Making social democrats

Citizens, mindsets, realities: Essays for David Marquand

Hans Schattle, Jeremy Nuttall

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781526120328
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Comparative Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book, a collection of essays by some of Britain's leading academics, public intellectuals and political practitioners, seeks to engage with the 'big picture' of British social democracy, both historical and contemporary, and point to grounds for greater optimism for its future prospects.

1
Making social democrats

Jeremy Nuttall and Hans Schattle

Social democracy in the age (or moment) of ‘Brexit’ and Trump: decline or renewal?

It is intellectually fashionable to be gloomy about the current state of the political world and about British progressive and social democratic politics more specifically. There are some good grounds for this. The British Labour Party's electoral defeats since 2010, its profound internal divisions since the election of Jeremy Corbyn as leader in 2015, the collapse of the Liberal Democrats, the fragmentation of progressivism in Scotland and, above all, the 2016 referendum vote in favour of ‘Brexit’, are all situated in a broader international context in which social democratic and liberal parties have struggled to maintain traction amidst the rise of (mostly) right-wing populism, manifested most dramatically in the election of Donald Trump to the American presidency. These problems are also rooted in longer historical questions, since the arrival of democracy in Britain in 1918, regarding the persistence of inequalities, the limits of democratisation, and of the cultivation of a sense of active citizenship within the confines of the British state, and the Labour Party's patchy electoral success in the so-called ‘Conservative century’. This book's honorand, the political thinker, historian, politician and public intellectual David Marquand, ranks among the most perceptive in drawing attention to many of these challenges, most notably in his acclaimed 1991 book The Progressive Dilemma (Marquand, 1992: 24–5).

These challenges are very real, yet the above picture is a partial one. It runs the risks both of conforming to the traditional tendency of many on the left, to focus primarily on the bleaker sides of social and political trends, and of magnifying relatively recent and short-lasting right-wing populist advances into something solidified, uniform and even irreversible. It is the contention of this volume that both political history and political present are more complex, multi-sided and essentially mixed than that, and social democrats need not resign themselves either to the inevitability or the endurance of the current state of affairs. As in times past, the constraints upon, and threats to, progress stand alongside achievements and new opportunities. While Labour won fewer elections than the Conservatives in the twentieth century, the extensions of welfare protection, civil liberties, democracy and educational opportunity to which its governments gave effect, most notably in office from 1945, 1964 and 1997, made a lasting impact, and often survived, at least in important measure, through long ensuing periods of Conservative rule. Social democracy's often diffuse societal, intellectual and cultural influences have exceeded and outlasted Labour's direct electoral success.

Moreover, even by the narrower electoral measure, it must be remembered that Labour's fall from power in 2010 came after, by far, its longest sustained period of electoral success. Albeit tentatively, the securing of the French presidency in 2017 by Emmanuel Macron, has suggested scope for a reinvigoration of centrist or centre-left electoral accomplishment, or at least, as also in recent elections in the Netherlands, and in the collapse of UKIP's vote in the 2017 British general election, the beginnings of a plateau and perhaps a diminution in the populist appeal. Even in the context of Trump's victory, it is too rarely remembered that the Democratic Party have still had the better of US presidential election results since 1992, and even more so in terms of share of the popular vote – as even in its defeats of 2000, and again in 2016 itself.

Most fundamentally, progressive and social democratic ideas rest on a broadly optimistic, albeit also nuanced and realistic, view of the potential and ultimate capacity for virtue, good sense and flowering of ‘the people’. At the core of a new politics of ‘mutual education’, wrote Marquand in 1988, in his seminal The Unprincipled Society, ‘lies the belief that men and women may learn if they are stretched; that they can discover how to govern themselves if they win self-government’ (Marquand, 1988: 246). In many ways, this description goes to the heart of the meaning and the challenge of social democracy, and of progressive politics more broadly. It highlights that real progress, both social and individual advances, must in some profound sense be achieved by the people of a country, not just for them, that the people's role must be active, not passive. It also indicates that this advancement must ultimately be about more than a material or structural one, an increase in economic well-being or in the efficacy of particular policies or institutions. It must also encompass an uplift in the culture, values and indeed the very character of the citizenry.

