social justice – but it was an ideal in no way inspired by class hatred. They were equally devoted to democracy and personal freedom. They were for the rational and practical, and suspicious of large general ideas which on examination turned out to have no precise content…They wanted to get results.

They were realistic in politics and critical of armchair politicians who, not understanding what the British electorate was really like, were forever making bad judgements. Above all, while accepting the ultimate emotional basis of moral valuation, they had great faith in the power of reason both to find the answers to social problems and to persuade men to see the light. They were for the pursuit of truth to the bitter end, through the patient and unswerving application of logical thought. They wanted no barriers of prejudice to obstruct the free working of the mind or blunt the sharp edge of intellectual integrity. (Hugh Gaitskell, 19552)