Labour talks of "fusing" social democracy with liberalism but today's progressives need to discover the two traditions always had strong common roots
What used to be called "Lib-Labism" has been a central theme of Gordon Brown's prime ministership. Well before he crossed the threshold of No 10 he hoped to reconstruct the tacit progressive alliance that helped to deliver the crushing Labour majorities of 1997 and 2001. That explains his overtures to leading Liberal Democrats when he inherited the purple; it was also a factor in his early emphasis on constitutional reform and what he called the "British tradition of liberty". In an intriguing interview with the New Statesman last month, David Miliband - the most thoughtful member of the cabinet apart from Brown himself - gave Brown's project a new twist. Social democracy, Miliband argued, is a necessary ingredient in 21st-century progressivism, but not a sufficient one. To address the problems of our time, the traditional social-democratic commitment to social justice and collective action must "fuse" with the traditional liberal commitment to individual liberty and the market economy. Lib-Labism rides again, but in principled, ideological clothes rather than in the instrumental ones tailored by Tony Blair.
For old SDP-ers like me, this is good news. It is what we tried and failed to do 25 years ago. Social democracy without liberalism is apt to calcify into a rigid and unimaginative statism. Liberalism without social democracy easily degenerates into a vacuous, all-things-to-all-men populism. But to succeed, the fusion Miliband called for needs a lot more thought and a much sharper edge than he suggested. In Britain, at least, the liberal and social-democratic traditions are much richer, less exclusive and more entangled with each other than he implied.
A few canonical examples make the point. R H Tawney, the prophet of equality, was a social democrat. He savaged the "religion of inequality" and its "great god Mumbo-Jumbo" and called for extensive public ownership. But he was also a liberal. He longed for the day when the great industrial cities of the north would be "little republics". He thought the question of what the state should own mattered much less than the question of who owned the state; and he believed that in the strangulated British version of democracy, the people did not. Self-evidently, the authors of the famous Liberal Yellow Book of 1928 were liberals, but they put forward a programme of state-led economic reconstruction, far more radical and far closer to the social democracy of the postwar period than was the cloudy socialism of their Labour contemporaries. Keynes and Beveridge were liberals, too, but their liberalism was quintessentially collectivist; and the postwar Labour government owed far more to them than to any socialist.
Instead of contrasting an allegedly individualistic liberalism with an allegedly collectivist social democracy, today's progressives need to rediscover a much older tradition, which goes back to the civil wars of the 17th century and straddles the liberal/social-democratic divide. In deference to the giant figure of John Milton, who distilled the essence of that tradition in prose that still quickens the blood, I call it "democratic republican". That does not mean it is hostile to monarchy as such - though it is certainly hostile to the Ruritanian absurdities still clustering around the British monarchy. Monarchies can be republican in spirit and temper, as Norway and Sweden have shown. What Milton hated about the English monarchy was the "perpetual bowings and cringings" that it fostered. I doubt if he would object to the bicycling monarchs of present-day northern Europe.
Revolutionary London
Be that as it may, what really matters about Milton is his vision of participatory self-government through open discussion and debate by free citizens bowing the knee to no one. He thought that vision had been realised in the revolutionary London of the 1640s. He called it the "mansion house of liberty", and extolled the turbulent "reasoning, reading, inventing, discoursing" of its people. In the end, the mansion house surrendered to the enemy. In the black year of 1660, the monarchy was restored, and its associated bowings and cringings returned. For a while, Milton was in fear of his life. But the democratic republican tradition survived. It surfaced again in the furious debates provoked by the French Revolution - notably among the so-called British Jacobins, whose bible was Thomas Paine's Rights of Man. It was a potent rhetorical and ideological resource for the Chartists of the 1830s and 1840s, who campaigned for universal manhood suffrage, less for economic reasons than as a badge of human dignity.
Later, John Stuart Mill, pioneering feminist and champion of local self-government, was one of its chief exemplars. He was for laissez-faire, but because he feared that an overmighty state would choke the springs of personal growth and public spirit, not for narrowly economic reasons. The democratic republican tradition is not the property of any single party. For most of the past century it had more influence on the Liberals than on the Labour Party, but it straddled both. There were strong echoes of it in the first New Left of the late 1950s and in the student revolt of the following decade. Tony Benn laid an unconvincing claim to its mantle a decade later, and in some of his moods, that eternal gadfly, Dick Crossman, did the same. The Scottish Claim of Right that paved the way for Scottish devolution was suffused with it, and there are traces of it both in the Scottish National Party and in Plaid Cymru.
The awkward squad
As all this implies, it is a tradition of outsiders, not insiders; of dissenters, not establishments. Democratic republicans are the awkward squad of our political culture, the leaven in the lump of passive deference to state authority or market forces. For them, democracy is not just a matter of counting heads. It is also a matter of public reasoning and collective deliberation, in which opinions are changed and minds enlarged.