Without this crucial double aspect of popular participation and ethical development, progressivism would both lack the depth of roots and power of momentum to sustain it and fail to provide to individuals that meaningful sense of inner, psychological fulfilment, involvement, and perhaps even happiness without which more economic-orientated or policy-orientated means of furthering progress seem pointless. The inescapable fate of the progressive, as Marquand articulated, is ‘to gamble’ on the ordinary people's ability to rise to this ambitious, participatory, learning process, and also to insist on this deeper agenda of progress through ethics, citizenship and values, not simply via the easier, more obvious or more tangible routes of ‘manipulative short cuts to change, imposed “reforms”, technocratic fixes’ (Marquand, 1988: 246).

This approach suggests the basis of progressivism is to be found in values, culture and character as much as economics, institutions and structures – though also in the interconnections across all of these. That being so, developments like the rapid expansion of higher education, heightened civil liberties, home ownership and ambitions, not least for women and ethnic minorities, the more rapid, democratic and accessible dissemination of news and information, a seeming growing recent upsurge in grassroots political involvement and even more attentive approach to parenting matter. They may be just as conducive to social and political ‘progress’ as some of the more traditional, and more oft-cited measures of social democratic strength, such as the size of the organised industrial male working class, or the extent of state economic ownership. Moreover, many of these advances have been especially marked since the supposed high-water mark of social democracy (variously dated as 1951, 1970 or 1979). There are thus serious grounds for broadening and complicating narratives of social democratic decline and advance, which presently excessively privilege, and at times romanticise, the pre-1979 past.

With such considerations firmly in mind, this volume focuses less on the economic, institutional or policy issues that have produced much fruitful investigation elsewhere, and more on these questions relating to the popular values, mindsets and sense of citizenship needed to further social democracy, on that deeper enterprise of Making Social Democrats. The book also aims to provide an opportunity for its authors and readers to reflect broadly and deeply on the ‘big picture’ of social democracy and progressivism, both historical and contemporary. Encouraging the lifting of sights from the restrictions of either academic specialism or journalistic and political immediacy, contributors were asked to reflect, as Marquand has done over his long career, on what it is that lies at the ‘heart’ of progressive dilemmas, to consider social democracy over a broad historical and contemporary sweep.

These two aspects give the book both a distinctive unifying focus and an especially kaleidoscopic coverage of social democracy. Relatively few such broad explorations of British social democracy have been undertaken since turn-of-the-century edited collections like that of Tanner, Thane and Tiratsoo (2000). Worley's compilation (2009) is more recent, but more exclusively focused on the inter-war period, just as Hickson's (2016) is more specifically concentrated on contemporary social democratic policy and ideas. The most comparable collaborative work on the theme of social democracy is the book In Search of Social Democracy (Callaghan et al., 2009), following a series of academic conferences in the mid-2000s on rethinking social democracy. This important volume is now ripe for reassessment; moreover, a large number of its contributions were in the sphere of economic policy. The book also offers a social democratic follow-up to the influential edited collection on Thatcherism by Jackson and Saunders (2012).

If the book seeks to attend to the large canvas of social democracy, it also pursues breadth in terms of its ideological inclusivity and its contributors. The term ‘social democracy’ serves as the unifying concept for the book, reflecting that in most major European countries, and certainly in Britain, the main social democratic political party has long been the primary focus of academic analysis, and broader public debate about the achievements and shortcomings of ‘progressive’ ideas – and indeed social progress as a whole. However, ‘social democracy’ is intended as a relatively expansive umbrella term, and it is one of the guiding assumptions that progressive ideas do not reside exclusively in any one ideology or party. Contributors (and themes) in the book range from socialists through social democrats to liberals, and, indeed, there is an acknowledgement in some of the discussion that conservatism has incorporated progressive dynamics. There is much divergence of viewpoint, reflecting the intellectual diversity of progressivism, past and present, as a whole. Although many of the chapters are written by academics and public intellectuals, several contributors hail from think tanks, journalism and government. In these respects, the book seeks to mirror its honorand, who has always bridged life's disciplinary, occupational and ideological divides. This is not to dispense, though, with an over-arching narrative, and a concern with the fluctuating mix of advances and retreats in progressive politics, and its essential ideas related to democratic empowerment and social equality permeates all the chapters. David Marquand's political approach and ideas provide the starting-point for many of the contributions. Equally, all the chapters open up fresh lines of enquiry of their own.

