David Marquand

The pregnancy was long, difficult and ridden with anxiety, but the birth was easy and infancy has been a triumph. Unfortunately, however, Mr Bradley’s instant history of the first few months of the Social Democratic Party tells us a good deal more about its gestation before the launch on 26 March than about its development since. This was inevitable, no doubt. Even instant historians have to get their books printed; and Mr Bradley’s would not be in the bookshops yet if he had dealt with the final stages of his story in as much detail as the earlier ones. All the same, the effect is curiously lop-sided: lop-sided, moreover, in a way which obscures much of the real significance of the events which Mr Bradley has set out to analyse.

The ‘Attlee consensus’, under the aegis of which the welfare state was consolidated and the mixed economy established, has been in ruins for some years now, but it is still too soon to tell whether a new consensus will replace it, or, if so, what the shape of that new consensus will be. The neo-liberal and neo-Marxist models offered by the Thatcherite Right and Bennite Left respectively are patently archaic and barren. Both rest on assumptions drawn from the primitive industrialism of the early 19th century. Neither is remotely relevant to a post-industrial society in the late 20th. But huddling in the rubble, gamely pretending that the familiar old building is still intact – the alternative offered by the Tory Wets and the traditional Labour Right – is not a satisfactory option either. With all their faults, the Thatcherites and Bennites have at least realised that the world of the Forties and Fifties is dead. The Gilmours, the Priors, the Healeys and the Hattersleys seem to think it can be resuscitated by mellifluous invocations of the spirit of Disraeli or cosy chats in a trade-union country house.

Whatever else it may or may not have been, Hillhead was unquestionably a personal triumph for Roy Jenkins. The crowds which packed the silent, thoughtful meetings were drawn by him. The old ladies who switched tremulously and belatedly from the Tories switched to him. The clever-silly London journalists who explained why the SDP bubble was going to burst made their jokes at his expense. Defeat would have kept him out of the leadership of the SDP and perhaps out of the leadership of the Alliance as well. Victory has consolidated his claims to both. After the long, grey years of the Seventies – the agonies of conscience over the European Communities Bill, the frustrations of office in the dismal governments of 1974, defeat in the Labour leadership election, the poisoned chalice of the Brussels Commission presidency – he can now enter his inheritance as the rallying-point for the forces of conscience and reform which have been leaderless since Gaitskell’s death. It is a sweet moment for those of us who followed him.

I first met Tony Crosland 25 years ago, at a seminar at Nuffield College. I took an instant dislike to him. I was then a rather priggish Bevanite, and I was shocked by his politics. I was even more shocked by his manner. He seemed to typify what I most disliked about the Southern English mandarinate. He had a cut-glass accent. He was insufferably sure of himself. He was appallingly and gratuitously rude. Then I read The Future of Socialism. Slowly, reluctantly, and with many backward glances, I was converted. Capitalism, it seemed, had changed, after all. Public ownership was not essential to socialism. It was merely a means to an end, and not a very important means. What mattered was equality, and equality could be achieved in other ways. Bevan dropped out of my pantheon, and Gaitskell took his place. Crosland did not join the pantheon, exactly, but he became a sort of candidate member. The next time I met him, the qualities which had previously shocked me seemed forgivable, perhaps even endearing. Very well, he had a cut-glass accent. Who can help his upbringing? Very well, he was sure of himself. If the author of The Future of Socialism did not have a right to self-assurance, who did? Very well, he was rude. That was a sign of a fundamental seriousness and egalitarianism.

As the name they gave their subject implied, the great political economists of the 19th century knew that the economy cannot be studied fruitfully in isolation from the polity. The notion that there is, or should be, a distinct and autonomous discipline of ‘economics’, whose practitioners are solely concerned with economic relationships, and for whom the corresponding political relationships are professionally irrelevant, would have seemed to them absurd, even shocking. By a curious paradox, however, the 19th-century tradition of political economy has fallen further and further into abeyance the more closely the economy and the polity have been intertwined in practice. Nowadays, in this country at any rate, economists study economics, while political scientists study politics. The result is that neither discipline has much to say about the central economic and political problems of our time.