The Fabian fringe in Manchester opened with a celebration of the 50th anniversary edition of Tony Crosland's Future of Socialism, examining how its vision of equality and reform could influence Labour's next generation agenda.

Austin Mitchell, Crosland's successor as MP for Grimsby, chaired the session having hosted the Fabian Northern Conference the previous week in Grimsby, which had discussed in more detail the relevance of Crosland's ideas on revisionism, on education and on inequality to Labour's future politics.

Dick Leonard, editor of the 50th anniversary edition of The Future of Socialism, opened the meeting, recalling how he had met Tony Crosland through the Fabian Society before going on to work closely with him in parliament and government. Crosland had been the leading Fabian of his generation, said Leonard, although he had been very clear that his Fabianism was different from that of the Webbs, as in his famous assertion in the book that Total abstinence and a good filing-system are not now the right sign-posts to the socialist Utopia: or at least if they are, some of us will fall by the wayside'.

Leonard spoke of how Crosland's vision of social democracy was inspired by both the openness and dynamism of the United States, and the egalitarian ethos of Sweden – and how he had resisted pressure from friends to 'tone down' his enthusiasm for features of America. While the policy proposals of fifty years ago were of limited interest - some had been tried and succeeded; others had been tried and failed – what remained central was Crosland's vision of the values underpinning social democracy, and the quest for a more equal society in which opportunities and freedom were spread more fairly.

Ed Miliband MP read from and discussed Crosland's account of equality, highlighting that Crosland believed that we remained very far from true equality of opportunity, a perhaps unattainable goal, but also that 'equality of opportunity is not enough'.

'Crosland worried about the impact of replacing "one remote elite (based on lineage) by a new one (based on ability and intelligence)". While a system based on ability and intelligence was to be preferred, he wrote"…If the inequality of rewards is excessively great, the creation of equal opportunities may give rise to too intense a competition, with a real danger of increased frustration and discontent." The equal opportunity to be unequal would not get at, he believed, a basic progressive anxiety about society: that vast inequalities of outcome breed resentment and inevitably entrench class stratification.

Miliband set out the argument, which he had made in a fuller speech at the Grimsby conference, as to why Labour's renewal could draw several key lessons from Crosland. The lesson of revisionism, which understood the world from a progressive standpoint and applied its values to the particular; "the lesson that equality should be at the core of a progressive government's ideology" and the lesson that Labour needed to convey to voters its vision and "picture of the good society", which must combine an appreciation and respect for individual aspiration with a politics of the common good.

Patrick Diamond, former policy adviser at 10 Downing Street, argued that Labour's renewal could be strengthened by 'ending the divorce' between the party's modernisers and the historic revisionist inheritance which had helped to shape New Labour, but which went largely unacknowledged.

'If you now read the founding texts of New Labour – such as Peter Mandelson and Roger Liddle's book The Blair Revolution or Phillip Gould's book – there is very little discussion of ideology', said Diamond. This had created the impression that New Labour was all about presentation. If that was the lesson which the Conservative modernisers took from New Labour, they were mistaken.

Crosland, Diamond argued, provided a lesson in how to modernise on the basis of values. This was what New Labour had also tried to do, but it had been uncertain about its ability to draw on the party's history to demonstrate this. The Labour party's future political and policy renewal needed to demonstrate that it was possible to draw on, use and acknowledge Labour's history without being inhibited by it.

Austin Mitchell highlighted Crosland's commitment to equality as highly relevant today: 'We are about equality. No need to quibble over whether we want equality of outcome or opportunity. It is still our job to advance equality through education and by shifting power and wealth down the social pyramid. When inequality is as gross as it remains today the job of equalising ''the distribution of rewards and privileges so as to diminish the degree of class stratification, the injustice of large inequalities and the collective discontents which come from too great a depression of rewards" is enough to absorb all our energies.

Sunder Katwala, Fabian General Secretary, said that the 'happy accident' of the coincidence of the 50th anniversary edition of the book with Labour's transition debate helped to shed light on how Labour should renew. New Labour had been a revisionist project – and that it was a shame that this had come forty years too late – but the negative rather than the positive aspects of revisionism had been stressed.

'What needed to go was clearer than what to put in its place. This had left New Labour talking more about the means of reform than about the ends which these reforms were intended to serve'.

The renewal debate was now shifting towards seeking a modern argument on inequality relevant to our own times, and building a political coalition to make it possible. Crosland could not provide the answers, fifty years on, but his book continued to ask the right questions. Successful renewal would require a greater confidence in the importance of ideological thinking: 'We have sometimes tended to talk as if ideology leads us into dogma. But it is when we are not clear about the ideological principles that we get stuck with a dogmatic approach to particular policies', he said.

The Fabian fringe debate Celebrating Crosland: The Future of Socialism at fifty took place on Sunday 24th September 2005 in Manchester Town Hall on the Labour conference fringe. The speakers were:

• Dick Leonard, editor, The Future of Socialism
• Ed Miliband MP, Minister for the third sector and MP for Doncaster North
• Patrick Diamond, LSE and former policy adviser, 10 Downing Street
• Sunder Katwala, Fabian General Secretary
• Hannah Jameson, Fabian Society
• Chair: Austin Mitchell, MP for Great Grimsby, and Fabian Executive.