David Marquand

Thirty years ago, as Keith Middlemas reminds us in his messy, but important and sometimes brilliant new book, Britain served as the model for the reconstruction of European democracy. Not only the British themselves, but their Continental neighbours, took it for granted that the secret of ordered freedom had been learned more successfully here than anywhere else, and that that secret had been encapsulated in the British version of parliamentary government. Today, it is clear to all but a handful of law lords, political columnists and past, actual or would-be Cabinet ministers that the version of parliamentary government which we thought we had thirty years ago no longer exists, if it ever did, and that the doctrines with which it was explained and justified no longer offer any guidance to the way in which our polity is organised.

For more than a generation, what Europeans call social democracy and what Americans call liberalism has been the dominant political creed of the North Atlantic world. Its achievements have been enormous. As Ralf Dahrendorf points out in his important and persuasive pamphlet, ‘After Social Democracy’, ‘it has turned the empty promise of freedom of contract into effective citizenship rights; the welfare state lies at the heart of social democratic politics. It has proved the ability of open societies to change without revolution; the varieties of Fabianism are, among other things, a triumph of democracy. It has spread the belief in a rational society; human improvement by education, social improvement by the uses of science, decision-making by rational discourse are all a part of the prevailing creed.’

The Civil Service attracts so much foolish, ignorant and malicious criticism that the unprejudiced observer is apt to assume, on the principle that mine enemy’s enemy is my friend, that nothing much can be wrong with it. After all, an institution which manages to upset Mr Tony Benn, Lady Falkender, Mr Michael Meacher, Mr Joe Haines, the editor of the Spectator and the sub-editors of the Daily Express cannot be all bad; and from there it is a small step to conclude that it must be all, or nearly all, good. The step is a dangerous one, however, and readers of these two attacks on the Civil Service will have to be on their guard against taking it. Both attacks are sometimes silly and sometimes unfair. Both advocate, or appear to advocate, dangerous solutions to non-problems. Yet in both there are shrewd hits as well as misses, and both focus attention on one of the central problems of modern British politics.

After a decade of decline, the old, Fabian right of the Labour Party is now so chastened that it is hard to remember that it was once the dominant tradition in British left-wing politics. These two volumes of autobiography bring back its great days: in doing so, they also throw a good deal of unintentional light on the reasons for its fall. Michael Stewart and Douglas Jay were both awarded Firsts at Oxford in the Twenties, entered Labour politics in the Thirties, held junior office in the Attlee Government in the Forties, supported Gaitskell in the battles of the Fifties and were appointed to Wilson’s Cabinet in the Sixties. Both served their country and party honourably, faithfully and as selflessly as anyone can reasonably be expected to do. Both exhibited, to an almost alarming degree, the characteristic Fabian virtues of rationality and reliability. Both are so obviously fish out of water in the Labour Party of the Eighties that the reader can almost hear them gasping for breath. Neither has the remotest idea why.

It is too soon to tell whether the month-old Social Democratic Party will replace the Labour Party as the main anti-Conservative force in Britain. What is certain is that the omens are far more propitious than anyone could reasonably have expected as recently as three months go. The death-wish which has gripped the Labour Party for the last two years shows no sign of loosening its hold. Though it is hard to believe that Tony Benn can actually win the deputy leadership, his attempt to do so is bound to inflict yet more damage on his torn and battered colleagues. Roy Hattersley’s quaintly-named Solidarity Campaign may reverse some of the wilder decisions taken at the Wembley conference in January, but even if it does the Party will still be committed to an electoral college of some sort, and the leadership will still be even more obviously in thrall to an incompetent and unpopular trade-union movement than it used to be in the past. Meanwhile the issue of compulsory reselection is ticking away in the background, and is almost certain to produce more Parliamentary defections to the Social Democrats as and when it explodes. More important than any of this, it is now as certain as anything in politics ever can be that Labour’s right wing has lost the battle over policy: that the positions which the Party took up at Blackpool last October will not be changed in any fundamental way and that Michael Foot and Denis Healey will therefore have to fight the next election on a programme closer to the French Communist Party’s than to that of any other important working-class party in the Western world.