Ross McKibbin

This book contains reflections on both history and theory, and is written with David Marquand’s usual elegance and intelligence. Its 19 essays concern themes familiar to readers of his biography of Ramsay MacDonald and his distinguished study, The Unprincipled Society: how can we devise for modern Britain an appropriate ‘social democratic’ theory of social action, and how can we construct a ‘progressive’ coalition which might give it adequate electoral support. Twenty-five years separate the first essay from the last, and they are not published in the order they were written. They have been tailored to bestow unity, but the stitching sometimes shows: thus on page 89 we find the Attlee Government chided for not undertaking a ‘revolution of production’ which would ‘smash the structures and root out the habits which had already produced more than half a century of relative economic decline’. But ten pages after this Saint-Simonian utterance, we find it conceded that the Attlee ministry could hardly have done this ‘in the lifetime of a single government’. How is this to be resolved? The answer is that the second judgment was written 21 years before the first. These essays are, in fact, chapters in the intellectual and political biography of a young Croslandite (once a Bevanite) who became an increasingly bruised and disenchanted Labour MP, a founder member of the SDP, and who now (I imagine) stands between the Kinnockian Labour Party and the Liberal Democrats. From the point of view of the reader interested in understanding how he has come to argue what he does it might have been better had this been made more explicit.

When historians come to account for the dégringolade of modern British politics both Tony Benn and Paul Foot will find a place: Benn as actor, Foot as an observer. The two have much in common: both were born into very similar families; both see their lives as a continuing re-education, a casting aside of cultural baggage packed with the detritus of a worn-out social system; both have come to discover a superior morality within socialism and the organised working class. In both, this process has been incomplete, perhaps deliberately so. They both have a strong sense of Englishness, though they have defined it with recourse to a radical vocabulary. Both see themselves within an English radical-democratic tradition – Levellers, Paine, Cobden – onto which both have grafted Marxism.

In the days since Sir Geoffrey Howe’s resignation I have had a strong sense, not so much of history being made, as of history being invented: all the actors in this drama seem to be declaiming their parts as much for the history books as for the audience. That is true also of those whose duty it is to watch the drama and criticise the actors. Even before the heroine expired in the night there was everywhere an assumption that the play was over; everywhere a scuttling for cover and the hasty construction of intellectual positions which put actors and critics in as good a relation to history as possible. Whether the play is over remains to be seen. The plot was always paltry, the dialogue incoherent, the characters usually unpleasant: but the stage on which it was acted is well-constructed, firmly buttressed and many hands have an interest in keeping it erect.

British politics at the moment seem curiously provisional. The failures of the present government are so gross and obvious that hardly anyone, even its nominal supporters, attempts to defend it ideologically. Yet at the same time hardly anyone believes that Labour will really win the next election, or that it could cope even if it did. There is also a strong sense that the re-ordering of continental Europe, whose outcome is itself indeterminate, has rendered our political life even more provisional: it has obliterated the old landmarks but made it quite unclear where we now go. This collection of essays, occasional pieces and personal and poetic reflections is thus intended to suggest new paths. The Alternative is a product of Samizdat, a journal founded late in 1988 when any alternative seemed rather unlikely. It hoped to create a ‘popular front of the mind’ – a kind of intellectual tactical voting – which would dispute what was widely perceived to be a right-wing ideological hegemony. The contributors to Samizdat, whose founding editor, Ben Pimlott, is one of the editors of this book, were adherents of the Labour Party, the old Alliance, the Communist Party and of no party at all. Many of the contributors still are these things, though some, like Michael Young, have returned to the Labour Party de jure and others de facto. It was a measure both of the successes of the Conservative Party in the Eighties and the apparent decay of the social-democratic and Marxist alternatives that such a popular front was possible.’

This Johnson is an energetic essayist. His energy is not simply physical, though he has plenty of that: it is mental too. He seems to write quickly – how else the productivity? – but he writes also with a kind of cerebral force, apparent in all these essays, which are themselves the tip of an intellectual iceberg: he has also written standard books on both South Africa and the French Left which combine contemporary political description with historical analysis in an admirable and often memorable way. Nor is he afraid of controversy, rather the reverse. He wrote a celebrated/notorious explanation of the shooting-down of the South Korean airliner KAL 007 which so many well-placed persons dismissed as impossible as to suggest that the explanation might well be true. His purpose, furthermore, though sometimes playful, as these essays demonstrate, is always serious. This collection is prefaced by a thoughtful introduction on the nature of individual political engagement (that is, the political engagement of intellectuals) and of the role of individuals as political instruments, as people who set things in motion.