Anthony Crosland was born on 29 August 1918 and educated at Highgate School and Oxford. The Second World War interrupted his studies, and he served with the 1st Airborne Division before returning to Oxford, where he took up a college fellowship and taught. He entered Parliament in 1950 as Labour member for South Gloucestershire, was out of the Commons after 1955, and in 1959 won Grimsby, which he represented until his death. He belonged to the revisionist wing of the party around Hugh Gaitskell.
His reputation rests on The Future of Socialism (1956). The book argued that postwar capitalism had changed so much that the old socialist program no longer fit it. Marx, he wrote, had little or nothing to offer the contemporary socialist, whether in practical policy, in the analysis of society, or in conceptual tools. Public ownership, in his account, was a means that had been mistaken for an end. The end was equality, to be pursued through economic growth, higher public spending and reform of the institutions that sorted people by class. He did not share the left's suspicion of affluence: "Generally, I have never been able to see why high consumption and brotherly love should be incompatible." He followed the book with The Conservative Enemy (1962) and Socialism Now (1974), and in the second summed up the dividing line: "we rightly say that equality and higher public expenditure are what divide us from the Tories."
As Secretary of State for Education from 1965 to 1967 he put the argument into practice. Circular 10/65, dated 12 July 1965, stated that "It is the Government's declared objective to end selection at eleven plus and to eliminate separatism in secondary education," and asked local authorities to submit plans to reorganize their schools on comprehensive lines. The historian Ben Pimlott noted that the circular "requested but did not require" those plans. In the same period Crosland established a new tier of higher education, the polytechnics.
He went on to serve as President of the Board of Trade from 1967 to 1969, then as Secretary of State for Local Government and Regional Planning from 1969 to 1970 and, in Harold Wilson's second government, as Secretary of State for the Environment. He stood for the party leadership in 1976 and received a low vote. He became Foreign Secretary that year and died of a stroke on 19 February 1977, at the age of 58, while still in the post.
Anthony Crosland is associated with Establishment Progressive. See the archetype