Progressive dilemmas: the historical long view

Part I takes the historical bird's eye view, exploring social democratic and liberal dilemmas that both pervaded the twentieth century and remain very much alive today. Jeremy Nuttall's chapter examines the many-sided relationship between social democracy and ‘the people’ in Britain. The issue of the people, the citizenry, the voters has long been a perplexing one for social democrats. Standing up for ordinary people is the very purpose of social democracy, and yet the people have frequently seemed to social democrats something of a disappointment, alternately insufficiently engaged with politics, or too conservative or individualistic when they do engage. Whilst highlighting this as a challenge and a problem, Chapter 2 also suggests that scholars and political analysts tend to under-play the extent to which progressivism and the voters have managed to operate in constructive harmony in the past, and the potential in the present moment for them to do so again.

For all the contemporary allure of populism, the British people have been, and are, on the whole, better than some of the worst sentiments aroused by the ‘Brexit’ project indicate, and their better instincts are open to more forward-looking political agendas. The chapter also contends, however, that channelling this more progressive side of the people will require social democrats to raise their game, too. If the people have sometimes disappointed social democrats, social democracy has also often failed properly to serve the people, tending, in its class outlooks, conservatism and internal obsessions, to itself lag behind some of the growing yearning for modernity, opportunity and affluence of the society it is claiming to wish to change. Both the people as a whole, then, and social democracy as an ideology, need to re-acquaint with, and refresh, the more forward-looking, constructive, optimistic sides of their respective natures.

A crucial part of this process will be intellectual and ideological re-thinking and reinvigoration, and more specifically an attention to the enduring intellectual and political divisions within progressivism. In Chapter 3, Michael Freeden probes this divide within liberalism whilst also addressing its implications for social democracy. Tracing liberalism's, and especially New and social liberalism's, distinctive offer of a fusion between social interdependence and individualism, Freeden assesses the failure of this liberalism to become the over-arching driver of twentieth-century politics. Too often, liberalism remained divided between its two wings, and insufficiently intellectually bold and imaginative in building on the ideological syntheses that Leonard Hobhouse, in particular, had articulated in the early part of the century. Such visions had been unable fully to break through amid alternative, more technocratic conceptions of the state, or adulations of the market, as well as the sheer magnitude of the challenges of the historical day to day. Nonetheless, Freeden sees two grounds for optimism. One is that liberalism has enjoyed a greater, albeit somewhat covert, influence than the rather limited later twentieth-century electoral success of the Liberal Party implies. In particular, liberalism long infused social democracy, notably in its Croslandite and New Labour variants. Second, the resilience and durability of liberalism, for all its apparent minority status, has been under-estimated, and it may well prove its fortitude at this contemporary populist moment, just as it appears under such strain and attack.

A third set of historical progressive dilemmas is explored, in Chapter 4, by Andrew Gamble through a re-visiting of Marquand's 1977 biography of Ramsay MacDonald. An extensive historical work, which sought to rescue MacDonald from the simplistic cries from his own party of betrayal for his heading of the coalition National Government in 1931, the book was also intended to offer clear lessons for what Marquand viewed as a Labour Party in the 1970s undermining itself though its class warfare, trade union sectionalism and doctrinal narrowness. Gamble argues that the dilemmas observed and lived out by both MacDonald and by Marquand, as his biographer, endured throughout the twentieth century and, indeed, remain unresolved today. How could the Labour Party protect the labour interest, yet also resonate beyond it,...