The Fabians are not all their hackneyed reputation holds them to be. Under new leadership they can once again be radical intellectual insurgents

One thinks of the first Fabians as crusty old crocks, debating land nationalisation, secularism, or eugenics in dusty Quaker Halls. In reality, the founders of the Fabian Society were young idealists. When they met to form the Fabian Society in Edward Pease’s lodgings on Osnaburgh Street, north of the Euston Road, in January 1884, the gathering would have more resembled a university political society, with vibrant, young, emotionally charged men and women wanting to change the world.

In 1884 Pease was 27, Beatrice Webb was 26. Frank Podmore, who suggested the name ‘Fabian Society’, was 28. Havelock Ellis, later to publish groundbreaking studies on sexuality, was 26. Edith Nesbitt, author of The Railway Children, was 26. George Bernard Shaw, whose royalties paid for the society’s current headquarters on Dartmouth Street, was 28. When he first met Sidney Webb, later author of Labour’s Clause IV, Webb was just 21-years-old, and by far the cleverest person in the room. If you want to imagine the Fabian Society in the reign of Queen Victoria, imagine the Young Fabians today.

The lazy caricature of Fabianism is of middle-class do-gooders, with a steadfast conviction that the state could be captured and utilised to the benefit of the poor. But this caricature ignores the ‘second generation’ Fabians such as GDH Cole who proposed guild socialism, or the municipalist Fabians who wanted each British city to be modelled on ancient Athens, or every Fabian since who has proposed local ownership and control rather than trust in the Man in Whitehall. On the right, the Fabians can inspire frothing at the mouth. Jesse Norman’s book The Big Society is a long loud howl against Fabianism, which he seems to define as almost anything that the state does. For conspiracy crazies, the Fabians are part of the same covert network secretly running the world as the Jesuits, the Masons, the Illuminati, the Jews, the Bilderberg Group and the lizard people.

The history of the Fabian Society is a history of British socialism. Few Labour manifestos have not felt the hand of the Fabians. From the Webbs’ minority report to the Poor Law Commission in 1909 which prefigured the welfare state, to the pamphleteers who called for the national minimum wage, democratisation of the House of Lords, a national health service and independence of the Bank of England, Fabians have both made the weather, and proposed specific policies. The legendary Research and Publications Committee instilled an intellectual rigour on putative authors. They rejected a proposal for a pamphlet on human rights law by one Anthony Blair in 1976.

A new general secretary has just joined the Fabian Society. Andrew Harrop is suitably over-educated, including an MA from the London School of Economics, which was itself dreamt up by the Webbs, Shaw and Graham Wallas in 1895 on a weekend away at a farm near Godalming. Harrop’s MBA will come in handy when tackling the Fabians’ finances, which are a disaster. The days of sponsorship from companies wanting to get close to Labour are long gone.

But his biggest challenge will not be fiscal, but intellectual. How can the Fabians make a distinct contribution to Labour’s renaissance? With the state about as fashionable as Jim Davidson, how can the Fabian idea that progressive change can be gradually achieved through democratic institutions be made popular? The Tory and Liberal Democrat coalition is pursuing social and economic policies which would have been very familiar to the Webbs. David Cameron and Nick Clegg have not invented laissez-faire, just given it a paint job. The response of the Webbs, Shaw, Cole, HG Wells, Annie Besant, RH Tawney and the rest of the Fabian alumni to this coalition would have been a wonder to behold. It would have been as brave as the 1909 minority report, as visionary as the Fabian Essays, as excoriating as Wells’ This Misery of Boots. Just as the Fabians were not fusty, but thrusting (don’t get me started on their sex lives), so their gradualism was not timid but instead urgent, passionate and insistent. They were as far from today’s Guardian-reading hypocrites as William Morris is from Cath Kidston.

Perhaps Harrop’s first job should be not to read the annual accounts, but to read the early Fabian pamphlets in all their radical glory. The job of elected politicians is to wear suits, speak in sentences, shake hands and smile for the cameras. Leave all that to Ed Miliband and friends. The job of the Fabian Society is to study the evidence and speak the truth, and to fire new ideas into the air like grapeshot. The last thing it should do is abandon its principal belief that the state can be a force for good, when the opposite view, now being enacted so wantonly by this government, is so plainly false.