I read every utopian and dystopian work ever published for an undergraduate essay on the value of utopian thought. I can remember the year I read Orwell’s 1984, it was 1984. Orwell got one thing wrong – the date. At the time Orwell was writing it was a possible future scenario, half a century later it has become reality!

I found that practical, small scale experiments for a community based on socialist principles – such as those of Robert Owen – might fail for many reasons. They wouldn’t be regarded as utopian if they had succeeded but the prospect of expanding the utopian vision in a capitalist society was always negligible.

I believe utopian thinking provides us with a model of an ideal society, not a perfect society but one for which we can strive to attain. In this respect Marx is just as much a utopian socialist as Owen. The question we need to ask ourselves is “how do we get there from here?”

A couple of incidents that occurred when I was commuting to work provides a useful analogy. The train to York was cancelled, we phoned and a bus service was provided to pick us up in York to convey us to York. In simple language, you start from where you are to reach your destination and not where you want to be.

On another occasion it seemed the railway company were determined to to get us somewhere on time, even if it wasn’t where we wanted to be!

I’m reminded of a humorous anecdote in which a hiker asks a farmer for directions. “Go the way you were headed,” the farmer said “and take the next turn left, then keep turning left until you get back here and I’ll give you further directions. Mind you, to get where you want to go I wouldn’t start from here.”

Once you’ve decided where you want to go you need to figure out how to get there. You might need to make several changes along the way, but you must always keep your destination in sight. If you don’t you know where you’re going, any road will do.

This is a useful approach from a philosophical point of view, I’ve frequently embarked on a voyage of discovery without knowing where it would lead until I got there. Unlike the majority of politicians, I continue to learn.