It has been a week of political loss. Frank Field, the man who introduced me to Labour politics, has gone and now also David Marquand, perhaps, along with Ben Pimlott, the writer I most often turned to for elegant insight into liberal politics.
David Marquand operated between realms. He was always the man with a foot in both camps. Politics and academia, Labour and Liberal, he was the man at the join. The son of one of Attlee’s Cabinet Ministers – Hilary Marquand was the far less famous Health Secretary after Aneurin Bevan (look out for Hilary at the National Theatre no time soon) – David Marquand became Labour MP for Ashfield the year before Lee Anderson was born and served for 11 years, until 1977. Despite, or perhaps because of, his high intelligence, Marquand was never given ministerial office by Wilson. Maybe Wilson was settling an old grip he had with Marquand’s father when the two of them were working at the Board of Trade. Marquand served briefly in the shadow cabinet but was sacked for supporting Ted Heath’s application to join the Common Market in 1972.
In 1977, Marquand left Parliament to become chief advisor to Roy Jenkins at the EU commission. The job in Brussels proved to be unsatisfying, though, and so Marquand embarked on the academic career which, in fact, gave him more power and fame than his political career had ever done. First at Salford, then Sheffield, then at Mansfield College, Oxford, Marquand produced a series of beautifully constructed monographs on politics. Nobody in his time wrote better on politics. Whether he always write wisely is another question. As a writer, Marquand was more of a hedgehog than a fox. In fact, Archilochus needs a third animal because Marquand had two recurrent themes. The first was his defence of pluralism. The second was his belief that a great progressive opportunity had been squandered when, early in the twentieth century, the Liberals had failed to make common cause with the fledgling Labour party.
The vigorous defence of pluralism is given its first in airing in Inquest on a Movement: Labour’s Defeat & Its Consequences, published in Encounter in July 1979. Marquand argues that social democracy has run out of steam and that Fabianism is no sort of creed for the Left. The Labour party is too rigid, too state-obsessed, too little influenced by the moral persuasion and individual autonomy of the New Liberals. Social democrats, he wrote, “seemed more anxious to do good to others than help others to do good to themselves”. Marquand went on, in The Unprincipled Society (1988) to explore the philosophical cost of this wrong turn. Intoxicated by the “possessive individualism” of the first industrial revolution, Britain had never developed a common purpose and shared civic morality. This failure of mutual education was the principal and grave failure of the left.
In political and policy terms, this led Marquand to the sort of constitutional settlement with which the Labour party has always been, to his great frustration, uninterested. In “Pluralism versus Populism” in Prospect in July 1997 Marquand hoped, in the wake of the limited devolution package of the time, that a new constitution must surely emerge: “an elected second chamber, regional assemblies, revitalised local government, freedom of information, a federal Britain in a federal Europe”. He never really understood, or accepted, that social democracy is a centralising creed and that the Labour party is always inclined to overrate the capacity and efficiency of state power. He is right, in my view. I wish the Labour party were more like the one he imagines than it is. But it’s not and Marquand therefore spent his political career on the side of his own life, hoping that the institution he wrote about would change in an image he presented to it. It never did and, despite the hopes that the Starmer government will become a posthumous monument to the ideas of David Marquand, I doubt it ever will.
Marquand’s frustration could curdle, in his later work, into golden ageism. The Decline of the Public (2004) and Mammon’s Kingdom: An essay on Britain, now (2015) both entail a curmudgeonly rejection of change which suddenly seems always to be for the worse. The diagnosis of the public realm was as judicious and elegantly expressed as ever but the solutions are a sort of impossible restoration. The British, he writes in Mammon’s Kingdom, “no longer know where they have come from or who they are”. In the last line of the book, Marquand get despairing: “we can't go on as we are”. But as John Gray said in a review at the time, we can; “and until some large event shifts the scenery in the way the Second World War did when it produced the lost Golden Age for which Marquand pines, we will”.
