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21 0498693 2 

The Fabian Society 

The Fabian Society 1s Britain's senior think tank. Concerned since its foundation 
with evolutionary pol1tical and economic reform and progressive social change, 
the Fabian Society has played a central role for more than a century in the 
development of pol1t1cal1deas and publ1c pol1cy on the left-of-centre. The Society 
IS affiliated to the Labour Party but is editorially and organisationally independent. 
In recent years the Society's work on the modernisation of the Labour Party's 
constitution and its analysis of changing political attitudes have played a 
significant part in the renewal of the party's public appeal. 

Today the Fabian Society seeks to help shape the agenda for the medium and 
long term of the new Labour Government. Analysing the key challenges facing 
the UK and the rest of the industrialised world in a changing society and global 
economy, the Society's programme aims to explore the political ideas and the 
policy reforms which will define the left-of-centre in the new century. Through 
1ts pamphlets, discussion papers, seminars and conferences, the Society provides 
an arena for open-minded public debate. 

The Fabian Society is unique among think tanks in being a democratically-
constituted membership organisation. Its five and a half thousand members 
engage in political education and argument through the Society's publications, 
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of local societies and meetings. 

New Lefts 

The General Elect1on of 1997 marked the end of a long period in wh1ch the 
ideology of the New Right dominated public life. Not just in the UK but 
throughout the world the intellectual credibility and popular appeal of neoliberal 
conservatism have been undermined by economic and social failure. 

But at the same time the left of centre has had to undergo a process of reinvention . 
The enduring commitments to social justice and to ideas of community, and 
the conviction that uncontrolled free markets cannot sustain the common good, 

1 
'10ld fast. But changing social and economic circumstances force open new 
arguments and new visions. On the verge of a new century, as throughout its 
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Must Labour Win? 


David Marquand 

Contents 
I. Fantasy Politics? 
II. Coalitions: Past, Present and Future 4 
Ill. From New Labour to Pre-Labour 8 
IV. The Pluralist A lternative 12 

Professor David Marquand is Principal of Mansfield College, Oxford. After 
eleven years as a Labour MP he became Chief Advisor in the Secretariat General 
of the European Comm1ssion. He was a member of the Independent Commis-
Sion on Social justice and of the Commission on Wealth Creation and Social 
Cohes1on (the Dahrendorf Commission). His books include Ramsay MacDonald, 
The Unprincipled Society, Progressive Dilemma and The New Reckoning. 

The content of this pamphlet was first delivered as the Ninth ESRC Annual 
Lecture. The Fabian Society would like to thank the ESRC for permission to 
reproduce th1s lecture. 

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I. Fantasy Politics? 
I begin with a thought-experiment. 

It is 2023. The seventy-year old Prime Minister, Tony Blair, IS on his 
way to Buckingham Palace to hand 1n h1s resignation. He IS still fit and 
v1gorous, but after more than twenty years in Downing Street he thinks 
1t IS t1me to hand over to a younger colleague. Stephen Tw1gg, whose 
v1ctory over M1chael Port1llo 1n the far-off 1990s was one of the first 
swallows of the long New Labour summer, will make an admirable 
successor. As his limousme glides along the Mall, Blair looks back, 
with just a soup\=on of nostalgia, on his years in office. He is an honest 
man, and privately, at least, he is willing to admit that he hasn't done 
all that he hoped to do. But in one achievement he takes unmitigated 
pride. He has broken the almost umbilical link between the British 
Conservative Party and the Bntish state which was one of the fixtures 
of the twentieth century. Conservatives still exist, of course; and there 
IS a rather forlorn Conservative Party in the House of Commons. Indeed, 
a handful of d1ss1dent Conservatives once took part in an uneasy 
and short-l1ved coal1t1on with the L1beral Democrats, the Greens and 
the breakaway Democratic Soc1al1sts. But the Conservative Party as 
such is about as remote from power as the Tories under the first two 
Georges. 

