The politics of neighbourliness: social democracy on the home front in Britain during the Second World War

Clare Griffiths probes the historical and political implications of the social and psychological concept of ‘neighbourliness’, especially as it played out in that pivotal moment of apparent social democratic ascendancy, the 1940s, and the ‘People’s War’. In line with the revisionist historiography on this period, Griffiths warns us against romanticising the decade, and exaggerating the degree of good will and community spirit that really existed. ‘Neighbourliness’ was often constructed, whether to boost the case for the war effort or, later, for socialism or town planning. It could also at times be invasive and snooping. Yet, she insists, we should not ignore the importance of the aspiration to neighbourliness, albeit imperfect and half-formed, as it was a persistent theme at government and intellectual levels, but also in ordinary, everyday conversations. Above all, it shows the important relationship between values and emotions on the one hand and political objectives on the other, as well as subjects like housing policy and community life somewhere in between.

Globalisation, the breaking and re-making of social democratic citizenship

Hans Schattle’s chapter explores the breaking of the postwar-era social contract across the ‘Western’ democracies alongside the dominance, since the Reagan-Thatcher era, of neoliberalism and its tenets of deregulation, privatization and unfettered trade. The legions of dislocated industrial workers who comprised an essential base of support for social democratic parties throughout the twentieth century have been relatively neglected by left and centre-left parties at the dawn of the twenty-first century as party leaders have shifted the balance of their strategies and public outreach toward the more affluent professional classes. Schattle also reckons with the sobering reality that exclusionary variants of right-wing populism have tapped the public resentment against the excesses and inequities of economic globalisation far more effectively than a renewed model of social democracy. He argues that empowerment, equity and engagement are three lodestars for the re-making of social democratic citizenship and illustrates how new voices and venues are emerging in pursuit of more auspiciously deployed governing institutions and public policies.

A labour of Sisyphus: the quest for a great Labour Party

A central historical progressive dilemmas is explored, in chapter four, 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. Nearly one hundred years on, MacDonald offers insights into the way in which, in times arguably even more challenging than our own he grappled for an extended period with these delicate political balancing acts.

David Marquand and liberal social democracy

Will Hutton levels indictments against the existing British state and its elected dictatorship as a ‘Gothic, feudal horror’, as well as the political left for lapsing into a state of ‘bankruptcy’ under current Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn. Hutton maintains that harmony between vigorous capitalism and reinvigorated self-government is entirely within reach. On the other hand, he acknowledges that the postwar social contract has been ‘unpicked’ in the course of the past generation and worries that the existing political and economic system in Britain inhibits (at best) and perhaps even forecloses the possibility of reform. Hence, Hutton concludes by claiming that successful democracy and successful capitalism both require a massive shift in political power in the United Kingdom away from top-down centralisation and domination and toward bottom-up participation and wealth generation.

Progressivism to democratic socialism: the special case of Dr Christopher Addison

Kenneth Morgan explores the significance of Christopher Addison, a still relatively neglected figure, whose long career illuminates many of the central dilemmas of the broad progressive tradition in the first half of the twentieth-century. Addison symbolises that there was a fusion of the socialist and liberal progressive traditions, even if it did not lead to a merger of the parties. Addison was very much a practical social democrat, ‘mechanical’ in some ways, Morgan suggests, from work with local authorities, through the co-operative movement, to collaboration with the professions over national insurance. Yet, he was driven by a clear moral purpose. This was an illustration that mechanical and moral routes to progress could be complementary. A further lesson for social democrats today is that Addison was far removed from a grandstander, drawn to conflict for its own sake. He pursued ideals, but was also grounded in the possibilities of the moment.

Principles and the progressive alliance in a networked society: what we can learn from Marquandism in the making and unmaking of social democrats

Neal Lawson probes the historical reasons why the ethically-driven, pluralist politics espoused by Marquand has yet to be fully adopted and assesses its relevance to the present. For much of the twentieth century, he argues, a mechanistic politics (and economics) were variously reflected in the power of, and importance attached to the state, the big company, the political ‘centre’, hierarchy and the machine. Fordism and Fabianism went hand in hand, but in the early twenty-first century they have given way to an uncertain situation in which capitalism is discredited, yet social democracy has not worked out a persuasive alternative. The need, in Lawson’s eyes, is to bend modernity to social democratic values, neither ignoring modernity, like Jeremy Corbyn, not bending the values to modernity, as with Tony Blair. The less hierarchical, more communicationally and informationally connected modern society offers grounds for optimism about the prospects for more democratic and egalitarian approaches. However, this must entail making moral choices, in favour of Marquand’s vision of active citizenship over turbo-consumerism.

British liberalism in search of ideological recalibration

In chapter three, Michael Freeden probes the divisions within liberalism whilst also addressing their 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 L.T. Hobhouse, in particular, had articulated in the early part of the century. Such visions had been unable fully to break through amidst 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. Secondly, the resilience and durability of liberalism has been under-estimated, and it may well prove its fortitude at this contemporary populist moment.

Not just any social democracy: ‘Marquandism’ and the primacy of pluralism and republicanism

This concluding chapter assesses whether it is possible to speak of Marquandism’ as a coherent whole. Noting the diversity and breadth of Marquand’s thought as one of its most distinctive features, the chapter concludes that it is nonetheless possible to identify an enduring consistency and coherence. This lies in Marquand’s commitment to, and exploration of the intertwined themes of pluralism, republicanism and social democracy. Underlying all of them is a commitment to greater equity and inclusion, but also to the need for ‘the people’ themselves to be active participants, ‘mutual learners’ in the process of their own progressive advance.

Social democracy before and after the EU referendum

David Owen, in chapter thirteen, reflects upon the underlying concerns that he and David Marquand share in principle: creating conditions to foster a more equitable distribution of wealth and resources in Britain, as well as a bottom-up, republican social democracy championing the virtues of justice and equality. Despite their incompatible positions on Europe, with Marquand supporting a federal Britain embedded in a federal Europe and Owen having campaigned for Brexit, the two erstwhile parliamentary colleagues converge in placing priority, in tandem, on democratic empowerment and economic reform and see these two goals as thoroughly interconnected. Can Britain manage to hang together in a post-Brexit Europe and also shift to a republican civic culture? Owen sees this prospect as still within reach, despite the obstacles.

Democracy and social democracy

The hands-on challenges involved in building up genuinely democratic mechanisms of self-government in Britain take a high profile in Tony Wright’s chapter focused on the democracy aspects within social democracy. Like it or not, Wright notes, the Brexit referendum was a remarkably successful democratic uprising, regardless of whether leaving the European Union is truly in the long-term interest of Britain and its citizenry. The defeat for the ‘Remain’ campaign underscored the weaknesses of the Labour party in the ‘politics of place and identity’, and renewed the imperative for social democrats to defend the liberal tradition in the face of nationalist and populist attacks. Despite all the setbacks that have undermined social democracy throughout the past generation, its ‘permanent revisionism’ is needed more than ever. Wright also notes that for all the problems, social democrats can take pride in the hard-fought public goods won through the years – better jobs, cleaner air, affordable health care – and forge ahead for a wholesale democratic revolution in Britain that renders a government more ‘decentralised, pluralised and participatory’.