Like Margaret Thatcher, Tony Blair is not much interested in ideas. But, like her also, he knows that ideas matter in politics. They chart a course, provide a narrative and rally the troops. So Blair wants some. He encourages those who trade in them. Intellectuals are summoned to Downing Street. Potential themes are market-tested. Friendly thinkers are nourished. The project is to define the Project-in a way which has some chance of becoming public currency.
Enter the Third Way, today's candidate for this role. History is full of Third Wayism, on left and right. It is a handy device for defining what you are not. After the second world war, it was a slogan for those on the left who wanted to signal their rejection both of US-style capitalism and Soviet-style communism. It is perhaps less useful for describing what you are for. There is not much public clamour for the "Third Way now."
Tony Giddens is well aware of this, which is why his useful primer, The Third Way (just published by Polity Press), tries to strike a more positive note. The framework may be set by what is rejected-neoliberalism on one side, "old style" social democracy on the other-but he is more interested in where such rejection leads. That is: to a new politics of the "radical centre."
Another interesting historical echo here. Twenty years ago Roy Jenkins concluded his celebrated Dimbleby Lecture, which launched the bid to remake the British party system, with a call for "a strengthening of the radical centre." Where Roy called, Tony (Blair) has answered. We are in the middle of an audacious attempt to change the shape of British politics. It is a nice touch that Jenkins, with his electoral commission, is about to provide a means to cement the audacity.
Yet in many ways Blairism remains a practice without a theory; it is having to make it up as it goes along. It is the ideology for an age which has rejected ideologies. Giddens presents a world in which there are no longer enemies to be defeated, only problems to be solved. It is a world made fit for policy wonks. Power has disappeared somewhere. The only sound is that of lions lying down with lambs.
It is easy to have fun with all this. As Giddens whisks us briskly through the issues, each one is given the Third Way synthesis. Mix individualism and collectivism, market and state, private and public, right and left. Forget about the old antagonisms. The new politics is pick-n'-mix. The question is whether this provides the basis for a modern progressivism of the centre left.
Giddens is persuasive that it does, although all the issues he touches on-from globalisation to welfare, environment and the family-are offered as no more than trailers for work still to be done. It really is open season for the think-tankers, and even political theorists. The challenge is to synthesise without being synthetic.
The Third Way is necessarily radical, although as Giddens points out "the equation between being on the left and being radical no longer stands up, if it ever did." It is about finding ways to harness a capitalist market economy-to which there is no alternative-to a politics of individual "emancipation" as Giddens describes it. This means an active role for a clever state enabling individuals to cope with social change, but more through new kinds of partnership than through a traditional collectivism.
If this is not "old style" social democracy, is it any kind of social democracy? I believe it is. So does Giddens (whose subtitle is "the renewal of social democracy"). There is room for argument about whether "inclusion" is the same as "equality." Giddens fudges this, but there clearly is a difference between equalising and including. The leitmotif of the Third Way is about strategies for getting everyone on board the ship rather than worrying about whether they have the same kind of berths-"supply-side citizenship," as Raymond Plant puts it in his new pamphlet on Third Wayism for the European Policy Forum.
The best way to understand the Third Way is as a new version of social democracy, with the blind spots of the old model attended to-its fondness for producer interests, its over-reliance on the state, tax and spend, and so on. Social democrats are permanent revisionists, or should be.
Seen in this way, Blairism connects with the larger project of social democratic modernisation which is taking place throughout Europe. In the British context, it was particularly necessary to signal the break from both new right and old left, and that is what Third Wayism does. But in its positive form it will stand or fall as new social democracy-and so it should.
There is another reason why ideas matter, and why it is necessary to try to give some overarching framework to what political activity is all about. Without this framework, politics soon becomes merely about place and position. It is quite possible to want to go beyond the old exhausted ideologies without wanting to give up on ideology altogether. Before ideological politics we had an 18th century world where faction and fixing ruled. We dispense with organising ideas at our peril. A rootless kind of Third Wayism would be a disaster. New social democracy today keeps old corruption at bay.