The Golden Age, for Marquand, never actually happened. He wasn’t, in truth, a nostalgist because his period of pre-lapsarian perfection never happened, and he knew it. In fact, his most famous, and in some way most brilliant essay, was devoted to explaining the loss. The Progressive Dilemma (1991) charts what Marquand regards as the defining moment of the British left in the tragic split between the liberals and the social democrats. Marquand’s thesis is seductive and simple: the right in Britain has united; the left has divided. If only Labour and the Liberals had not decided on combat in the first decade, the political history of the 20th century would have been profoundly different.
It’s a seductive thesis but is it true? Perhaps there was a moment – Marquand’s limpid prose almost makes me think so – perhaps there was a moment, in the last days of the 19th century, when radical reformers had become disillusioned with cautious Liberal governments but the Labour Representation Committee had yet to meet, when a merger was a possibility. But Marquand’s thesis is more than that there was a lost moment for merger. His thesis is that a merger would have made a serious difference to the fortunes of the new party which would, in his estimation, have proved to be a far tougher fighting force against the Conservative party than the Labour party proved to be. It seems rather obvious that a liberal party in competition with a social democratic party is likely to lead to some corrosion of the vote to both. It’s not quite so obvious, though, to say that all the votes for those two parties would automatically have transferred, then and in time to come, to a new combined political force.
There is, in fact, no election lost by Labour which we can say, with certainty, would have been won with the addition of Liberal votes. The percentage of the vote and seats won by the Liberal party was so low in 1951, 1955 and 1959 that even adding the whole vote in a bloc to the Labour party would very likely not have been enough to have changed the identity of the government. It is plausible to speculate that a better performance for a combined progressive party in 1959 might have built a stronger platform for that imaginary party when it came to fight the 1964 election. As it was, Labour won the 1964 election in any case, by 317 seats to 313. The addition of some Liberal seats, and the boost of Liberal votes in marginal seats that Labour lost, might have boosted Wilson’s majority. Maybe there would have been no need for an election in 1966 but maybe, from a slightly stronger position, Wilson would have won by more, in 1966, than the 98 majority he achieved. With Liberal votes and seats in both of these elections, Labour could conceivably have won the 1970 election rather than suffer a surprise defeat to Ted Heath’s Conservative party. That said, Labour did trail the Conservatives by 43 seats in 1970 and the Liberals won only 6 seats. The real point is that it is impossible to know. As entertaining as it is to wander down this dead end, we have departed a long way from historical method.
Which is a strange place to be because it is as a historian that David Maquand has an enduring claim on our attention. The historical essays in The Progressive Dilemma are compelling and judicious, even if the grand political conclusion might contain an element of wish-fulfillment. In 1977 Marquand published a revisionist biography of Ramsay MacDonald – a characteristically brave thing to do. MacDonald is a by-word for treachery in the Labour party and Marquand, the man who is both in and out, the man at the point of departure, does a brilliant job in explaining and, to some extent, redeeming his subject. "I believe strongly", writes Marquand at the start of the book, "that the past can have lessons for the present. But I do not believe that its lessons can be learned by forcing it into a procrustean bed, shaped by present day expectations and present day assumptions. Hence, I have tried to depict MacDonald as a man of his own time, facing the problems of his own time, and not as an exemplar or a warning for our own”.
The result is a triumph. Marquand shows how considerable MacDonald's personal and political achievements had been before the cataclysm of 1931. He writes the book not as an account of betrayal but as the human tragedy of an individual life. It was David Marquand’s philosophy transferred onto a treatment of MacDonald. In the English Historical Review, Ross McKibben wrote that Marquand’s book “is without question the most important biography of a Labour leader yet published”. That judgement probably still stands. A kind man, a civilised man who prized conversation and the tempests of politics, David Marquand leaves a legacy of work and nothing he wrote could be a more suitable epitaph than to take on the defence of the one politician above all others who broke the party line.
I was lucky to meet him once, when he was Principal at my old college, Mansfield. Very gentlemanly.