A fantasy, of course. I do not suggest that it will happen, or even that it 
is likely to happen. Desp1te my title, I shall make no pred1ctions. My 
answer to the question it poses is the class1c cop-out, 'it all depends'. I 
chose it to recall a once-famous Penguin Special, Must Labour Lose?, 
published in 1960, just after Labour's third success1ve election defeat. 
At the time, that seemed a good question. Yet 1n the 1mmed1ately following 
election Labour won a small maJority, which paved the way for 
a big majority eighteen months later. The future is as mdetermmate 
now as it was then. At this moment, 1t is hard to imagine an early 
Conservative recovery. But the combination of an economic downturn 
and a substantial SNP advance in Scotland might transform the electoral 
odds. As always, contingency rules-whether OK or not. 

That sa1d, I think my fantasy was worthwhile. In Britam, the twentieth 
century has been a Conservative century. Conservative or Conservative-
dominated governments have been in office for 66 years of the 98 


years since 1900, and for 59 of the eighty years since Britain acquired 
a democratic suffrage in 1918. The composition and assumptions of 

British elites, the shape of the political and moral economy and the 
texture of civi I society all bear the impress of a customary Conservative 
predominance. We cannot know if that predominance has ended . But, 
as my thought-experiment was intended to suggest, there is at least a 
chance that it has, and there is even a chance that it wi II be replaced by 
a Labour predominance. 

The questions raised by these chances cry out for exploration. They 
have to do with the fundamentals of British democracy, the British state, 
British capitalism and Britain 's relationship with the European mainland, 
as well as with the ambiguities of the British progressive tradition. 
I shall try to explore them in that perspective. I shall ask what light 
past history throws on the present Government's long-term prospects. 
I shall try to describe the crises that destroyed the previous regime and 
the questions that face the new one. I shall argue that it cannot answer 
them without resolving the unacknowledged paradoxes at the heart of 
its so-called 'Project'. I shall end by suggesting that the best way to 
resolve them is to abandon the whole mentality of victory and defeat. 

I begin with the legacy of the extraordinary Spring night when Conservative 
fortress after Conservative fortress fell to the Labour and Liberal 
Democrat onslaughts. Even now, it is hard to grasp the scale of the 
electoral earthquake played out on our television screens. The biggest 
swing from Conservatives to Labour since 1945. No Conservative MPs 
from Scotland or Wales. The lowest Conservative share of the vote 
since 1832. The biggest Labour majority in the party's history. The biggest 
parliamentary majority won by any party since 1935. The biggest 
centre-left majority since 1906. The geography of the result was as portentous 
as the arithmetic. As Anthony King puts it, some of the seats 
that fell to Labour 'bear names so redolent of Tory Engla.nd that, unti I 1 
May 1997, it was almost impossible to imagine their ever being won 
by a Labour candidate: names that conjure up images of shady oaks, 
mock Tudor villas, well-watered lawns, and a jaguar (or at least one of 
the larger Fords) in every drive.' For the moment, at least, Labour Britain 
embraces Crosby as well as Caerphilly, Edgbaston as well as 
Easington, West Harrow as well as East Hull, Hove as well as 
Hemsworth, St. Albans as well as Sedgefield. 

Like Mrs Thatcher before him, in short, Tony Blair managed to assemble 
a new electoral coal1tion, only on an even more capacious scale than 


hers. For the first time since Gladstone's Liberal Party split over Irish 
home rule, the Conservatives are no longer self evidently the party of 
big business. For the moment, at least, the New Labour coalition extends 
right across the social spectrum, from the dispossessed of the 
inner cities to the corporate elite, from Diane Abbott to David Sainsbury. 
Its leaders have stood Mrs Thatcher's achievement on its head. In 1987, 
the Conservatives were the largest working-class party in the south of 
England. In 1997, Labour won more votes than the Conservatives from 
:y the middle class and from home owners for the first time in its history. 
:e, 


II. Coalitions: Past, Present and Future 
This is a remarkable achievement. 

But 1t IS one thing to assemble a winning coalition, another to ensure 
that 1t survives. Harold Wilson assembled a similar, though narrower, 
coal1t1on 1n 1966, only to see 1t fall apart a few years later. The same 
thing happened to the Attlee Coal1tion that triumphed in 1945. We 
cannot know whether the Bla1r coalition will survive, and there is not 
much point in asking. So I shall ask a different set of questions: What 
conditions would have to be satisfied for it to survive? What will its 
leaders have to do if it is to be more than another brilliant flash in the 
pan? What, if anything, can it learn from past history? 

