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Blair's Grail Quest for the Third Way
has had a poor reception on the left. In some ways this is
understandable. By turns Blair has made uncertainty about
the concept and its content a virtue (following Tony Giddens'
argument that it is all still a work in progress) and then
he seems to have convinced himself that the philosopher's
stone has indeed been found and it turns out that the Third
Way is exactly what the Blair administration has been doing
ever since May 1997.
Far too many socialists have seen the pursuit of the Third
Way as simply a public relations stunt. Smoke and mirrors
to disguise the continuity between the Thatcher/Major years
and the present government. Blair is widely seen by some left
of centre writers as a man not much interested in history.
A Labour leader who is not of his party, in terms of background
or political formation, and, therefore, not much interested
in the history or origins of the party which he leads. This
is a misjudgement of both Blair and the rather grandly named
project of New Labour.
Blair's pursuit of the Third Way and his ambitions for New
Labour in the 21st century rest on a particular reading of
20th century British political history. Blair leads a party
which in his bones he feels should not exist. History took
a wrong turn in the early 1900s and as a result we have had
the best part of one hundred years of Conservative, or Conservative
dominated, governments. Brief interregnums of Liberal or Labour
governments cannot disguise the fact that the Conservatives
have been the governing party (or dominant party or natural
party of government, the terms all have roughly the same import)
this century.
On the face of it this seems strange. The Conservative Party
is a 19th century institution created to represent the interests
of the landed aristocracy and established church. The 20th
century has been the century of mass democracy and the rise
of the common people. One might have expected not a promising
era for a party such as the Conservatives.
Actually the Conservatives had a thin time of it in the 19th
century, a time when the electorate was restricted by property
and house holding qualifications, the party won few elections
and, except at the turn of the century, had few extended periods
in office. In contrast the extension of the suffrage and the
democratic politics of the present century have seen the Conservatives
flourish. They dominated politics in the inter-war years and
the post-1945 period has seen two long periods of continuous
rule, one for thirteen and one for eighteen years.
By contrast the Labour Party, which is a child of the 20th
century (created as the Labour Representation Committee in
1900 and becoming something closer to a party in 1906), has
been remarkably unsuccessful in the century of its creation.
Labour has never yet managed to govern for two full terms
of office. It has won elections but often with no overall
majority in the House of Commons (1924, 1929 and February
1974) or very small majorities (1950, 1964 and October 1974).
Only on three occasions (1945, 1966 and 1997) has the party
managed clear and decisive election victories.
The 20th century has turned out to be, as historian Arthur
Seldon describes it, the "Conservative century".
For Tony Blair, and those who think like him, this has been
an easy victory for the Tories, a victory by default, because
of the troubles and divisions of the centre left. For Blair
the tragedy of the left has been the sundering of socialism
and liberalism in the early part of the century. The split
between Labour and the Liberals divided the left against itself
and, particularly given the nature of the first-past-the-post
electoral system, this made it easy for the Conservatives
to dominate the political system.
In a sense this is a hopeless fantasy. We cannot climb on
board the Tardis and go back in time to undo the splintering
of the relationship between organised labour and the Liberal
Party which took place, partly because of dissatisfaction
with the way the Liberals were representing the interests
of a growing trade union movement and partly because of the
cultural gap between the Liberal leaders and increasingly
politically aware union leadership. My own guess is that the
emergence of a separate Labour Party was highly likely (not
inevitable, nothing in politics ever is) and the Liberal grandees
did not have the skills to prevent it. This is unlike the
leaders of the Democratic Party in the United States who were
able to get the unions on board in the 1930s and thus block
the creation of an effective and seperate union based party.
There really is no point in crying over spilt milk but can
we put Humpty Dumpty together again? Can the Third Way provide
the link which can reconnect Labour and Liberals?
In a sense we should go back even further to discover the
relationship between the two parties. The English radical
tradition has always had its individualist and its collectivist
threads. Even in the 1640s, at the time of the English Revolution,
the left had two currents, the Levellers and John Lilburne
were individualist and radically anti-establishment, whereas
the Diggers and Gerrard Winstanley were collectivist and radically
anti-establishment. Whatever their differences both trends
were militantly egalitarian and this probably explains why,
despite their differences, their opponents could not or would
not tell them apart. The 1647 Reading and Putney debates about
the future of the revolution are more or less the starting
point for the English radical and democratic tradition. As
much part of the liberal inheritance as the socialist one.
