Goodbye to the Third Way

2nd April 2007
By Anthony Giddens

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In British politics it is extremely difficult for a party to be elected for three, let alone four, successive terms. As far as the current government — and the nation ­— is concerned, we therefore stand at a crucial transition point. It is probably two years until the next national election. Although he is hanging on and on ... Tony Blair is due to step down in the near future. How will Labour fare under Gordon Brown, assuming he does become leader and prime minister? What policies should be kept, and what policy innovations should be introduced?

In electoral terms, over the past ten years Labour has had by far the most successful period in its history. The party has never previously been in government for two full terms before, let alone three.

Yet in spite of its long-standing hold over power, New Labour has been dismissed by many as all sound-bites and no coherent policies. Others have claimed that whatever policies it does possess have been mostly appropriated from Thatcherite conservatism. New Labour has simply taken the party to the right, and has given up most of the progressive causes for which it once stood.

These views are naïve and inaccurate. The party reversed its fortunes by adopting the political philosophy of the third way, itself often seen as vague and woolly, but actually packed with ideological and policy content.

Every successful left-of-centre party in the world is a third-way party. The third way was, and is, about the modernising of left-of-centre politics in a world which has changed dramatically, not only post-1989, but as a result of other transformations, such as the intensifying of globalisation and structural problems affecting the welfare state.

I believe that a thorough overhaul of Labour’s policies is needed at this point. It is time to say goodbye to the term ‘third way’, not because it provided the wrong orientation — on the contrary — but because the party and the government must move on.

In its place, I propose that Labour reconstruct its policies in the context of what I shall call a Contract With the Future. By this phrase I mean that Labour should offer a contract to citizens to initiate a future for the country, and as far as possible the wider world, that is socially just, as well as economically and ecologically sustainable.

New ideas are essential if Labour is to rekindle enthusiasm amongst the electorate. They should be based, as they were in the early 1990s, upon an analysis of the major changes affecting our society today. To win another term, Labour has to go onto the offensive.

Ideologically, the party needs a clearer definition of the public purpose than it has achieved to date. Building a robust public sphere has to be a prime ideal. The public sphere is not synonymous with the state, and has to involve a diversity of agencies, including businesses, voluntary associations and NGOs. Similarly, the party should be more up front about its egalitarianism. Creating a less unequal society is not just a moral ideal; it will be crucial for the country’s future competitiveness. A society in which a quarter of the population lack skills and qualifications will be crippled economically in a world in which there will be less and less place for the unskilled.

I would like New Labour more explicitly to rejoin the social democratic family of parties. The party in the 1990s was highly influenced by the New Democrats in the US, and in many ways fruitfully so. But the US is a different form of society from those in Europe, more tolerant of inequality, and able to draw upon immense resources compared to Britain. Britain is a European country, and should aspire to a similar mix of prosperity and equality to that found in the best-practice Continental states.

As they are in Scandinavia, aspiration, ambition and social mobility should be keynote ideas for Labour. Ours is a society in which it has been difficult for people from deprived backgrounds to do well. Considerable progress has been made since 1997, which can be further built upon. The Tories have mounted an attack on Labour on this count, saying that the level of mobility in the UK today is less than it was two or three decades ago.

Don’t they realise that if chances of mobility are low today, this is because of what happened when the Conservatives themselves were in power? Studies of social mobility by definition refer to people born twenty years ago or more. Labour’s policies must be aimed at ensuring that future generations do better.

The programme of constitutional reform begun in 1997 should be further developed. Brown speaks of a new constitutional settlement, but I think it is best to call this the democratising of our democracy. Labour should become serious about decentralisation and devolution.

Quite apart from the contribution such processes can make to the strengthening of democracy, they are important in responding effectively to globalisation. For example, today cities and regions interact directly with the global economy — they need local leadership to provide drive and direction.

Devolution is not real if it doesn’t involve power and if it doesn’t involve money. Reviving the regional agenda will be challenging, since it is one of the fields where Labour policy has gone distinctly awry. The proposed regional bodies would have had very little real influence. Voters were not prepared to endorse essentially toothless organisations.

Yet in principle such an agenda could help the country significantly. Regions are becoming more and more important as globalisation intensifies, as the experience of other countries shows. I would like to see it reactivated and strengthened, and more progress made towards simplifying the clutter of local government.

Decentralisation in health care and education means a further radicalisation of Blairite policies, not retreating from them. Gordon Brown seems to have insisted upon watering down the Alan Milburn proposals for foundation hospitals. He did so at least in some part for good reasons. It is a policy that has to be closely monitored, in terms of both quality of care and implications for inequality.

Yet if these issues can be addressed, as I think they can be, we should aim for a system giving foundation trusts more local control than they have under the diluted scheme that Labour eventually adopted.

Here lies one of the main tests for Brown. The Treasury, where he has spent the past ten years, could be seen as the epitome of centralising government. One of the lines of the Tory critique as soon as Brown comes to power will be — already is — that enormous sums of money have been spent to little effect, because the state is not the vehicle to deliver true reform. So when Brown talks of the state becoming the servant of the people, not only must he mean it, but he must show how it can happen.

Public services should be reformed to follow what I call the two ‘Ps’ — People and Participation; welfare reform needs to concentrate on prevention and early intervention, rather than only upon a safety net.

Brown has already started to go Green, and delivered an impressive speech on climate change in early March. He will need to preside over a wholesale greening of the Labour Party. Climate change, and the environment more generally, coupled with problems of energy security, will be dominating issues on the political agenda for the next ten to twenty years. We should not just be asking how we can combat global warming, but how sustainable is our current way of life.

There is a whole new set of concerns in politics today centred upon life-style and life-style change. Labour must not cede the ‘well-being’ agenda to the Tories, but on the contrary develop detailed policies in this area.

Labour’s foreign policy since 1997 is far from having been an unequivocal failure. There were notable successes in Bosnia, Kosovo and Sierra Leone. Yet the debacle in Iraq, coupled to Blair’s seemingly obsessive closeness to the Bush administration, have been prime factors underlying Labour’s slippage in public support.

Gordon Brown has little experience of foreign policy, but will have to forge a different approach. There must be a timetable for disengaging from Iraq and distance introduced between UK foreign policy and the policies of the Bush administration. Brown has the chance to be one of the main European leaders of the ‘new generation’, and he should seize it with both hands.

Labour can win again. It won’t be easy. Labour’s main problem is not the Tories, but widespread public disillusionment, not only with the government itself, but to some degree with all politicians. A great deal will depend upon Gordon Brown’s first year in power.

Will he be able to shed some of the baggage of the past and make a fresh beginning? Will he be willing and able to reach out to citizens who have not been traditional Labour supporters? I hope and think the answer to both questions will be yes.

Anthony Giddens is a Labour Peer and author of ‘Over to You, Mr Brown: How Labour Can Win Again’, published by Polity Press March 2007.

Filed Under: Labour, Tony Blair, Brown, Third Way
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