Progressive dilemmas after the election.
| Author | Jackson, Ben |
| Position | Features - Interview |
With the fraught relationship between Labour and the Liberal Democrats now at the centre of British political debate, few are better placed to comment on the present conjuncture than David Marquand. Marquand's career has spanned the worlds of political activism and political analysis, including a period as the Labour MP for Ashfield (1966-77), a key role in the founding and early life of the Social Democratic Party (SDP) in the 1980s, and periods in academia, as Professor of Politics at Salford University and then Sheffield University, and as Principal of Mansfield College, Oxford.
Marquand's unique combination of political experience and intellectual interests have made him an influential commentator on the politics and history of the British left. He is the author of numerous books and articles, including Ramsay MacDonald (1977); The Unprincipled Society (1988); The Progressive Dilemma (1991); The Decline of the Public (2004); and most recently, Britain Since 1918: The Strange Career of British Democracy (2008).
A recurring theme of all of these works has been Marquand's staunch advocacy of a pluralist social democracy that takes seriously both the insights of the British liberal tradition--especially the new liberalism of the Edwardian period--and the social democratic egalitarianism associated with the Labour Party. In this interview, Marquand reflects on his career, on the development of his political thought, and on the prospects for pluralist social democracy in the Cameron-Clegg era.
From Gaitskell to the Greens
I would like to start by asking about your personal political journey. In the course of your career you have moved from the Labour Party to the SDP to the Liberal Democrats to New Labour and then away from New Labour. In your most recent writings you have expressed sympathy for the Green Party. How far do you see these changes in party affiliation as reflecting an evolution in your own political views, or is it more a matter of your political views staying the same while your judgement of the most appropriate practical vehicle for these views shifted?
It was a bit of both. My change to the SDP from the Labour Party was a matter of ideological consistency. I had been a revisionist social democrat, or Gaitskellite, in the Labour Party, and I was also strongly pro-European. In the Labour Party of the late 1970s it became more and more difficult to get a hearing for these views. I wasn't just a member of the SDP, I played an active part in its foundation. I was one of a small group of people who tried to prepare the way for the saviour, namely Roy Jenkins, when he came back from Brussels. I believed the same sort of things that I had believed, fairly consistently, since I first got involved in electoral politics in the 1960s, so there was no great change in my views then. However, my views did evolve a lot in the course of the 1980s and still more subsequently.
I supported a merger between the SDP and the Liberal Party, partly as a matter of ideological consistency as I then thought, and partly as a pragmatic necessity. There clearly wasn't room for two 'third parties', as was demonstrated by the result of the 1987 election when the SDP-Liberal Alliance did worse than in 1983. At that time I lived in the High Peak constituency in Derbyshire and I stood there as the Alliance candidate in 1983. I was very involved both with the local SDP and with the local Liberals and it was clear to me that when you looked at them on the ground there was virtually nothing to distinguish them from each other. They were essentially the same sort of people wanting to do the same sort of things.
However, I got more and more sympathetic towards Kinnock's Labour Party or rather to what Kinnock managed to do with the Labour Party. I was no fan of Kinnock in the early 1980s, but it seemed to me that by 1992 he had virtually (not single-handedly, of course) changed the Labour Party into what I had always wanted it to be, namely a European social democratic party. This made me increasingly hostile to the Liberal Democrats' line in the 1992 election. They struck a pose of equidistance between the two larger parties and engaged in a lot of Labour-bashing. I got more and more fed up with that and I left the Liberal Democrats at some point after the 1992 election (to be honest I can't remember when). I didn't make a great song and dance about it but I stopped paying my membership fees.
When Blair became leader of the Labour Party, I was very enthused--above all by his brilliant and courageous campaign to delete the old Clause IV from the party constitution. This was what Gaitskell had fought for thirty years before, and had failed to do. Now Blair had done it! It seemed to me that the least I could do was to demonstrate my support for this achievement by re-joining the Labour Party, which I did. But I pretty soon repented.
The first term of the Blair government I thought (and still think) was very impressive. But even then, there were some worrying signs. By this time I was Principal of Mansfield College, Oxford and my various roles as such left me little time for anything else. But, in so far as I did watch politics in the Labour Party, I thought there was a rather ugly, authoritarian streak in New Labour--not in terms of national policy but in terms of party management. That alarmed me. The Alastair Campbell/Philip Gould axis seemed bent on stamping out dissent and, in the ghastly phrase of the time, keeping everyone 'on message'.
I was also alarmed by the tone of Blair's famous Chicago speech setting out his new doctrine of liberal interventionism. Even then I didn't like the sound of that, and as events unfolded during the 2001 parliament I became more and more unhappy with the direction the Blair government was taking. I wrote a lot of angry pieces criticising the Iraq war, and I became more and more worried by what seemed to me to be the authoritarianism of the so-called 'War on Terror' and the flood of illiberal measures that went through the House of Commons in the wake of 9/11. The whole rhetoric of the 'War on Terror' seemed to me (and still seems to me) to be lunatic. You can't wage a war on terror. Terrorism is not an entity; it is a technique of waging asymmetrical warfare. Anyway, I got more and more disgusted with Blair's government and the party that supported it, and at some point (again, I can't remember exactly when) I left the Labour Party for the second time.
As for the way in which my views have evolved, if you look at my writings, you will see a fairly steady progression away from what I would now call 'statist' social democracy to something much closer to the republican tradition of politics. In my latest book, Britain Since 1918, I identify four distinct strands of rhetoric and feeling in our political culture. One of them I call democratic republicanism and another democratic collectivism. In the 1960s I was a democratic collectivist. By the 2000s I had become a democratic republican.
Realigning the left
You have been an eloquent advocate of the idea of realignment on the left, by which is usually meant closer cooperation between Labour and the Liberal Democrats. This is a key idea that emerged from your book The Progressive Dilemma, which was a very influential work, especially in the 1990s. Blair and a lot of the people around him seemed to adopt wholesale some of the book's rhetoric and historical analysis.
...
To continue reading
Request your trialCOPYRIGHT GALE, Cengage Learning. All rights reserved.