These two traditions have always been integral to the British
left. Sometimes in tension but more often intertwined and
intermeshed. The individualist and collectivist elements have
often been incarnated in a single person. George Orwell, Nye
Bevan and Tony Crosland owed as much to the individualist
tradition as to the collectivist one.
In the late 1800s and early 1900s the division between socialism
and liberalism was not a very clear one. New or advanced liberals
such as J. A. Hobson, T. H. Green and L. T. Hobhouse expounded
views not all that different from those of many Fabians and
even leaders of the Independent Labour Party. Keir Hardie
famously wrote an open letter to Lloyd George asking him to
consider taking up the leadership of Labour. Even much later
the two party's were intertwined. The 1945 Atlee government
had its foundations in Keynes' work on demand management and
full employment and the welfare state as conceived by Beveridge,
both of them Liberals.
The rise of class politics in Britain after 1900 meant that
in a contest between Labour and the Liberals for the leadership
of the centre left Labour was bound to win but class politics
has been on the decline as an influence on voting behaviour
and political identification. This is particularly true amongst
women and younger voters. This is one of the perceptions which
has prompted Tony Giddens to seek out the Third Way in order
to go "beyond left and right" and try to assist
in the "Renewal of Social Democracy". The decline
of traditional working class communities and the shrinking
of the organised manual working class has led to a weakening
of collectivism.
Blair may have been premature, in January, in asserting that
most of us are middle class, or soon will be, or at least
want to be, but his comments do express the reality of late
20th century Britain. People do have more individualistic
aspirations, more middle class ones if you like. We live in
a more diverse society, racially, morally, ethnically, religiously
and sexually. There is no way back from that and there should
not be. A left which celebrates difference and diversity can
find itself coming home to its liberal and individualistic
roots as well as retaining its commitment to solidarity and
a range of collective solutions to society's problems. Liberty,
equality and fraternity always seemed a pretty good mission
statement to me.
In a way the argonauts of the Third Way are asking the right
questions. How do we make the left relevant in a more individualistic
society which is more fragmented than in the past? Can social
democracy recognise both the changed circumstances of the
times and the changed values and aspirations of ordinary people?
The problem with some of the conclusions which are being produced
is that they are conservative not radical ones. Egalitarian
and anti-establishment themes were with us from the very beginning
of the left. We should not retreat into a fundamentalism which
refuses to recognise the changed times that we live in. We
need to value our traditions but also consider what we can
draw from them.
The discussion around the Third Way has the potential for
great radicalism. Fresh thinking but not on the basis of a
blank slate. Year zero only ends with zero. If we are serious
about a Third Way then old assumptions, tribalisms and party
boundaries will not work. The blunt truth is that I agree
with some Liberal Democrats more than I agree with many Labour
Party members (both to my right and to my left). Do we really
want to maintain the pretence that we agree with 100% of what
our party stands for and that the other lot have nothing to
say worth listening to? If so we should go to grow up classes.
A Third Way (not a middle way) needs to find room for the
liberal and the socialist insights and traditions, I would
even find some room for a few conservative themes on law and
order and education.
We cannot undo the history of the 20th century but we can
address what went wrong. In the long run Labour and the Liberal
Democrats must work together if the 21st century is to become
the social democratic century. To do that everyone who is
serious about where we go from here needs to look at the traditions
and history of the centre left and be clear about both what
divides us as well as what unites us. We cannot get back the
past but maybe, just maybe, we can go back to the future.
C. R. Attlee, The Labour Party in Perspective,
Victor Gollancz Ltd 1937
Peter Clarke, Keynes and Keynesianism, The Political
Quarterly, July - September 1998
Anthony Giddens, Beyond Left and Right, Polity Press,
1994
Anthony Giddens, The Third Way, Polity Press, 1998
Christopher Hill, The World Turned Upside Down, Penguin
1974
Ralph Miliband, Parliamentary Socialism, Merlin Press
1964
Anthony Seldon, Conservative Century in Anthony Seldon
and Stuart Bell (eds) Conservative Century, Oxford University
Press, 1994
Andrew Vincent, New Ideologies for Old?, The Political
Quarterly, January - March 1998
A. S. P. Woodhouse, Puritanism and Liberty, J. M. Dent
& Sons Ltd 1974 |
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