Leading us up the cul-de-sac
Robert Taylor
THE THIRD WAY AND ITS CRITICS by Anthony Giddens Polity, £25, £7.99, pp. 189 Aithony Giddens is the self-styled intellectual promoter of Tony Blair and his wretched 'Third Way'. He ought to know better. The director of the London School of Economics is a prodigious if opaque writer, mainly of sociology textbooks that fill shelves in university book emporia from Stanford, California to Singapore.
Professor Giddens likes to be 'at the cut- ting edge of modernity'. During the glory days of student revolution in the late 1960s he lectured to an adoring audience at Cam- bridge University in the manner of David Lodge's History Man. Now he is New Labour's academic voice for the chattering classes of central London. At the LSE's last graduation day he bellowed into the micro- phone: 'The LSE, that's the place to be'. How cool and right on.
His original book, The Third Way, was a global bestseller, translated into no less than 25 foreign languages. From Brazil to Russia, from Ivy League campuses to the Balkans, Mr Giddens is spreading the uni- versal message of our Great Helmsman. Now he has spun out another short volume to defend the Third Way against its many critics. It carries with it a suitable imprint of official approval with a banal recom- mendation from the Prime Minister on its cover. But no matter. Rumour has it that Mr Giddens's name is on the next tranche of Tony's cronies for the House of Lords.
This is indeed a treason of the aca- demics. For what Mr Giddens is trying to do is give intellectual coherence and respectability to what is essentially a spuri- ous and vapid project. Behind all the grand talk is a self-regarding conspiracy of mainly young men on the make (women are few in the project and usually derided) who cap- tured the Labour party nearly six years ago and are now using it to further their own selfish ambitions for power and wealth.
Giddens's latest offering is little more than party propaganda masquerading as scholarship. It does not really provide any satisfactory response to Third Way criti- cisms, particularly those from Lord Dahrendorf. Indeed, it seems unintention- ally to justify the validity of those original attacks. The Third Way is deeply illiberal and intolerant. It hates pluralism and per- sonal freedom except for homosexuals. It glories in control and in the arbitrary use of state power. Mr Giddens seems oblivious to this disturbing trend. In one sinister pas- sage he even seems to favour the use of massive police raids on sink estates to deal with the socially delinquent.
Civil liberties are not discussed at all. But the draconian regulation and harsh rhetoric of Jack Straw are an essential part of the Third Way. What is missing is any sense of compassion and humanity. The Third Way is an attempt to promote uncritically the wonders of global capital- ism through a perversion of the political language of the centre-left about equality. George Orwell, thou shouldst be living at this hour!
Mr Giddens crudely caricatures the 'old' Left and Social Democrats that dominated the European Left for much of the postwar period. It is hard to accept his opinion that this involved bureaucratic state power, attacks on the free market and 'equality of outcome' in the Germany of Willy Brandt and Helmut Schmidt, the Sweden of Tage Erlander and Olof Palme, the France of Francois Mitterrand, let alone the Britain of Clem Attlee and Harold Wilson.
Giddens's Third Way is mainly designed for the youngish rich self-improvers of south-east England who spend their time su,rfing the internet and setting up dot corn companies. The world of manual labour, poverty pay and insecurity seems far away. In Mr Giddens's concept class has long vanished. Trade unions go unmentioned. The old, the poor, the sick are out in the cold. It is true he spends more time in this volume than in the last discussing the prob- lems of developing nations, but he seems keen to ensure that those burdened with debt must accept their responsibilities and make themselves acceptable to the players of global markets.
This is a complacent, arrogant and nar- rowly self-satisfied view of the world that belies the realities we see all around us, not least at night in doorways along the Strand a few hundred yards from Giddens's LSE. In truth, none of the evils exposed by the left 100 years ago has gone away. Inequali- ties of wealth and income are wider in Britain today than they were in Victorian times. Our education system is the worst in the Western world. The national health service is falling to pieces. Public transport in the capital is a national disgrace. Our old are the poorest in Western Europe.
But New Labour wants to shut down, not open up a public policy debate. It is domi- nated by the need to do what it takes to win whatever the injury, to tell lies when required, to claim every setback as a triumph, and to rubbish anybody who so much as raises a feeble hand in dissent. This is not Social Democracy but New Authoritarianism. Perhaps in his next vol- ume Anthony Giddens might explain why so many people on the Centre-Left outside the New Class to which he belongs are sick- ened and disillusioned almost daily by what they see and hear being done in the name of the Third Way.
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