Patrick Diamond
Many eloquent and moving tributes to the late David Marquand have been published. I did not know David very well, although I interviewed him on several occasions, and had the good fortune to meet him at a number of political events. His influence and impact on British progressive ideas over many decades was extraordinary. Although Marquand was later to disparage Tony Blair’s modernisation project, his historical work, in particular his widely read treatise, The Progressive Dilemma (1991), defined the intellectual framework for New Labour to a greater extent than the contribution of any other public intellectual.
In the late 1970s, Marquand elaborated a formidable critique of ‘illiberal labourism’ alongside the failure of British state corporatism. His article, ‘Inquest on a Movement’, published in Encounter magazine in July 1979, maintained that ‘The gulf between socialists and social democrats is now the deepest in British politics’. He argued that Labour had surrendered its role as ‘the chief vehicle of radical reform’. The revisionist project of Hugh Gaitskell and Anthony Crosland was imploding:
Traditional, post-war social democracy can be revised in the way I think necessary only if the revisionists are prepared to offend virtually every centre of power in the Labour Movement. The social-democratic wing of the party has never been prepared to do that in the past, and it is hard to believe that it will suddenly change the habits of a lifetime now.
Marquand’s sweeping conclusion was auspicious: ‘I do not believe that the job of revising traditional welfare-state social democracy can be done within the formal framework of the Labour Party or that active Labour politicians can contribute much to it’.
In the wake of the Thatcherite decade that followed, The Progressive Dilemma enunciated a bold synthesis of social liberalism and social democracy that sought to marry individual liberty with social justice and the collectivist state. Tony Blair’s landmark 1945 anniversary lecture to the Fabian Society followed Marquand’s analysis almost to the letter. He is said to have warmly welcomed Blair’s decision in 1994 to re-write Clause 4 of the Labour party’s constitution. Jeremy Nuttall and Hans Schattle in Making Social Democrats are surely right to contend that, ‘for all Marquand’s later criticisms of New Labour, he was one of its most important intellectual influences, especially in its early, dynamically reforming years’.
It is apparent that Marquand became disillusioned with New Labour’s alleged betrayals and tergiversations, although he acknowledged that Blair’s first term yielded innumerable progressive achievements. In many ways, Marquand’s disappointment at New Labour’s refusal to develop into a mainstream European social democratic governing party combining political pluralism with a robust commitment to egalitarian reform, environmental justice and decentralisation, one of the ‘roads not taken’ after 1997, appears justified. The relationship between the so-called progressive intelligentsia and Blair’s Government was, to say the least, uneasy. Nevertheless, the ideological and intellectual chasm between Marquand and New Labour was perhaps not as wide as it has sometimes been portrayed.
On public services, Marquand despised top-down targets and the imposition of central control. He was equally scathing about the marketisation of the public sector, a position ably articulated in his brilliant book, The Decline of the Public. He disparaged the ‘hollowing out of citizenship’ and ‘manipulative populism’ that now pervaded British government. Yet by the end of its second term, New Labour was moving away from top-down targets while there was growing scepticism even among Ministers about the over-reliance on ‘quasi’ public sector markets. Much greater emphasis was given to the development of self-governing schools and hospitals with stronger recognition of the importance of professional autonomy, as well as community participation. Marquand’s insights, particularly his emphasis on the need for a decentralised polity and strengthened public domain, would have immeasurably strengthened New Labour’s reform programme, not least in devising a strategy to protect the public realm from severe cuts that followed Labour’s 2010 defeat. That such a breach occurred was ultimately to the detriment of the Blair Government (in which I played a role as an adviser).
On constitutional reform, Marquand acknowledged the historical significance of the post-1997 reforms and the reshaping of the contours of the UK polity and state. Yet he felt, with some justification, that Blair’s Administration failed to build on its initial reforms by elaborating a wider vision of a federal political system underpinned by ‘civic republican’ values. In its second term, New Labour’s agenda on the constitution ran out of steam, while it never devised a viable reform programme for England. The Government needed Marquand’s radical cast of mind to provide ideological impetus, although the practical realities of the hard grind of making democratic political change – ‘the strong and slow boring of hard boards’, as Max Weber put it – need to be acknowledged. It is nonetheless a historical tragedy that the Labour government could not broker an accommodation with the progressive intelligentsia on political reform, despite Marquand’s efforts. Instead, the gulf merely grew wider, not least following Britain’s involvement in the invasion of Iraq and the global ‘war on terror’.
Marquand’s ambition to develop a ‘new-model, libertarian, decentralist social democracy’ in UK politics has remained so far unrealised. Yet he posed the existential question of British progressive politics more sharply than any other thinker. How can we forge an enduring anti-Conservative coalition in British politics that commands the support of the centre alongside the Left? A Labour victory at the next election will ultimately disappoint if it is merely another brief interregnum in a long phase of semi-permanent Tory rule. The hard work of building a durable progressive coalition goes on. Thank goodness we have David Marquand’s unparalleled intellectual contribution to guide us on that journey.
Patrick Diamond is Professor in Public Policy at Queen Mary University of London. He served as Head of Policy Planning in 10 Downing Street under the last Labour government.