Responding to an enquiry about his cultural perspec­tives in the years immediately after the Second World War, Williams comments:

I thought that the Labour government had a choice: either for reconstruction of the cultural field in capitalist terms, or for funding institutions of popular education and popular culture that could have withstood the political campaigns in the bourgeois press that were already gathering momentum. In fact, there was a rapid option for conven­tional capitalist priorities; the refusal to finance the docu­mentary film movement was an example. I still believe that the failure to fund the working-class movement culturally when the channels of popular education and popular culture were there in the forties became a key factor in the
very quick disintegration of Labour's position in the fifties. [...]