The tutorial and former Labour MP David Marquand, who has died aged 89, was one of many foremost political analysts of his era on the centre left of British politics. His life and work was spent in pursuit of how finest to attain political, financial and social reform inside a pluralist social democracy, an ambition that was unfulfilled, however about which he remained constantly optimistic.
An independent-minded, progressive mental, Marquand mixed a profitable educational profession as a politics professor with each political activism and a prolific stream of revealed historical past and journalism. He poured his appreciable power right into a raft of considerate analytical books and essays on the long run course of the left in Britain. The Unprincipled Society (1988), The Progressive Dilemma (1991), The New Reckoning (1997) and Britain Since 1918: The Unusual Profession of British Democracy (2008) are amongst his most influential publications.
He was blessed with the flexibility to put in writing with brilliance and readability and his first ebook – the authorised biography of Ramsay MacDonald (1977), which has come to be thought to be the definitive account of the lifetime of the primary Labour prime minister – was acclaimed on its publication by the historian AJP Taylor as “first-class”.
His political beliefs advanced with the passage of occasions in the midst of his grownup years, taking him on a lifetime’s journey by membership of the events of the centre and the left, commenting, when he joined Plaid Cymru in 2016, that he had “been in additional events than the Prince of Wales”. Throughout his years within the Labour social gathering, he was a revisionist social democrat, however felt that it misplaced its method by pursuing an intolerantly proletarian type of socialism within the late Nineteen Seventies that excluded middle-class radicals corresponding to himself.
He fought his first parliamentary seat for Labour within the south Wales seat of Barry in 1964, halving the Conservative majority. Within the subsequent common election in 1966, he gained the Nottinghamshire seat of Ashfield.
As soon as within the Commons, he swiftly gained a repute for his evident means, making his maiden speech within the Funds debate on incomes coverage and stressing the necessity for improved wages for mineworkers in his constituency. He was a member of the estimates committee and the choose committee on process. From 1967 to 1969, he served because the parliamentary personal secretary to Reg Prentice, minister of public constructing and works, and later of abroad improvement, a rightwinger who would subsequently defect to the Conservatives.
Marquand was all the time a fervent fanatic for British membership of Europe, and after the 1970 election turned a delegate to the meeting of the Council of Europe. He briefly joined Labour’s opposition frontbench as an financial spokesman in 1971, however misplaced the put up that October when he was one in all 69 Labour MPs to insurgent in opposition to the social gathering whip within the historic vote to hitch the Frequent Market. Thereafter he was more and more concerned within the fractious debate about the way forward for the Labour social gathering and was a number one determine within the Manifesto group of moderates searching for to halt its leftward course.
As an acolyte of Roy Jenkins, Marquand determined to resign as an MP to work with Jenkins in Europe, when the latter took up the put up in 1977 as the primary British president of the European Fee. The following byelection, in Marquand’s supposedly protected seat of Ashfield the place his October 1974 majority of twenty-two,915 was overturned by the Conservatives by 264 votes, was a sensation. Labour would regain the seat within the 1979 election, however the shattering defeat was ascribed to Marquand’s resolution to take up a profitable, tax-free and considerably ill-defined put up supposedly liaising between the fee and the European parliament.
He discovered it an unsatisfactory position in any case, and inside 18 months returned to the UK and life as an instructional, whereas concurrently pursuing his political pursuits. He was a founder member of the Social Democratic social gathering when it launched in 1981, remaining a member of its steering committee till 1988, having already been carefully concerned with the technique that led to the breakaway from Labour. He contributed concepts to Jenkins’s speeches throughout this era, together with his famed “breaking the mould” Dimbleby lecture in 1979 that heralded the approaching cut up.
Marquand stood unsuccessfully as an SDP candidate in Excessive Peak in 1983 and subsequently joined the merged Liberal Democrat social gathering, leaving after the 1992 election. His subsequent transfer could be to rejoin the Labour social gathering in 1995, impressed as he then was by Tony Blair, though he would later depart – over opposition to the Iraq struggle and what he thought to be New Labour’s extreme authoritarianism – and describe the previous Labour prime minister as “that magician of ambiguous populism”. He flirted with the Inexperienced social gathering earlier than his transfer to Plaid Cymru, by which era he regarded himself as a democratic republican.
Born in Cardiff into Labour politics, David was the eldest of three kids of Rachel (nee Rees), a schoolteacher, and Hilary Marquand, an economist, authorities administrator, Labour MP (1945-61) and a minister in 4 completely different posts within the Attlee authorities, together with as successor to Aneurin Bevan in 1951 as minister of well being.
David was educated at Emanuel college, Battersea (then a voluntary-aided grammar college), which now boasts a Marquand studying room. He took a primary in historical past at Magdalen School, Oxford, and chaired the College Labour Membership in 1957. His nationwide service was spent at Bodmin, Cornwall, with the joint providers college for linguists (often called the “Russian course”), a programme of intensive language research devised throughout the chilly struggle to coach doable future interpreters, translators or candidates for the key providers. Michael Frayn and Alan Bennett had been contemporaries on the course.
In 1958 Marquand was a educating assistant on the College of California, Berkeley, for a yr earlier than becoming a member of this newspaper as a frontrunner author, having turned down a extra profitable put up on the Sunday Specific. In 1962 he returned to Oxford to pursue a analysis fellowship at St Antony’s School, and in 1964 took up a put up as a lecturer in politics on the just lately established College of Sussex, the place he remained for 2 years till coming into parliament.
His educational profession resumed in 1978 when he turned professor of up to date historical past and politics at Salford College. In 1991 he moved to take up the politics chair at Sheffield College and arrange the up to date historical past and political economic system division. In 1996, a yr after it turned a part of the college, he turned principal of Mansfield School, Oxford, the place he stayed till 2002. He remained an honorary professor at Sheffield, was a visiting scholar on the Hoover Establishment, Stanford, within the US (1985-86), a visiting fellow on the division of politics and worldwide relations at Oxford from 2002, and an honorary professor within the college of regulation and politics at Cardiff College from 2015. An energetic member of a number of influential thinktanks, he was awarded a lot of honorary levels, awards and fellowships together with these of the British Academy, the Royal Historic Society, the Royal Society of Arts and the Realized Society of Wales. He was, nevertheless, a fervent opponent of the honours system.
In 1959 he married Judith Reed, a authorities economist and later an instructional. She survives him, together with their kids, Charles and Ruth, six grandchildren and three great-grandchildren. His siblings, Richard and Diana, predeceased him.
