Frank Field saw benefit in the Lib Dems. In this election year, Labour would be wise to do the same
David Marquand and Frank Field, both of whom died this week, never sat on the Labour benches together. The professor of politics and the longserving backbench MP had very different temperaments too, one searchingly academic, the other a bold moraliser. They also disagreed about many of the big issues in British politics, the European Union above all.
But they also had some hugely important things in common. Both started as free-thinking Labour MPs – Marquand in 1966 and Field in 1979. Both possessed a rare degree of intellectual and spiritual hinterland. Both then went on lifetime political journeys. These took them increasingly away from Labour, though they always remained in Labour’s orbit.
Marquand joined the Social Democrats and then moved to academia, while Field ultimately finished his career on the cross-benches of the House of Lords. Both also believed that the many failures of British progressive politics were embedded in its lack of pluralism. Both were radical reformers who believed modern politics and government have failed to keep pace with modern Britain.
All the same, neither of them conclusively threw in their lot with the Liberal Democrats, the party that stands for such reforms. Marquand remained wedded for years to the possibility that Labour could reinvent itself in a more pluralist way, but a combination of New Labour and the Lib-Dem coalition with the Tories put an end to that. Field advocated tactical voting for the Lib Dems in the 1990s – a heresy that is punishable with expulsion by Labour these days, though it was followed by millions of voters in 1997.
Each was nevertheless a totemic figure among those in the progressive tradition in their generation who argued the need for a different kind of politics in Britain. Marquand was the brilliant biographer of Ramsay MacDonald, a lieutenant of Roy Jenkins, then an impassioned defender of the public realm against both Thatcherism and New Labour, and latterly a Welsh devolutionist. Field started as an antipoverty campaigner, then increasingly became an advocate of welfare state reform.
The two men were part of the progressive penumbra around the Labour party that rejects doctrinaire politics, particularly of the Labour left, but whose hopes that New Labour would find ways of cementing a more lasting and broader appeal were also disappointed. Both were open to new ideas and open to engaging with other traditions. Each championed the need for democratic and institutional reform and for civic and individual engagement.
In the end, it must be said, each of them also failed. Marquand never succeeded in inspiring some new form of common cause between the left and the centre (for which, in other contexts, read socialism and liberalism, statism and individualism or Labour and the Lib Dems) which could transcend the limitations of either party. Field, meanwhile, never managed to build the coalition for benefits reform that he believed necessary as the welfare budget expanded in response to an ageing society and to changing sickness patterns.
Where does responsibility for this failure lie? It must be shared widely. Part of the sharing out, however, involves asking how and why the Lib Dems, and not Labour alone, have failed to provide the answers.
In a political system such as ours, so dominated by the two main parties, there will often be a good reason to defer thinking about the Lib Dems. The Conservatives and Labour are routinely scrutinised and judged, almost to destruction at times. The prospects of some of the smaller parties such as the