Vol. 20 No. 17 · 3 September 1998
pages 3-5 | 2412 words
Third Way, Old Hat
Ross McKibbin
The departure of Frank Field, the enthusiastic reception by the Parliamentary Labour Party of Gordon Brown’s spending plans, together with the increasingly desperate attempts by the Government’s leading members, particularly the Prime Minister himself, to discover a Third Way, represent an important moment in the history of New Labour. The hunt for the Third Way, which has been going on more or less since Blair announced the birth of New Labour, is in many respects paradoxical. It is not obvious why a government which prides itself on its pragmatism and freedom from ideological baggage should spend so much of its time trying to acquire a new ideological encumbrance. Furthermore, the Government is at the moment under no electoral pressure: on the contrary, its lead in the opinion polls remains formidable – without precedent in our modern history. The Prime Minister continues to be enormously popular. In these circumstances, it seems surprising that he should wish to tamper with a winning formula. The departing Field and the spending Brown are, as we shall see, two of the reasons why.
What is most curious about the search for the Third Way and the debate about the policies which are supposed to constitute it is how unhistorical they are. Few of the participants seem to have much sense of the history either of the Labour Party or of the country it now governs. The rhetoric of the Third Way is, in fact, very misleading in its assumptions. It seems to suggest that the Third Way is a via media between two polar opposites – an uninhibited free market at one pole and ‘socialism’ at the other – and that these opposites themselves are complete entities which occupy all the space at each pole. But this has never been the case, at one pole or the other. In Britain there have this century been few defenders of the uninhibited free market as a basis of social policy and there has certainly been no such thing as ‘Old Labour’, if by that we mean a political party whose ideology was set in stone and therefore unquestionable. The history of the Labour Party has been one of almost constant ideological and political adaptation. In this sense there are many ‘Old Labours’. The Old Labour Party which Mr Blair inherited, which we might call the Kinnock-Smith Party, was one variety, and it differed from Tony Benn’s variety as it did from the Wilson-Callaghan variety. That Party in turn differed significantly from Attlee’s, which differed even more from Ramsay MacDonald’s. And so on. We could argue, indeed, that Tony Crosland’s The Future of Socialism presented as much of a challenge to the ideological status quo within the Labour Party as the proponents of New Labour have done; yet Crosland never imagined that he was re-creating the Labour Party. We should, therefore, at least in part, see New Labour – both as practice, what it does in government, and as ideology, what it says it stands for – as one strand in the Labour Party’s traditions.
Letters
Vol. 20 No. 19 · 1 October 1998
From Bruce Bucknell
Ross McKibbin is right to question the empty rhetoric of the Third Way (LRB, 3 September), but his own thinking is old hat. He implies that today’s economy is little different from that of 1931 and that we need to relearn a few simple lessons. Rather than parade his Old Labour prejudices, perhaps he could explain just how the lessons of Britain’s economic and monetary policy in the Twenties are relevant to us in 1998. Has he not noticed the change in the levels of taxation and of transfer payments in the intervening period? Or the fact that more than twice Britain’s annual income is now traded in London in one form or another every day? Or that the main cause of death is heart disease not TB, as I believe it still was in 1931? He asks why no one today believes that the best way of solving a social problem (when he really means poverty) is to throw money at it. If only life was so simple. He doesn’t seem to have appreciated the universal truth of human behaviour that Mrs Thatcher knew very well: no one likes paying taxes. Furthermore, the more tax levied on us to transfer to poorer people, the more entitled we feel to some of that money.
And what about Europe? McKibbin writes as if we were an island entire unto ourselves. An independent central bank is part of the price we have to pay to allow our entry into the single currency. In this respect, the Government is very New indeed. Does McKibbin believe that joining the single currency is even worse than giving up power over interest rates? Or does he agree with the now apparently orthodox view among Euro sceptic Conservatives that a little bit of inflation is good for us and that we can easily survive with ‘more flexibility’ outside this new currency area?
Bruce Bucknell
Kingston on Thames
From Bruce Bucknell
Ross McKibbin is right to question the empty rhetoric of the Third Way (LRB, 3 September), but his own thinking is old hat. He implies that today’s economy is little different from that of 1931 and that we need to relearn a few simple lessons. Rather than parade his Old Labour prejudices, perhaps he could explain just how the lessons of Britain’s economic and monetary policy in the Twenties are relevant to us in 1998. Has he not noticed the change in the levels of taxation and of transfer payments in the intervening period? Or the fact that more than twice Britain’s annual income is now traded in London in one form or another every day? Or that the main cause of death is heart disease not TB, as I believe it still was in 1931? He asks why no one today believes that the best way of solving a social problem (when he really means poverty) is to throw money at it. If only life was so simple. He doesn’t seem to have appreciated the universal truth of human behaviour that Mrs Thatcher knew very well: no one likes paying taxes. Furthermore, the more tax levied on us to transfer to poorer people, the more entitled we feel to some of that money.
And what about Europe? McKibbin writes as if we were an island entire unto ourselves. An independent central bank is part of the price we have to pay to allow our entry into the single currency. In this respect, the Government is very New indeed. Does McKibbin believe that joining the single currency is even worse than giving up power over interest rates? Or does he agree with the now apparently orthodox view among Euro sceptic Conservatives that a little bit of inflation is good for us and that we can easily survive with ‘more flexibility’ outside this new currency area?
Bruce Bucknell
Kingston on Thames
