Historians seeking the threads of 20th century British political history ought to have as much, and probably more, to say about the right as the left. Property’s fear of democracy did much to shapepolitics from 1789 to 1918. But it wasthe Conservatives who dominated electoral politics in Britain after mass enfranchisement, though rarely on their own terms.

David Marquand’s illuminating and original thesis is that the history of British democracy is best understood as an argument between the four ‘grand stories’ of Whig imperialism, Tory nationalism, democratic collectivism and democratic republicanism. His regret is that the nobler traditions were too often snuffed out.

Stanley Baldwin’s accommodation of the rising Labour movement dominates the inter-war chapters and Harold Macmillan dominates the middle of the century. Knowing how and when to retreat was in large part the Whig secret of Tory political success. Yet, despite the self-destruction of both Enoch Powell and Keith Joseph, it turned out that the Tory nationalist drum could reverse the ‘ratchet effect’ leftwards after all. Casting Ted Heath as a flawed, tragic hero Marquand declares Margaret Thatcher by far the most radical prime minister of the century.

But it is worth also remembering what Thatcher did not change. With so few defenders of the post-war welfare settlement – as the Thatcherite right, Bennite left and SDP centre offered competing prescriptions for a clean break – what is striking is how much of it endured: public spending was 43 per cent of GDP in 1980 and 41.9 per cent in 1996. Marquand perhaps underestimates how far democratic collectivism entrenched its vision in public attitudes, not just in welfare institutions. He acknowledges that the Attlee Government ”did more good to more people than any previous or subsequent British government” while emphasising that Government’s intellectual, political and often physical exhaustion by 1951.

In renewing the author’s longstanding critique of Labourism, ‘Britain after 1918’ at times ventures close to the caricature of Fabianism as a ‘poisoned well’ offered by Phil Collins and Richard Reeves in Prospect last year, though  Marquand’s is an infinitely more informed and somewhat more nuanced critique. That Collins and Reeves nominated as their anti-Fabian hero, GDH Cole – among the most active Fabians of the century, and President of the Society – showed an inability to distinguish at all between baby and bathwater. By contrast, Marquand stresses the interplay of competing and overlapping traditions. Still, he pulls a similar trick in making RH Tawney the icon of his democratic republican challenge to collectivist Fabian egalitarians. Many fair-minded Fabians would be willing to concede half of the critique, but Fabianism is a plural tradition too, combining moral and mechanical reform.

The attractions of democratic republicanism – its open-ended discursiveness – have also often proved political weaknesses. The best may lack the conviction and passionate intensity of their rivals but even an inherently plural politics must have some sense of what it wants to achieve. Energy courses through a prologue telling the story – often of glorious defeat – of the demands for democracy from below from the English Civil War to 1848. Yet the extension of the franchise between 1867 and 1918 came largely from above, with the partial exception of votes for women. The democratic republican tradition was missing in action for most of the next half century. If it was revived in the late 1960s, it was not clear to what ends. What did the 1968ers ever do for us? (Those of us who weren’t there – perhaps many who were – have never been quite sure).

The principal agent of its revival was Margaret Thatcher – an unintended consequence of her testing the unwritten assumptions of British politics to destruction. Pressure from below now changed not just political possibilities but outcomes too, perhaps most strikingly with the Scottish Claim of Right and the Constitutional Convention, and the broader democratic reform agenda of Charter ’88. It did so where it could successfully create alliances between civic pressure and traditional institutions and parties. Crucially, Thatcher did not just provoke a civic counter-mobilisation but also converted her Labour opponents to a much more pluralist idea of democracy than it had held for its first nine decades, or had needed in the age of Baldwin and Macmillan.

Having begun the book arguing that Tony Blair “held essentially the same centralist vision of the democratic state as Sidney Webb in the 1880s”, Marquand acknowledges that New Labour’s first term from 1997 to 2001was the closest we have come to a period of pluralist democratic advance. This, he says, was squandered after 2001. Marquand finds republican instincts creeping out behind Gordon Brown’s collectivist soul but the promise of a new constitutional settlement which would have challenged New Labour’s authoritarian reputation now risks slipping from view.

Marquand believes that David Cameron would return to the Tory Whig tradition of Edmund Burke. There is a strong strand of dispositional conservatism in Cameron who, despite his wariness at acknowledging the lineage, is a recognisable throwback to the Macmillan and Douglas-Home élite. Yet his post-Thatcherite party has inherited a liberal, small-state ideology which is often profoundly un-Conservative in its implications.

The perils of writing history up to the present day are shown by Cameron having ditched, not long after publication, his Whiggish strategy of ‘Tory men and Labour spending plans’. It offers a reminder that Macmillan’s self-proclaimed ‘progressive Toryism’ was not motivated only by the political desire to lay the ghost of the 1930s. Macmillan’s ‘Middle Way’ was deeply rooted in the 1930s experience of Stockton, the promises made in wartime solidarity, and an intellectual commitment to Keynesianism. Marquand cites the rejection of the plan to float the pound in 1952, which would have broken with full employment, as the moment the ‘post-war consensus’ was settled. So Macmillan felt bound to reject serious pressure for traditional fiscal conservatism – accepting the resignation of his Chancellor and Treasury team (including Enoch) in 1958. David Cameron seemed to begin that argument with his party, but changed his mind.

For all its great merits, this is a somewhat uneven book. It is a brilliant history of ideas in politics, provoking both old and new arguments. But the post-war chapters sometimes fall into a more conventional run through the textbook turning points than the distinctive thesis promises. Given how much the personal pen portraits brought to ‘The Progressive Dilemma’, I regretted the author’s decision to distance himself from his own role as participant and observer. (One sparse footnote sources the author’s judgement that anti-Wilson plotting, though constant, was often fantastical: “I write as a former plotter”.)

Marquand’s ‘Progressive Dilemma’ concluded that Labour would be necessary, but not sufficient, to a successful, sustained challenge to Tory dominance. That argument may now be both more difficult and as important as ever.

This may depend on understanding the republican and collectivist traditions not as opposing armies but as potential, if uneasy, allies. Their on-going, mutual interrogation which could fuse social democratic and liberal thought. There would be several tensions: a thin, majoritarian idea of democracy would be one barrier; a left-libertarian allergy
to the necessary role of government in dismantling class disadvantage could prove another. Still, this offers the best hope of creating a politics which could speak in the causes of equality and democracy to the spirit of Lloyd George, Tawney, Orwell and Amartya Sen, and seek to link mobilisation from below with progressive state action. It
would not be easy, but the history of British democracy suggests it could also do much to determine which type of Conservativism we face.