Something Old, Something New, Something Borrowed, Something Blue: the Jackdaw Politics of the Third Way.
New Labour claims that its ‘third way’ represents a new and distinctive approach that differs from both the old left and the Conservative right. There have been many attempts to position the third way on a left-right continuum (see Driver and Martell 2000). On the one hand, New Labour claims that it is a left or left of centre party, with the third way seen as a modernised or renewed social democracy (Blair 1998; Giddens 1998, 2000). On the other hand, it has been argued that there has been a significant convergence between New Labour and the Conservatives, resulting in a new consensus of ‘Blaijorism’, or perhaps now ‘Hagairism’.
However, this approach is too simplistic as the picture is more complex and nuanced. First, there remains considerable debate about the content of the labels of the first and second way. Crouch (1997) claims that there have been four distinct ‘Old Labours’. It is unclear to what extent Labour was ever a ‘socialist’ or even a ‘social democratic’ party, and the broad church of Old Labour includes individuals as diverse as Attlee, Bevan, Crosland and Benn. Similarly, the Conservative right is an uneasy mixture of neo-liberal and neo-conservative tendencies. There has been some rewriting of history, caricaturing the old left and the new right in order to create space for the third way (Economist 1998; Levitas 1998; Navarro 1999). Second, attempts to place ‘the third way’ on a left-right continuum give too much coherence to a term that defies simple description. Like Old Labour, the third way is a broad church. It is very diverse, including some policies such as the minimum wage associated with the old left and the Private Finance Initiative of the new right. Third, Crouch (1997) points out that in many ways the Labour election victory in 1997 is more similar to Conservative victory of 1951 than the Labour victory of 1945. Labour could not wish away the previous eighteen years, and was forced to build on a landscape inherited from the Conservatives. Its response was not wholesale abolition of Conservative policies, but an selective attempt to reform the reforms. Some policies such as the purchaser/ provider split in the NHS were incrementally changed, while others such as the Assisted Places scheme in education and tax relief on health insurance for elderly people were abolished. As Blair argued in the Introduction to the 1997 Manifesto (Labour Party 1997) ‘Some things the Conservatives got right. We will not change them. It is where they got things wrong that we will make change.’ This is more policy adaption than policy convergence. It follows that it is meaningless to place the third way on a left-right continuum which exists in a timeless policy vacuum. Rather than comparing third way policies to what Old Labour did, such as Keynesian full employment, the more difficult counterfactual exercise is the comparison between what Old Labour might have done in today’s circumstances.
Using examples from welfare reform, the complex roots of the third way are examined in terms of something old, something new, something borrowed and something blue. Before this, a useful starting point is to map out some of the territory of the third way and the welfare state.