The first two questions are best approached by way of the third. The 
last 120 years have seen at least three examples of comparable new 
coalitions which did survive. The first was the Unionist coalition assembled 
by Lord Salisbury and joseph Chamberlain after Gladstone's 
convers1on to Irish home rule. This dominated electoral politics for 
twenty years and metamorphosed 1nto the Conservative Party that dominated 
the mterwar period. The second was the Old Labour coalition-
the fissiparous yet tenac1ous coal1tion between the rad1cal intelligentsia, 
the progressive middle class and the Labour Interest-which Ramsay 
MacDonald assembled after the first world war and which Herbert 
Mornson and Hugh Dalton were chiefly responsible for fortifying during 
the second. Though the Old Labour Coalition came to full fruition 
only in 1945, it displaced the Liberals as the main anti-Conservative 
force in British politics between 1922 and 1929. The third was the 
Thatcher Coalition between aspirant Essex Man and Woman, a fierce 
new 1ntell igents1a of the rad 1cal nght and the pre-existing Conservative 
Party that dom1nated the 1980s and came to grief in the 1990s. 

Each coa l1t1on was the product of part1cular circumstances at a partiCUlar 
t1me . Yet certain common features stand out. In each case, the opportunity 
to construct a new electoral coalition was prec1p1tated by 
cns1s-by the Liberals' home rule split in the case of the Salisbury-
Chamberlain Coalition; by the deeper and more complex cnsis that 
overwhelmed Bnt1sh Liberalism during and after the f1rst world war in 
the case of the MacDonald Coal1t1on; by the cris1s of reviSIOnist social 
democracy that spl1t Callaghan's Labour Party 1n the case of the Thatcher 

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Coalition . In each case, daring, sk ilful and creative political leadership 
ensured that the opportunity was seized. In each case, the new coalition 
was subsequently cemented by a mixture of ideology and myth-a 
myth of nation, empire and property for the Salisbury-Chamberlain 
coalition; a myth of modernity, justice and solidarity for MacDonald's; 
a myth of national renewal, market freedom and individual opportunity 
for Mrs Thatcher's. 

In each case, the ideology and myth had great emotional and moral 
force. They all had a touch of nobility about them. They summoned 
their adherents to historic tasks. In doing so, they made it possible for 
the leaders of a diverse coalition of interests and experience to invent a 
common identity for it. And in each case, the ideology and myth were 
embodied in an appropriate statecraft-by strategies for winning and 
using power that rooted the identities they fostered in experience. In 
the case of the Salisbury and Thatcher Coalitions, these strategies were 
largely executed in government. Initially, the MacDonald Coalition had 
to do so in opposition. But Old Labour invented itself in the pursuit of 
power as effectively as did Old Unionism and New Conservatism in 
its exercise. 

What does this imply for the new Blair Coalition? It is not difficult to 
identify a precipitating crisis, or rather crises. The most obvious was 
the Conservative civi I war over Britain 's relationship with a federal ising 
Europe. Europe was to John Major what Ireland was to Gladstone; 
what the first world war and the upheavals of the 1920s were to Asquith 
and Lloyd George; and what sterling's collapse in 1976 was to 
Callaghan . It drove a wedge through the Conservative Party and destroyed 
its reputation for competence. It also made large sections of it 
appear eccentric, obsessional and, from the point of view of Internationally 
oriented big business, potentially dangerous. In doing so, it 
helped to engender a strange new class of what might be called 'Blair 
capitalists'-New Labour fellow travellers or converts from the corporate 
sector, whose very existence gave their new allies a priceless aura 
of vicarious economic rectitude. 

