Goldilocks politics

EVEN her detractors admit that Mrs Thatcher made Britain interesting to people overseas. Bits of the doctrine that came to be known as Thatcherism (a combination of privatisation, patriotism, hostility to trade unions and above all a belief in people taking responsibility for themselves instead of expecting the state to look after them) have been imitated in many countries. Now that her Conservative Party has been out of power for a year and a half, its New Labour successor says it is again turning Britain into a political trendsetter. This time the doctrine being tested for export is Tony Blair's celebrated “Third Way”. But what is it?

The answers should be readily to hand. After all, Mr Blair and his ministers give frequent speeches on the Third Way. He crosses the Atlantic to discuss its marvels with Bill Clinton. Anthony Giddens, director of the London School of Economics, has written an impenetrable book on it, and Mr Blair himself has put his name to a Fabian society pamphlet. Clever young things huddle in Downing Street seminars delineating it ever more exquisitely. Gluttons for punishment can read the latest musings on it on the Internet. Following Gerhard Schröder's election as German chancellor, an Anglo-German working group has been set up to look at the Neue Mitte, the Third Way's German counterpart.

Clearly, something exciting is going on. But despite all the seminars, speeches and articles, its champions insist on describing the Third Way at an unhelpful level of generalisation. “My fellow Americans, we have found a Third Way: smaller government and a stronger nation” (Bill Clinton). Sometimes it just seems to mean compromise. Peter Mandelson, Britain's trade secretary, says the Third Way in a European context means something in between the nation state (too small to cope with some problems) and a super-state (too big and too remote). All agree on what the Third Way isn't: neither the Old Left nor the New Right. But nor, say its visionaries, is it just splitting the difference. No, it is “about traditional values in a changed world” (Blair); a “very fundamental paradigm shift in politics” (Giddens).

Trying to pin down an exact meaning in all this is like wrestling an inflatable man. If you get a grip on one limb, all the hot air rushes to another. But it is worth persevering; it may be a poor ideology, but as a piece of politics the Third Way needs to be understood.

Despite the obfuscatory fog of generalities, one thing is reasonably obvious. For “a very fundamental paradigm shift in politics” the core ideas of the Third Way sound rather familiar. In Mr Clinton's vision of the Third Way, government does not just provide services: it is an “enabler and catalyst”, “a partner with the private sector and community groups”. The president wants government to be fiscally disciplined and less bureaucratic. It should not try to solve all of people's problems, but to create the conditions in which people solve their own. For his part, Mr Blair says that the Old Left championed indiscriminate and often ineffective public spending, but that the Third Way concentrates on making sure that the spending produces the desired result. He also says (something of a conceptual breakthrough for the Labour Party) that governments should be friendly to private enterprise (as the workers' class enemies are now known).

In short, these new politicians want to make government smaller and cleverer, fiscally sound, and friendly to business. It is hard to fault these commonsensical objectives. And in Britain's case they mark a clear departure from the big, stupid, overspending, business-hostile Labour governments of the 1960s and 1970s. But hang on. Aren't they precisely the objectives that Labour's Conservative foes tried to achieve before Mr Blair turfed them out of office in 1997?

Having demonised those Tory governments while opposing them Labour is understandably reluctant to admit that it is following the path they marked out. So a big part of the business of the Third Way consists of making up a story about what the Tories stand for which makes their Labour replacements look clearly different. In his Fabian pamphlet, for example, Mr Blair says that the New Right treats “public investment and often the very notions of ‘society' and collective endeavour as evils to be undone”; and that it advocates the “wholesale dismantling of core state activity in the cause of ‘freedom' ”.

Maybe he has some other country's politicians in mind? The Conservatives tried to stop the state from growing, and to roll it back, but never in their wildest dreams to abolish it. Indeed, 18 years of Tory government left the state's overall share of the economy virtually undiminished: 44% of GDP in 1979 and 43% in 1996. Some things had been privatised, yes, but others had grown. Had there been any “wholesale dismantling of core state activity”, you would expect New Labour to have entered office with plans for reconstruction, perhaps through the re-nationalisation of what the Tories privatised. It didn't.

