Britain Since 1918

The Strange Career of British Democracy

Datos Bibliográficos

ID9799321
AutoresKevin Jefferys (University of Plymouth, autor de correspondencia)
Año2009
Volumen124
Número509
Páginas1003-1005
Fecha de publicación2009-07-16
Peer ReviewedSí
Open AccessNo
TipoARTICLE
RevistaThe English Historical Review (JOURNAL)
Identificadores de la revistaISSN: 0013-8266 • E-ISSN: 1477-4534
EditorialOxford University Press (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1093/ehr/cep192
OpenAlexW2007799013
IdiomaEN
Citas recibidas11

David Marquand's wide-ranging new study sets out to assess the various ways in which British politicians, intellectuals, officials and citizens have viewed democracy. While the emphasis is on the period from 1918 to the present day, one of the virtues of the book is that it provides a detailed and fluent assessment of the protracted path which led to the majority of adults being enfranchised by the end of the First World War. At this point, the author notes, Britain had attained a ‘democracy of sorts’: despite a series of franchise changes stretching back to 1832, much of the old tradition of autonomous executive power sustained by the doctrine of the ‘Crown-in-Parliament’ continued. The fundamental problem in British politics after the Great War was therefore to be that of how ‘a political class formed in the pre-democratic era would cope with democracy’. In tackling his theme, Marquand focuses more on politicians and intellectuals than officials and ordinary citizens, and, as might be expected from someone with a distinguished track record in politics and the media, as well as in academia, he provides a series of perceptive and illuminating portraits of figures from across the political spectrum. Aneurin Bevan, for example, is described as being for ‘many on the Labour right...the Lucifer of the movement – a fallen angel, blessed with a mellifluous tongue, but cursed with overweening ambition and flagrant irresponsibility’. On the Conservative side, Lord Home is introduced as ‘charming, utterly conventional and utterly unintellectual’, his emergence as prime minister in 1963 representing ‘the last hurrah of the old patrician elite: a snook cocked at a world it found alien and distasteful’

Democracy · Media studies · Parliament · Political science · Politics · Power (physics · Sociology · Theme (computing · History · Law · Political and Economic history of UK and US