The democratic republican tradition is both individualistic and collectivist, but in its own distinctive ways. It is individualistic in prizing personal autonomy and growth, but it disdains the individualism of the predatory tycoon and the shop-till-you drop consumer. It is collectivist because public reasoning and civic engagement can take place only in collectivities. But it is suspicious of the top-down, central-state collectiv ism that has been the dominant theme of all Labour governments thus far. It prizes social justice, but in its own special way. It values human dignity and creativity more than economic equality, and puts its faith in the kinetic energy of ordinary citizens rather than in social engineering.
The democratic republican tradition saturated the early Labour movement. It had enormous influence on the miners' unions, and even more on the Co-operative movement. It drove the "gas-and-water socialism" of the great northern industrial cities, and it was strongly represented in the Independent Labour Party. But the First World War brought a profound change in Labour's mentality. Understandably, but tragically, post-1918 Labour forgot the democratic republican strand in its heritage. It was no longer an outsider; it was a potential, and soon-to-be actual, party of government. State power glimmered on the horizon. Pressing economic and social problems - mass unemployment, the collapse of the old staple industries, bitter industrial conflict - clamoured for solutions. The kinetic energy of ordinary citizens was all very well, but the bureaucratic machine, with Labour ministers pulling the levers, seemed to offer quicker results. Central-state collectivism seemed practical, down to earth and, above all, immediate. The vision of a new society, built by enlightened social engineers, gradually displaced the dream of self-emancipation by active citizens.
That, more or less, is where we are now. The results, however, have been cruelly disappointing. Even the postwar Labour government left a more ambiguous legacy than later Labour myth ology suggests. Its great achievement was to follow the trail blazed by Keynes and Beveridge to its logical conclusion. Economic planning - the distinctively social-democratic element in its programme - turned out to be a mirage. Later Labour governments were far more disappointing. The Wilson government of the 1960s made Britain a more civilised and tolerant place, but that had nothing to do with social democracy. Its essays in economic planning were even less successful than its postwar predecessor's and its attempt to tame the increasingly overmighty trade unions was a ghastly failure. Of the disastrous Wilson-Callaghan government of the 1970s it is kinder not to speak.
Iraq aside, Tony Blair's legacy is more impressive. His government's constitutional reforms were the most far-reaching since the Reform Act 1832, perhaps since the Act of Union. Though it is too soon to tell for certain, he may turn out to have drawn the sting of the Irish Question, which has plagued British government after British government for at least three centuries. But these have nothing to do with social democracy. Their real meaning is that they cleared up unfinished business left over from the Liberal governments of Gladstone and Asquith. Ireland apart (a huge and glittering exception), Blair patently did not understand what he was doing, or even agree with it. In policy areas to which social democracy was relevant, the kindest verdict is that his government wasted the centre left's greatest opportunity since 1906. Initiatives cascaded from it like water from a burst pipe, each purporting to correct failings in the one before. John Reid's immortal excuse - that his department was not "fit for purpose" - gave the game away. Not just the Home Office, but the British state had become unfit for purpose.
Or rather, unfit for the purposes entailed by central-state collectivism. New Labour's critics often accused it of abandoning old Labour's social-democratic principles. In some ways, this is true; but it oversimplifies a much more complex reality. Blair's incessant talk of "change", "youth" and the "new" came out of a rhetorical storehouse that went back to the 1920s. He and his colleagues faced different constraints from those facing previous Labour governments and the policy instruments they used were different, too. Yet the fundamental assumptions underpinning their approach to the economy and society had more in common with those of their predecessors than they or their critics were happy to admit. They still took it for granted that enlightened social engineers at the centre could change a complex modern society for the better by pulling the appropriate levers of state power: that the obese could be slimmed, the yobbish tamed, the work-shy put to work and the public services "reformed" by fiat from the top. The ghosts of Sidney and Beatrice Webb haunted the corridors of Whitehall as enthusiastically as they had done under Wilson and Attlee.
Missing the point
The injection of allegedly individualistic liberalism into the allegedly collectivist bloodstream of British social democracy would be a gigantic exercise in missing the point. Progressives in the Liberal Democrat and Labour parties should indeed come together, on the basis of common principles; and Miliband deserves warm praise for raising the question. But the two progressive parties have no need to "fuse" traditions. They need to rediscover the democratic republican tradition that is common to both.
The familiar contrast between individualism and collectivism is as misleading as it is well-known. What is needed is a different kind of collectivism, based on a different conception of the individual and involving a different kind of politics. As Wordsworth once wrote, "Milton! Thou should'st be living at this hour.
Illustration by A Richard Allen
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