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Marquand D., Britain Since 1918. The Strange Career of British Democracy — 2009

The history of democratic politics in Britain since the coming of universal male suffrage in 1918 is a dramatic one, crowded with events and colourful figures. As well as the great events of war and economic crises, and the quieter drama of constitutional change, this era has been studded with democratic protests of every sort: from the General Strike and the hunger marches of the 1930s, anti-Suez rallies and CND marches in the 1950s, student, feminist and green protests in the 1960s and seventies, the miners' strike and poll tax clashes of the 1980s, and the anti-Iraq War marches of the early twenty-first century. The story opens more than 350 years ago. The Levellers of the 17th century, 18th-century radicals, the Chartists and the Reform Acts are all part of the unsteady and fiercely contested progress towards a democratic constitution. Dreams, visions and ideals are important too - of George Orwell, and Enoch Powell, Milton, Thomas Paine and Edmund Burke, Churchill and Lord Salisbury, Aneurin Bevan and Tony Benn - for they have also shaped our outlook. BRITAIN SINCE 1918 is a formidable combination of narrative and analsysis: entertaining, instructive and thought-provoking.

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Marquand D., Britain Sinse 1918. The strange career of British democracy — 2009

In this rich, articulate book, the rickety trajectory of UK politics over the last century - with a succession of weird individuals at the helm - is deftly related by a historian with insider knowledge. Though it takes a little while to get underway, Marquand's insightful narrative describes the tenacious recurrence of political traits down the decades. Harold Macmillan was a "Whig imperialist to his fingertips" and this tradition is continued (in modified form) by David Cameron, who has "developed an emollient rhetoric of inclusion, harmony and evolutionary gradualism". In the case of Margaret Thatcher ("a revolutionary, albeit of a highly unusual kind"), we learn that "her Tory nationalism ran alongside a... largely unrecognised streak of democratic republicanism." Marquand regards Blair as the Scarlet Pimpernel of British politics: "His protean indeterminacy baffled the Conservatives as much as it baffled colleagues." But once "he had become Bush's prisoner... his best qualities — his stubborn self-belief and indomitable will — conspired with his worst ones to bring him down." In a new conclusion for this paperback, Marquand sums up the story of British democracy as "one of courage, perseverance, wisdom, selfishness, folly and self-deception". It is the very fallible nature of the participants who flail through this strange stew that makes politics so compelling.

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