The European crisis was exacerbated by a deeper crisis of identity and 
purpose. Thatcherism was, above all, an anti-socialist crusade. Socialism 
was its 'other', the hydra-headed enemy which it was duty-bound 
to extirpate. But in the 1980s and early-1990s, socialism, in any sense 
which earlier socialists would have recognised, disobligingly lay down 
and died. The Thatcherites found themselves in the undign1fied posi



tion of a contestant in a tug-of-war whose rival suddenly lets go of the 
rope. They fell flat on their backs. They needed enemies, and they no 
longer had an enemy worthy of their steel. They did their best with 
Europe, but in the Richter scale of dangers, the infinite tedium of European 
integration hardly ranks with the Red Peril. More disconcertingly 
still, the demise of socialism changed the terms of politico-economic 
debate. The historic contest between social ism and capitalism was over. 
More subtle questions arrived on the agenda: 'What kind of capitalism?' 
'How can the dynamism of the capitalist free market be combined 
with social cohesion and mutual trust?' And to these questions, 
the bleak certainties ofThatcherite neo-liberalism offered no answers. 
As the implications of its silence sank in, the erstwhile heroes of the 
Thatcher Revolution looked less and less like the shock troops of the 
Free Market Militant and more and more like an ideological Dad's Army. 

Compounding the crises over Europe and over ideology was a deeper 
crisis of the Constitution and the state. It was a com pi icated affair, this 
constitutional crisis; and it is difficult to capture in a few sentences. Its 
manifestations included the Scottish Claim of Right; the swelling popular 
demand for a Scottish Parliament that followed; the lesser echo of 
that demand in Wales; the introduction and withdrawal of the poll tax; 
the abo I ition of the metropolitan counties and the steady erosion of 
local government's spending powers; the proliferation of quangos; the 
rising tide of indignation over 'sleaze'; and the steep decline in poll-
measured support for the political system. The items in this catalogue 
did not all spring from an identical source. Yet a common theme sounded 
through them all. The Thatcher governments stood for a combination 
of market freedom and state power-with the second as the vehicle for 
the first. To attain the idealised free market of their dreams, they had to 
hobble, crush or uproot the non-market institutions and values that 
stood in its way. To do that, they had to make the maximum possible 
use of the panoply of power which the ancient British doctrine of absolute 
parliamentary sovereignty confers on the central executive. That, 
in turn, obliged them to sweep away the web of understandings and 
practices which had constrained the central executive in the past. 

Two consequences followed. The juggernaut of parliamentary absolutism 
was no longer under wraps. It stood forth untrammelled, in all its 
gross antiquity. Before Thatcher, the British tradition of autonomous 
executive power had gone hand in hand with a more subtle tradition of 
executive restraint. Custom, precedent, unwritten codes and gentleman's 
agreements had nurtured a range of informal defences against a poten



tially overmighty central state. Now these defences had crumbled. The 
result was outrage in many quarters and unease in more. 

The second consequence was more subtle. The Thatcher governments 
hoped to procure a bourgeois revolution with a monarchical state: to 
pour the new wine of choice, opportunity and enterprise from the old 
bottles of Britain 's ancien regime . Their achievements were remarkable, 
but also self-undermining. Old elites were humbled and new attitudes 
inculcated. But the new attitudes were more subversive than their 
proponents realised . The Thatcherites' economic values-opportunity, 
efficiency, value for money-were at war with the moral and political 
values-deference to authority, respect for tradition, adherence to custom-
that sustained the ancien regime on which they depended. The 
more successful they were in dismantling the barriers to their economic 
values, the more they eroded the moral and cultural presuppositions of 
the Constitution through which they did so. The restive, raucous, 
undeferential, bourgeois Britain of which they were the midwives could 
be governed successfully only through a bourgeois state. 

This triple crisis was Blair's opportunity. He seized it with at least as 
much daring, skill and creativity as the great coalition builders of the 
past. Now he has to cope with its legacy. But at that point the parallel 
between the Blair Coalition and my three past Coalitions comes to an 
end. New Labour has been the beneficiary of a crisis of the old order. It 
has enjoyed the right kind of leadership. But it has not yet constructed 
a cementing ideology or myth, while its statecraft is enmeshed in paradox. 



Ill. From New Labour to Pre-Labour 

In place of an ideology or myth New Labour has a rhetoric-an a-

historical (not to say anti-historical) rhetoric of youth, novelty and 

a curiously abstract Future. 

