Review: Over to You, Mr Brown
| DOI | 10.1111/j.1478-9302.2008.00157.x |
| Published date | 01 September 2008 |
| Date | 01 September 2008 |
| Author | David Willetts |
| Subject Matter | Article |
Review: Over to You, Mr Brown
David Willetts MP
Anthony Giddens earned a reputation as the guru behind Tony Blair, providing an
intellectually respectable case for the New Labour project. His latest book, Over
toYou, Mr Brown, is an attempt to provide the same service for Gordon Brown. His
arguments and the first year of the Brown premiership are an excellent oppor-
tunity to assess how the project is faring.
If anyone can make a coherent case for Labour today, Anthony Giddens can. He
was after all the intellectual behind the concept at the heart of New Labour – the
‘Third Way’. It is an odd expression which fails many of the conventional tests for
a successful political message. It has no meaning in the outside world – political
code does not get much more inward looking than this. Nevertheless it contains
within it a devastatingly effective political narrative. The story is that in the bad
old days of British politics there was only a choice between statist Old Labour and
the neoliberals. Then at last, with linguistic inevitability, you get New Labour. It
takes us down the Third Way which combines fairness and freedom, equity and
efficiency. Instead of the old politics of ‘either ... or’ you instead have the seductive
politics of ‘and’. In fact ‘and’ is probably the key Blair word. Every dilemma can
be resolved with an ‘and’.The conventional language of politics does not have a
vocabulary rich enough to convey this approach so new words have to be created,
combining apparent opposites, so this book offers a classic Giddens neologism of
‘flexicurity’ (Giddens, 2007, p. 96).
There are many serious criticisms of the Third Way which Giddens does not
address in the book. For a start it is a caricature of the British political tradition.
Previous generations of Labour modernisers such as Roy Jenkins get written out
of the script.And as true conservatism is thought to be libertarianism you end up
with the One Nation tradition of Conservatism classified as a sub-set of social
democracy (p. 16). My view would be that both political parties have felt the pull
between the twin poles of freedom and community. The parties have attempted
their own distinctive reconciliations of these tensions with a lesser or greater role
for the state. But even Margaret Thatcher (who is by some margin the most free
marketeer modern Conservative leader) had a concept of community; her speech
to the Synod of the Church of Scotland in 1988 was an attempt to explain it.
The criticisms are not just historical. There is a deeper conceptual problem too.
If ‘and’ is a crucial word for the Labour modernisers, so is ‘however’. The
structure of much of the argument in Giddens’ books such as this one and most
© 2008 The Author. Journal compilation © 2008 Political Studies Association
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notably The Third Way is for a paragraph of free market economics to be followed
by a paragraph of communitarian public intervention, linked by that crucial
weasel word ‘however’. Even where there is acknowledgement of the trade-off,
there is little to help us make decisions about the trade-off. Statements such as
‘traditional redistributive mechanisms should stay in place, but be adjusted if they
compromise job creation’ offer little guide as to what policy makers should do (p.
108). This means that it is very hard to work out on what basis the occasionally
conflicting demands which go into the Third Way can actually be reconciled.
Sometimes this led to peculiar inconsistencies. Tony Blair ended up proposing
super-casinos and regulating fairground prizes. Sometimes, as we will see with tax
credits, the Third Way was used as a way of avoiding open discussion about the
trade-off which was being made and led to some strange outcomes.
Behind the Third Way lies another concept formulated by Giddens – self-identity.
The argument is that we need this new form of politics because we ourselves have
changed. No longer do we have identities rooted in traditions like the organised
working class or indeed the sober respectability of the suburban salariat. Instead
we have a range of identities which we create for ourselves through a process of
building internal narratives. Relationships and decisions rest not on traditional
obligations but are freely chosen and we can opt into and out of them.This insight
is real, and captures something important about modern life. It is what aspiration
and social mobility are all about. However, this transformation has been more a
feature of our public lives than our private lives.There are still forms of identity
which are as fixed and fast as ever. For example, the obligations of children to their
parents (and parents to their children) are not things we can opt out of. It is
therefore hard to see how children fit into this model. In fact...
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