The claim that the Conservatives rejected “the very notion of society” is no less preposterous. Mrs Thatcher did once say that “there is no such thing as society”, a quotation New Labour politicians cite time and again to press home the idea that Conservatives see people as atomised economic actors rather than social beings bound together (another vaunted Third Way insight) by mutual rights and responsibilities. But the quotation, notoriously, is incomplete. What Mrs Thatcher actually said was that:

Too many people have been given to understand that if they have a problem it's the government's job to cope with it They're casting their problem on society. And, you know, there is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women, and there are families. And no government can do anything except through people, and people must look to themselves first. It's our duty to look after ourselves and then, also, to look after our neighbour. People have got the entitlements too much in mind, without the obligations. There's no such thing as entitlement, unless someone has first met an obligation.

You could slip that into any fashionable tract on the Third Way without it looking out of place. According to Jack Straw, Mr Blair's home secretary, the Third Way, too, has no need for such a thing as society, on the basis that “society is not a ‘thing' external to our experiences and responsibilities. It is us, all of us.”

The big idea is that there is no big idea

Mrs Thatcher had more time for society than her critics allow; on some other matters, though, the portrait painted is, if exaggerated, at least basically accurate. She definitely saw government's tendency to grow, and to crowd out enterprise and private choice, as a problem. Her mission to halt and reverse what looked like an inexorable growth in the state's reach was clear to her departmental ministers and civil servants, even those whose instincts pulled in the opposite direction. Thatcherism was not a fully worked out theory when Mrs Thatcher entered office in 1979 (and critics of the Third Way may want to bear that in mind). But from the beginning it possessed one big idea—shrink the state so as to enlarge the space available for private choice and enterprise. It was all the more striking because it ran counter to the prevailing consensus.

In this area, Labour's Third-Way leaders and the Tories they replaced may genuinely disagree a bit. Third-Way propagandists are keen to contrast the right-wing assumption that governments almost always get things wrong with their own belief in the possibility, at least, of successful state intervention. Arguing that choice tends to be available only to those with the means to choose, and as such is too often a cover for privilege, they insist that the state really can get things right, provided it is managed better.

But how to manage it better? The Old Left answer would have been by spending more money on more public employees belonging to trade unions. The Third Way is against this. Mr Straw says that, apart from being the most expensive of options, “the statist approach—in housing, in policing, in education, in welfare—treated our citizens as passive recipients of services”. Mr Blair says the Conservatives damaged health and education by showing “a visceral antipathy” towards the public services. But he refuses to equate the interests of the welfare state's consumers with the interests of its workers, whom he has already begun to antagonise by creating a regime of inspectors to weed out bad teachers, social workers and doctors.

In October, Mr Blair tried to explain his Third Way to senior civil servants by giving examples of ways in which it had helped the government find new ways to act. These included his government's use of a public-private partnership, rather than outright privatisation, to modernise the London Tube; government co-operation with the Wellcome Foundation, a charity, to invest in public research laboratories; and an invitation to private firms to help raise school standards in designated “education action zones”.

However it is not plain what these disparate examples have in common. Public-private partnerships were pioneered by the Tories—and in many cases amount to little more than an accounting trick to take public spending off the balance sheet. And there is nothing radical about a government providing matching funds to encourage charitable spending, as in the case of the Wellcome Foundation. Perhaps the common theme is a willingness to blur the boundary between state and public provision? But if so, why the continued ritualistic hostility to private schools and private medicine?

Blurriness is certainly not something the Third Way fights shy of. Indeed, in as much as it airily dismisses the relevance of most of the “old-style dichotomies” which maintained certain clarities in political life, the Third Way is pro-blur. While Mr Blair does not want to continue Thatcherism's crusade against the state, nor does he seek to reverse it (which means it is likely to grow). He and his colleagues want people to be less selfish, but claim to have no problem with anyone becoming “filthy rich” (Mandelson). They want to promote equality, but not to restrict choice (except, perhaps, in the matter of schooling). They want the dynamic market of America but they also want the social cohesion of Western Europe. They want to be liberal and they also want to be social-democratic. And they want to believe that none of these wants clashes with any other.

