I recently purchased a golden oldie in the form of "Which Way? Thirteen dialogues on choices facing Britain". Edited by Michael Ivens and Clive Bradley, it was published in London by Michael Joseph Limited way back in 1970.

The format is simple - take a writer or politician from left and right, and invite them to write a short essay on issues such as nationalisation, tax, housing, education through to international issues. Each writer is also allowed a brief reply to their opponents text. The format works beautifully and there are some big names - Enoch Powell and Ian Mikardo being the most obvious. Some of those 1970 debates continue - most notbaly there is a chapter headed "Common market or NAFTA?" particularly apt as Keir Starmer appears set to drag the UK as close to the European Union as he feels he can get us. Others - such as the Cold War "East versus west" have been dated for a generation, although it is stimulating to be reminded of a time when Moscow and Beijing were on poor terms.
Most of the authors of course are no longer with us, although Michael Wynn Jones (better known now as Mr Delia Smith) enjoyed a high public profile until 2024 as one of the owners of Norwich City. One of the best-written commentaries is by T Dan Smith described as "Chairman of the Northern Economic Planning Council" who writes on government, parliament and technology. In 1970 Smith was just a few years from being brought down in a corruption scandal that led to his imprisonment. There is enough here in his cogent arguments on the importance of planning and development to suggest that this was an outcome that was far more than a personal tragedy.
What is notably missing from "Which Way?" is anything resembling the type of culture wars which so dominate contemporary debate. Perhaps we were more serious then, as a people? Arguments about transexuals, statues, renaming roads or decolonising school curriculums were peripheral in the early 1970s, if they existed at all. Identity politics in that era primarily meant one thing - class - the subject, naturally of a chapter all to itself.
The final section - "What kind of future?" features the late Conservative journalist T E Utley. Here I think we find some structure for the debates of 2025 and beyond. Utley writes:
"In Britain the nation does not exist by virtue of the State; the state exists and is capable of activity by reason of the fact that it presides over a nation." (p.261)
When even a north London leftie lawyer like Sir Keir Starmer begins to realise that this country has been changed too much, too fast, by immigration, Utley's words carry weight. Until we work out how to be a nation again, we are some years away from producing an update to the type of debates in the pages of "Which Way?" They can only really feature in societies with a degree of commonality.
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