David Lipsey has produced a stimulating memoir, balancing an honestly self-critical account of a varied life with serious reflections on what has gone wrong with politics, the state of social democracy, constitutional reform and the problems of long-term policymaking in Britain, with special reference to the issue of social care for the elderly with which he has been consistently engaged since his appointment to the House of Lords in 1999.
Though our lives have criss-crossed, he and I have never properly worked together – and this is illustrative of where a previous generation of social democrats went wrong. In 1972 Lipsey went from being a young GMB researcher to working for Tony Crosland. Crosland was, and still is, for many of us our idol: the arch-revisionist of huge intellectual range and clarity with a ‘larger than life’ personality who left an indelible impression on all he met. A regret about this book is that he gives us all-too-brief glimpses of his towering but flawed hero.
Crosland’s friends and rivals were Denis Healey and Roy Jenkins. Healey was not enough of an ideas man to inspire deep loyalty, at least then, but in office Jenkins had shown that it was possible to combine effectiveness as a minister with radical passion. Many of us rallied to him. That is how I ended up in 1976 working as special adviser to Bill Rodgers who had just become a cabinet minister and who had served with distinction as the regimental sergeant-major of the pro-Europeans in the parliamentary Labour party.
Crosland and Jenkins and their respective followers had drifted apart, with the ‘Croslandites’ distancing themselves from the ‘Jenkinsites’, who they implied were obsessing about Europe, abandoning egalitarianism, and acting as a bunch of rightwing elitists outside the ‘mainstream’ of the party. The only beneficiaries of this division were the ‘legitimate’ and not-so-legitimate left.
After our 1979 defeat, Lipsey left Labour politics for 20 years in journalism. I ended up in what turned out to be a different political wilderness, the Social Democratic party. When Labour began to recover, I was excited by Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, but Lipsey remained distinctly more lukewarm about their egalitarian credentials. The divisions of the 1970s lingered on. Let’s hope the present generation works together better.
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Roger Liddle is a Labour member of the House of Lords
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In the Corridors of Power
David Lipsey
Biteback Publishing | 320pp | £25