One of the central preoccupations of David Marquand's writing has been the Labour party, its tortured trajectory, its achievements and its failures, its capacity to inspire and disappoint. He has written eloquently about the progressive dilemma, whether progressives in British politics should support and work within the Labour party as the best available vehicle for achieving political, economic and social reform. This was and remains a dilemma because progressives, both social democrats and socialists, have tended to be drawn from the radical intelligentsia, enthused by ethical ideals and political theories as to how society might be made better, and committed to a politics founded on principles and clear ideological views of the world, whereas the Labour party was created by the trade unions primarily to represent the labour interest in Parliament, and appealing for support on the basis of working-class solidarity, identity and culture. When the Labour Representation Committee was established in 1900, its objective was to establish a distinct Labour group in Parliament, with its own whips, able to agree its own policy. Labourism, the ideology of the Labour movement, was conservative, pragmatic, realist and defensive, rather than radical and transformative. Progressive intellectuals often came into conflict with Labourism, and many despaired of the party and left it, but for more than a hundred years the Labour party has been the main focus for progressive politics in Britain, the indispensable party for both the left and centre-left. The enthusiasm of different groups of progressive intellectuals for the party has ebbed and flowed, as some leave in despair and others join (or rejoin) in hope.

David Marquand's understanding of the progressive dilemma was shaped both by his parliamentary experience and also crucially by the research for his biography of Ramsay MacDonald. In this essay I review Marquand's interpretation of Ramsay MacDonald and Marquand's social democratic critique of Labourism, contrasting it with the very different interpretation by Ralph Miliband in his socialist critique of Labourism, Parliamentary Socialism, first published in 1961. Marquand and Miliband articulate different accounts of the progressive dilemma, but they agree about the recurring problems which have beset Labour throughout its history, problems still very evident today.