Mr Straw has said that people need a “framework of belief”, and as a result those who govern in their name need to have this framework marked out for them “so that there is some template for the scores of individual decisions which they have to make every day.” But it is hard to see how any template could sort out these disparate goals and aspirations. To its detractors, their very multiplicity shows the Third Way's fundamental hollowness: a doctrine that says you can have your cake and eat it too is a recipe for ducking every hard decision.

Enthusiasts see it differently. Some of these goals may be in tension, even incompatible, but they happen to be what the voters—who are seldom ideologues—want, whether they have fitted them into a “framework of belief” or not. In striving to do what the voters want, the Third Way frees policymakers from the need to place every decision on a left-right spectrum, or inside any other fixed ideological scheme. The Third Way, Mr Blair told the French National Assembly helpfully, is whatever works.

What it's really for

Pragmatism has much to commend it. If nothing else, it frees a government to experiment. How else could Mr Blair have taken workfare, an idea that originated with America's Republicans, and made it into Britain's “new deal” for the unemployed, a flagship Third Way policy? But whatever the merits, this pragmatic approach means that the Third Way must by definition be several planks short of a framework of beliefs consistent enough to provide Mr Straw's “template” for the scores of decisions that a government has to make every day.

In the final analysis, though, as the comrades used to say, that was never what the Third Way was meant to do. Some political doctrines start with ideas. This one started with a predicament: the inability of the Labour Party to win an election by running on its traditional policies. A few years before the 1997 election, Philip Gould, a party strategist and pollster, summed it up by writing an internal memorandum with the succinct title: “Winning the Trust of the Centre without Betraying the Left”. Although not an adequate description of what the Third Way is, this may not be too bad a description of what it is actually for.

New Labour has a strong sense of guilt about its move to the right. The constant complaints about Mr Blair being a “control freak” arise from the long and still incomplete battle he has had to wage within the party against those on the left who think of themselves as “true Labour”. He is exquisitely sensitive to the charge that he is merely a Tory in disguise. At his party's annual conference last September he made a point of rejecting this “nonsensical” allegation. And it is nonsensical, if you swallow the Third Way's nonsensical caricature of what Conservatism is.

The big gap in today's British politics is not between the Third Way and the policies of the Conservative governments that preceded Mr Blair. It is between the Third Way and what Labour used to stand for. That is why many politicians on Labour's left heap such scorn on the new idea. One such MP, Austin Mitchell, calls the Third Way “a convenient label for pragmatism, empiricism, eclecticism and a general approach of ‘do nothing and ask your focus group'.” He says that if the left is not to be swept hither and thither by every fad and fashion, it needs to be anchored in “redistribution, intervention, high public spending, full employment and equality”. There's a template for you.

Your policies, my values

Unfortunately for Mr Mitchell, reverting to such a platform would spell disaster for the party. But so would abandoning all of the feelings behind it. The strength of the Third Way is that by embracing a certain level of contradiction it helps Mr Blair to talk seriously about social justice—in some sort of which he believes—without having to say much about socialism, a word deemed to have outlived its usefulness. His critics look at New Labour's theft of Tory clothes and say the prime minister has no convictions. But they are wrong. He is convinced that you can do Tory things on the basis of Labour beliefs and be thanked for it. He believes that while his policies have changed with the times he remains faithful to Labour's central values.

In 1995, as leader of the opposition, Mr Blair travelled to Hayman Island in Australia and told a meeting of News Corp executives:

If—and I accept this is the real challenge—the left can liberate itself from outdated preconceptions, strip its essential values out from the means of their application relevant to another part of their history, then a modern left-of-centre is the best able to provide security amid change.

The idea that a party can reverse its policy ideas but cling to its underlying values is arresting. Policies that were base when they sprang from Tory values (greed, worship of the market) become suddenly precious when reprocessed through the alchemy of Labour's higher purpose (altruism, community). Labour may have mislaid a core value or two along the way (in Mr Blair's Fabian pamphlet equality becomes “equal worth”, something rather different), but as long as not too many babies are lost in the torrent of bathwater the voters seem unfussed. As Lewis Namier, a historian, once said, what matters most in politics are the underlying emotions, “the music, to which ideas are a mere libretto often of very inferior quality”. The music of the Third Way may well harmonise economic efficiency and social justice, a tune the Tories somehow forgot. But can the libretto be made to make any sense at all?