The very label, 'New Labour', is part of that rhetoric. So was the now-
forgotten language of the 'Young Country', and so is the much-trumpeted 
'Third Way'. The cry of 'New, new, new: everything is new' 
with which Tony Blair astonished a meeting of European socialists 
shortly after his victory might be seen as its epitome. Its attractions are 
obvious. It enables New Labour to airbrush its past. It impIies that there 
is no rational alternative to the policies it currently favours. But it is 
unlikely to serve the wider purposes I have been discussing. It lacks 
emotional and moral resonance. There is nothing noble about it, nothrng 
to create a sense of common endeavour in a glorious cause. Despite 
its energetic tone, the underlying message is curiously apologetic. 
The world is changing, we are told; and we have to change with it. We 
may not l1ke the changes; we may think them harmful or even wicked, 
but we can't stop them. All we can do is to adapt to them-weasel 
words 1f ever there were any-as gracefully as possible. It is the rhetoric 
of a management consultant, adv1sing a company to re-design its products, 
not of a political leader, mobilising his followers for a rendezvous 
with destiny. 

It 1s also a misleading rhetoric. The most interesting thing about New 
Labour is that it is not new. Nor are the issues it confronts. As I shall try 
to show in a moment, the traditions on which it draws go back, in one 
case for more than a century, and in another for more than three centuries. 
As for issues, the most striking feature ofthe three grand questions 
1t has Inherited from the old regime -how should Britain relate to a 
federal1srng Europe? how can the creative destruction of market capitalism 
be reconciled w1th sooal cohes1on? what is the solution to the 
creep1ng crisis of the Constitution and the state? -is their obstrnate 
longev1ty. The European question has been part of the stuff of British 
pol1t1cs Since the 1950s. The grander questions about capitalism and 
about the state are older still. In one form or another, they domrnated 

nes

the pol1t1cal agenda dunng the long lnd1an summer of Brit1sh Liberal-
ISm that ended rn 1914. And that, 1t seems to me, IS the true mean rng of 

It v. 

New Labour. The not1on that 1t has advanced 1nto astoundrng new 

a uti 


terntory, never before glimpsed by a political thinker's eye, is glib and 
superficial. The real point is that, after an 80-yeardetour, the British left 
has had to pick up where Asquith and Lloyd George left off. 

Then why not say so? Why pretend to be new when you are in fact 
old? The answer, I suspect, lies in a double paradox, which has been 
central to New Labour from the beginning. It is, in the first place, a 
paradox of composition. The central fault line in modern post-industrial 
society is that between the winners and the losers in the global 
market-place. The lion's share of the extraordinary productivity gains 
associated with the current capitalist renaissance has gone to the owners 
of capital, to a new techno-managerial elite and to a handful of stars 
in the global entertainment industries. These are the winners: the new 
lords of creation. They want to hang on to their winnings. Most of all, 
they want to maintain a global economic system in which they can win 
even more. Confronting them are the losers, the casualties of that same 
global system: the anxious middle classes, threatened by 
proletarianisation; the increasingly casualised working class; and the 
burgeoning under-class. That fault line runs through the New Labour 
coalition. A-historical managerial ism cannot bridge it, but it does-at 
least for a while-disguise it. 

It also disguises a deeper paradox of purpose and method. Ever since 
its triumphant arrival on the political stage, New Labour has been torn 
between two alternative statecrafts, each a legacy from the party's past, 
and each manifest in current Government policy. In deference to Sidney 
Webb, who used the term himself, the first might be called 'democratic 
collectivist'. It is essentially top-down and dirigiste . It is based on the 
premise that elected governments both can and should change social 
behaviour for the better by regulation and manipulation from the centre. 
Its exponents take it for granted that the democratic state has the 
legitimacy, the knowledge and the capacity to engage successfully in 
this sort of social engineering. They also take it for granted that democratic 
politics rightly consists of a struggle between disciplined, hegemony-
seeking mass parties trying to monopolise the power of the state. 
The notion that a free society depends on a vibrant civil society-on a 
network of autonomous bodies standing between the state and the individual-
is alien to it. Such bodies, its exponents are apt to think, are 
nests of obscurantism at best and bastions of privilege at worst. 

