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George Bain on the Socialist Union's Twentieth Century Socialism.

My mother came from a middle class, conservative family in Belfast, my father from a working class, socialist family in Alloa. There is nothing like having a downwardly socially mobile mother to give an only child the drive and ambition to better himself.

Growing up in Canada, I remember her stressing that I was not to become a manual worker, "a working man", like my father - "no one gives you any thanks once you have to take your jacket off to do a job" - and that the main way for me to avoid this fate was to get a university education. When, after having attended the University of Manitoba, I won a scholarship to Oxford, she felt her life's work was successfully completed.

If I inherited my drive and ambition from my mother, I obtained my political and wider social values from my father. Some of my most vivid childhood memories are of him speaking, in his capacity as president of his branch, at the union's annual Christmas party and summer picnic, of his debates with friends and relatives about the political issues of the day, and of his attempts - when he was on strike or laid off from the Canadian Pacific Railway - to keep the family afloat financially.

Not surprisingly, therefore, when I began university in the late 1950s I became active in the New Democratic Party, a rough equivalent to Britain's Labour Party. Indeed, I became president of the Manitoba party at the age of 23 (which indicates just how little competition there was to fill this post) and helped to manage its campaigns in the 1962 provincial and the 1963 federal elections.

As I wrestled with the problems of promoting the advantages of democratic socialism to the Manitoba electorate, I came across a Penguin Special, Twentieth Century Socialism, published in 1956 by the Socialist Union, a group of Labour Party members founded a few years earlier to think afresh about the meaning of socialism in the modern world. It had a tremendous impact upon me, both intellectually and politically, and I later came to Oxford to study under one of its principal authors, Allan Flanders, and his close friend, Hugh Clegg.

The basic argument of the book is that socialism is largely a question of ethics or morals. Its essence lies in three universal human ideals: equality (of opportunity, not outcome), freedom (both political and economic - "freedom from want"), and fellowship (a recognition of obligations to the community). These values are the ends of socialist endeavour and should be adhered to unflinchingly.

In deciding on the means by which these ends are to be achieved, however, socialists should be flexible, guided by experience rather than dogma. They should behave like members of the medical profession, whose ends - to prevent and to cure disease - do not change, but who continually revise their means as knowledge advances.

Socialism has become so identified with its means (for example public ownership) that some would deny that its essence lies in its ends. Certainly, many who would not call themselves socialists would subscribe to the values described above. Socialist or not, the distinction between ends and means and the values that the latter represent have been useful in providing me with a broadly consistent course over the years.

For example, in the 1960s I wrote a paper for the Donovan commission advocating statutory support for trade union recognition. In the 1970s as a member of the Bullock committee, I signed a report recommending employee representation on company boards. In the 1990s I have become the chairman of the Low Wage commission, which is charged with setting a national minimum wage.

All these policies have been seen by different groups and at different times as being either left or right wing, socialist or non-socialist. For me, the labels are irrelevant. I have supported these policies as a means of promoting three basic ideas: equality, freedom and fellowship.

George Bain is principal, London Business School.