Amazon.com description: Product Description: This book provides the first sustained examination of the relationship between socialist ideas and the policies of the 1945-51 Labour government. It has frequently been assumed that Labour was essentially opportunist, or that it embraced a cross-party consensus dictated by Keynes and Beveridge. By contrast, this study insists that Labour ministers applied specifically socialist precepts to the exercise of power. Among the areas of policy considered are economic planning, public ownership, social services, profits and taxation, and attitudes towards gender roles and the family. By restoring ideology to a central place in postwar policy-making, it is possible to achieve not merely a much fuller understanding of Labour's most successful administration, but also of the prehistory of the party's more recent issues to redefine its democratic socialist identity.