It was epitomised in Aneurin Bevan's decision to nationalise the local 
authority hospitals in the name of efficiency and uniformity, and in 


Tony Crosland's promise to abolish 'every fucking grammar school' in 
the name of an abstract theory of social equality. It achieved a kind of 
apotheosis under the great Attlee Government. The Wilson governments 
of 1964-70 practised it with markedly less success. It came miserably 
to grief under the Wilson-Callaghan governments of 1974-79. 
Pace New Labour's rubbishing of Old Labour, it has had a strange 
rebirth under the present Government. It is strongly entrenched in the 
Department for Employment and Education . It is the lodestar of Gordon 
Brown's Treasury. It helps to justify the Prussian discipline which 
New Labour's leaders have imposed on their own followers. Above 
all, it provides the rationale for the project of a workfare state, in which 
vast and complex changes of attitude and behaviour are to be engineered 
from Whitehall, which lies behind the Government's approach 
to social policy. 

Yet New Labour is not only the heir of the Webbs. It is also the heir of 
a quite different tradition which might be called civic activist or perhaps 
civic pluralist. This is the tradition of what Quentin Skinner calls 
'Roman liberty': a tradition for which freedom is above all about self-
government, about active engagement in the public sphere. It goes back 
to John Mi I ton and James Harrington in the seventeenth century; to the 
Country Party in the eighteenth; and to the Chartists in the early-nineteenth 
. It had a powerful influence on the young Harold Laski and the 
young G.D.H. Cole, as well as on the mature R.H. Tawney. It was 
embodied in the practices of those great recruiting grounds of the Labour 
movement, the dissenting churches and the trade unions. 

For the purposes of this pamphlet, however, its contemporary implications 
matter more than its lineage. Two implications stand out. The first 
is summed up in the old adage that power, like muck, is no use unless 
it be spread : to make a reality of self-government power must be diffused 
as widely as possible. The second implication is that there must 
be checks and balances to ensure that power is not concentrated in an 
overmighty central state: that the ideal of self government also entails a 
politics of pluralism, power-sharing and negotiation. And, in however 
confused a fashion, these principles now animate most, if not all, of 
New Labour's constitutional programme. 

To be sure, we don 't yet know how far the programme will go. The 
outlook for freedom of information is obscure. House of Lords reform 
may, at least initially, produce an entirely nominated second chamber 
-a step away from, rather than towards, the civic ideal. Electoral re



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form depends on the hazards of a referendum, and, even if it comes to 
pass, it is not clear how proportional or pluralistic the new system will 
be. Yet, when all the caveats have been made, there is no doubt that a 
profound transformation of the British state and the British political 
system is in prospect. Come a Scottish Parliament and a Welsh Assembly, 
there will be two alternative power-centres in Great Britain, challenging 
the orthodoxies of the metro pol is and speaking for nations with 
political cultures and moral economies that diverge quite sharply from 
those of the EngIish South-East. Elected mayors worthy of their salt will 
be more assertive and enjoy more authority than local government has 
done for decades. The domestication of the Human Rights Convention 
will strengthen the judiciary at the expense of the executive. 

More important still, reform seems bound to develop a momentum of 
its own . Little by little, a range of pluralistic checks and balances will 
force the old dogs of Westminster and Whitehall to learn new tricks. 
They will find it harder to overawe opposition with the big sticks of 
parliamentary sovereignty and party discipline. To some degree, at least, 
they will have to practise a politics of negotiation, power-sharing and 
consensus-building. This is, of course, the kind of politics that Tony 
Blair has practised with brilliance and daring in Northern Ireland. But 
it is a politics for which top-down, Old Fabian dirigisme has no logical 
place -and which is likely, at any rate in the long run, to make top-
down, Old Fabian dirigisme unworkable. 


IV. The Pluralist Alternative 
Paradox is the stuff of democratic politics. 

No doubt, New Labour can live with this paradox for some time to 
come. But I doubt if it can do so for ever. Sooner or later it wi II have to 
decide whether the dirigiste or the pluralist strand in its inheritance is 
to come first. The line of least resistance would be to stick to dirigisme. 
It is congruent with the party's technocratic rhetoric. It fits the mentality 
of Whitehall. It caters to the well-intentioned optimism which is 
one of the new regime's most attractive features and chimes with the 
hegemonic ambitions that New Labour has inherited from Old. 

