Throughout my life, my work and writing have reflected an interest in the future, that is, in the changing anticipations at different points in the century. They also express two dominant moods. The first is radical, restless and optimistic. For the six years from 1945 to 1951, I was the head of the Labour Party's Research Department and involved in policy making for the most radical democratic government of the century. The Manifesto for the 1945 Election, which I helped to write, was called 'Let Us Face The Future.' It reads now very much as a period piece, and of course it is; but it worked - the entire programme was put into action - and the experience gave me a taste both for conjecture and acting on it. Our particular brave new world of those years was no dystopia. A better future for Britain was in the offing, and likewise for the British territories in the Indian, Asian and African continents which the Labour Government propelled towards independence.
My Labour Party pamphlet, 'Small Man, Big World', belonged to that period. I thought that big government, like big business or big unionism, was a threat to democracy, since democracy could flourish best in small groups built to the scale of the individual. But I still had faith that one only had to hammer away at such obvious truths and in the end governments would have to give way, that is, give away some of their power.
I formed another, to get the Open University set up - this was unfortunately too expensive for anyone except the government to finance - so we campaigned for the government to do just that, which eventually it did. I was prompted to push for it partly by the satire, intended to be deadly serious as well as funny, embodied in my book, 'The Rise of the Meritocracy.' The meritocratic elite of the future was to be open only to those who could as children sail through one examination after another. The Open University was, and is, to be open to anyone, with or without qualification.
These two campaigns have been successful. Not so one launched, as a follow-up to the Open University, by the International Extension College. Under its aegis a small chain of new colleges has been started in Africa, consultancy work done in dozens of Third World countries, and a World Refugee College established in 1980 as an offshoot. But the goal was perhaps too ambitious. It was to create as an alternative to orthodox schools a dense network of 'radio colleges' which would be open to anyone and which would also not be exam-ridden. The people to benefit would be the hundreds of millions of children and adults, who, as things are, get no schooling at all. But how can they be organised? If there is a way we have not found it yet.
Single-issue politics cannot, however, ever oust ordinary humdrum politics. I have never completely abandoned my hopes for the latter, and, whether with hopes or without them, the state of political life of any nation must never be neglected. This was without any longer expecting any worthwhile general reforms to come from either of the established parties. A new progressive party was different. I put in a plea for one in 1960 and helped to found one in 1981: the Social Democratic Party. Less institutionalised than the old parties, with roots not going so deep in history, the new party was intended to be more receptive to new thinking.
My other mood is less aerated, less optimistic, more concerned with the prevention of further decline than with the achievement of further progress. The purpose is conservation. This mood was first struck in my books on the family. 'Family and Kinship in East London' was about the threat posed by 'progress' to extended families which, until they became the victims of housing policies, had proved their resilience, as I hope they will again. The immediate family has also been under threat, and, if it were not able to resist, the whole of our marvellous civilisation would crumble within a generation or two. Nothing is more important than the conservation of the family and what remains of active community life. The broader conservationist or ecological movement needs to encompass them both.
'Eternity is in love with the productions of time.'