Book: Politics and Progress
Author: David Blunkett
Price: (Demos/Politico's ?8.99)
Who or what, from the point of view of political theory, are the third way and New Labour? David Blunkett, more than any other current thoughtful politician-more than Frank Field, more than Gordon Brown, more than Peter Mandelson, more even than the prime minister-provides a key to the solution of this mystery.
Blunkett is one of the most interesting figures on the British political scene. He is distinguished by his reflectiveness, his passion and his integrity. In his autobiography, he tells us with candour and feeling that, "I count not being able to see as an inconvenience rather than a disability... The whole point, of course, is that we should all be judged by what we do and how effective we are irrespective of any 'disability'... There is only the world we all inhabit and, whether blind or not, we all have to come to terms with that."
Just so. The same robust attitude to individual responsibility is present in David Blunkett's politics. As he says in Politics and Progress, "A modern commitment to equality... must consider personal responsibility-whether people have made free and informed choices about what to do with their lives... We are prepared to compensate people when inequality arises through no fault of their own. But... we instinctively feel that efforts should be rewarded, and that the distribution of resources in society should reflect the choices we have made."
Blunkett, however, sees himself as someone who has been helped by the state as well as by himself: "My personal experience was transformed into political commitment by the recognition that my opportunities in life were not the result of chance, but the product of political strategies by those who battled against inequality in the past... I did not succeed because government was doing something 'for me' but because it enabled me to do things for myself."
It is this combination of Samuel Smiles and Christian socialism-embodied in Blunkett's own career and attitudes-that makes him the embodiment of the third way. As he puts it, "A commitment to community can, and should, hold attractions for many of those who could see themselves as supporters of conservatism. Their fear of radical politics has often been based on consensus about the oppression or intrusive role of the state. The values set out here are as much about the individual contributing to the well-being of the whole as about what government can do to enable this to take place."
Or again, "Today we can look again for inspiration in political theories, obscured by... 20th-century ideologies, theories which offer insights into the importance of a wide spread of wealth to the health of democracy and the productivity of the economy... these issues can be addressed only if we find common ground between liberals and communitarians."
So there we have it-the third way is about the recognition that neither laissez-faire liberalism nor blanket state socialism can answer to the needs of human beings living with one another in society, because autonomous individuals can achieve fulfilment only against the background of an enabling state, communal actions and institutions.
Or do we? What is distinctive about this? For third-way theorists, the "discovery" that neither state action nor individual activity is by itself sufficient to bring about the good life may truly be a discovery. But this is news only for third-way theorists, battling against a peculiarly naive form of socialism advanced in the 1980s. For the rest of us, from Thatcherites to Gaitskellites, this much has always been common ground-the beginning, not the end of debate.
The difficult questions of practical political theory in England over the last half century and more have not been about whether the state or the individual is the sole object of concern, but rather about how to balance the claims of the state against the claims of the individual and the claims of society. The third way as represented by Blunkett (and, I suspect, rightly represented) is no more than a welcome return by the Labour party to the debate in which the rest of us have been participating all along.
So if the third way turns out to be no more than a return to the real world, what is new about New Labour? And this is where it gets interesting-because the answer is that New Labour is also David Blunkett. Look behind the third-way theorising to Blunkett's actual record in office and one finds the amalgam of reactionary modernism and bureaucratic interventionism that characterises New Labour.
First, the reactionary modernism: this is beautifully exemplified by Blunkett as home secretary. Old-fashioned liberal concerns-with the preservation of trial by jury, national control over extradition, the presumption of innocence, the operational independence of the chief constable, the independence of the judiciary-are all regarded as rather quaint, by comparison with the passionate desire to extirpate crime and protect the honest citizen from the hoodlum and the gang. Whether, in practice, the passionate effort to extirpate crime is likely to prove effective in the absence of sufficient numbers of police officers to catch and convict more than 3 per cent of criminals, or sufficient numbers of prisons to accommodate the number of prisoners, or sufficient intensive abstinence-based drug treatments to rehabilitate the young hardened drug addict, is another matter. But the motive is clear: ditch liberal traditions in pursuit of a modern passion to clamp down on the crime that disrupts society.
Then the bureaucratic intervention: this is exemplified by Blunkett both as home secretary and education secretary. Together with his predecessor Jack Straw, he has doubled the administrative staff of the home office. And this is not a passive bureaucracy. With an initiative a week (or slightly more), Blunkett's home office has intervened incessantly-no surprise to the headteachers who, as a result of his term as education secretary, now receive 2,800 pages of instruction and inquiry from Whitehall each year.
This combination of reactionary modernism and bureaucratic interventionism is more interesting than the third-way theorising, because it constitutes a New Labour battle strategy for government. And the interesting aspect-from the point of view of political theory as opposed to practical effect-is the view it reveals about the question that we (unlike the Labour party of the 1980s) have been debating all these years: the question of the balance between the state, society and the individual.
The presumption disclosed by the reactionary modernism is that, to protect society, the state must cease to concern itself too much with the old-fashioned liberal apparatus of checks and balances between state power and individual autonomy. And the presumption disclosed by the bureaucratic interventionism is that, to promote the welfare of society, the state must cease to concern itself too much with the old-fashioned liberal apparatus of checks and balances between the state and civic institutions and must instead exert itself more directly.
In other words, New Labour's position is that the state must be more effective in defending and promoting the welfare of society, and that, to be more effective, the state must be more active and less tolerant of constraints on its power. The naive egalitarianism and the desire to undo capitalism of Michael Foot's Labour party are out-but the belief in the redeeming power of state action is alive and well in New Labour.
This should be a profound relief to anyone inside the Labour party who fears that it has pulled up its roots. The roots are there, and the tree is growing. By contrast, for those of us who believe that the main effect of an overgrown tree is to cast shade, the task of pruning the spreading branches of interventionism and illiberal state power has been given a new urgency by six years of reactionary modernism and burgeoning, costly, ineffectual bureaucracy.