But I can 't see how it can answer the great questions-about Europe, 
about capitalism and about the state-that now clamour for attention. 
Power-sharing and coalit1on-building are the essence of European governance. 
Britain cannot come to terms with EU membership until British 
governments grasp that truth. And you can't be a pluralist in Europe 
while sticking to dirigisme at home. The search for a new social capitalism 
can only be conducted consensually and is almost certain to 
lead to a more pluralistic form of economic governance, balancing stakeholder 
interests against shareholder rights. And, as New Labour has 
itself half-realised, the crisis of the state cannot be resolved by trying to 
re-invent the ancien regime . Yet that is what the dirigiste option would 
mean in practice. In any case, dirigisme is conceptually flawed. Here, 
at any rate, Hayek was right. Governments don't and can't know 
enough to re-make society in accordance with a grand design, since no 
conceivable grand design can do justice to the complexity and reflexivity 
of human behaviour. That was why the dirigiste experiments of the 
1960s and 1970s failed. There is no reason to believe that new experiments 
in the same mode will do any better now. 

The alternative is to run with the grain of the pluralism already immanent 
1n New Labour's constitutional agenda, to diffuse power and responsibility 
still more and to create further checks and balances in order 
to do so. Obv1ous items in such a project would include a local 
income tax, buttressmg local economic development powers; regional 
assemblies; the democrat1sat1on of the quangos mherited from the Conservatives; 
a fully proportional elector<.~l system; more radical parliamentary 
reforms; and an elected second chamber, with its own demo



cratic legitimacy, perhaps representing the institutions of civil society. 
Much more important than any institutional changes, however, is the 
change of outlook that the pluralist alternative would entail. It would 
mean abandoning the dream of a new society, engineered from above 
by a reforming Government. It would mean the end of the victory-atall-
costs, winner-takes-all mentality which is as fundamental to New 
Labour as it was to the New Right. Indeed, it would mean the demise 
of the very notion of winners and losers. There is no guarantee that it 
would bridge the divisions within the New Labour Coalition, or generate 
a cementing ideology or myth. I think it could, but I concede that it 
might not. It might make New Labour the pivot of a new political system, 
but that too is uncertain. The real point, however, is that such 
considerations would no longer matter. The fate of previous electoral 
coalitions would no longer be relevant. Single-party hegemony, of the 
sort we have known in this country for most of the last century, would 
no longer be attainable. Majoritarian democracy would have been replaced 
with consensual. 

Pluralism is not a panacea. It means trusting the people, and the people 
can be wrong. It means stronger localities, and localities can be small-
minded. It means negotiation, and too much negotiation can lead to 
immobilisme. Yet, with all its difficulties, the pluralist option seems to 
me more likely to offer solutions to the real-world problems that face 
the new Government than is its dirigiste alternative. Much more important, 
I believe that pluralism embodies the values of the Open Society 
more fully than any other approach to politics. So I end with a new 
question-no longer, 'Must Labour win?'; instead, 'Can New Labour 
accept that victory in the old sense is no longer worth having?' 


12 


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FABIAN 


SOCII'IY 

Must Labour Win? 


David Marquand, one of Britain's most celebrated political thinkers, sets out 
his arresting analysis ofTony Blair's political project. 

Drawing on his unique historical perspective he illuminates the political genesis 
of the new Labour government and considers what lessons the past offers the 
Labour hierarchy in holding together the impressive electoral coalition that it 
amassed at the last election. 

In making the case for a left of centre politics based upon pluralism rather than 
central ism, Professor Marquand advocates a rejection of the 'winner takes all 
mentality' which has pervaded twentieth century British politics. In doing so he 
poses perhaps the most provocative and difficult question of all for the Labour 
leadership, "Can New Labour accept that victory in the old sense is no longer 
worth having?". 

Professor David Marquand is Principal of Mansfield College, Oxford. 

This paper is part of the Fabian Society's New Lefts programme, which seeks to 
engender debate on the future of the Left. Previous publications include The 
Third Way: New Politics for a New Century by Tony Blair. 

Fabian Pamphlet 589 

£5.00