The best example that I've seen of Democratic Socialism operating in this country was during the Second World War. Then we ran Britain highly efficiently, got everybody into a job. It wasn't so difficult then to employ people who were disabled and in difficulties and all the rest of it. We wanted to use all their efforts, and we found the money to do it. We also produced, I would have thought, probably more than any other country including Germany.

We mobilised better! The conscription of labour was only a very small element of it. We also did what I think we ought to do on a far greater scale now, looking after the people who are worst hit. In the war, instead of saying because (the country) is in extreme circumstances you've got to cut the pay of the people who are worst off, they did the opposite. They increased pensions, social security. It was a democratic society with a common aim in which many of the class barriers were being broken down. Many of us thought we would never return to a society in which class barriers were rebuilt. Many of them have been. And many of those class barriers are the very things which have injured the community since.