Britain | Bagehot

Britain’s Labour Party has forgotten how to be nice

Small sums can have disproportionate effects on the public realm

Illustration of a red budget box with the NHS, the British Museum and closed shops coming out of it
Illustration: Nate Kitch

In 1956 Anthony Crosland, a Labour Party thinker, called for “a brighter, more colourful country”. It was not enough, he wrote, for a Labour government merely to increase exports or old-age pensions. Britain must have “more open-air cafés, brighter and gayer streets at night…more riverside cafés…more murals and pictures in public places…statues in the centre of new housing-estates, better-designed street-lamps and telephone kiosks, and so on ad infinitum”.

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This article appeared in the Britain section of the print edition under the headline “Brighten up”

From the November 2nd 2024 edition

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