The Praful Bidwai Column for the week beginning June 18, 2001
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The ‘Fourth Way’,
not Third!
Britain’s general election has proved historic. Not only has Mr Tony Blair become Labour’s first leader in 100 years to win two elections in a row; he was the first to do so with a convincing margin—10 percentage points over the rival Tories’ 32 percent. Labour won partly because of a negative vote. Only one out of four electors favoured it. But its victory is a big slap in the face of the Tories who have lost popular appeal as never before. Quite simply, the election marks the end of the “Conservative Revolution” that Mrs Thatcher unleashed 20 years ago.
Thatcherism uniquely combined social conservatism, parochial nationalism and devotion to predatory capitalism in a fangs-bared, anti-trade union, property-worshipping form. Mrs Thatcher’s great success lay in stirring up, and then legitimising, deep antipathy among the middle classes towards the idea of equality and welfare. Thatcherism, which celebrated the “Greed Creed”, coincided with the rise of the ultra-conservative US Right. It thus commanded unequalled ideological ferocity. This was central to the imposition of what has been called the Anglo-American model of capitalism on the global economy.
Mr Blair’s New Labour didn’t challenge Thatcherism frontally. It doesn’t seek to transform capitalism. Rather, it has tried to manage capitalism “responsibly”, while professing a vague commitment to underprivileged people. New Labour no longer represents a Socialist project. It has explicitly abandoned the goal of common ownership of the means of production—a Labour characteristic for eight decades.
Yet, Blairism does mark a break with Thatcherism. It may not aim to restore the “welfare state” that Thatcherism destroyed in the name of “workfare”. But it wants to make Britain a “fair and decent” society in which everyone gets a “chance”. This itself represents an ideological departure from Thatcherite social remodelling.
Add to this Labour’s commitment to “modernise” politics and open up to Europe by moderating nationalism, and its bold devolution agenda, reflected in the creation of the Scottish and Welsh legislatures. And the political break with Thatcherism appears strong. New Labour’s social ideology too is liberal, not conservative. However, its economic break with Thatcherism is weak and hesitant. This is fully reflected in Britain’s evolution since 1997 into a more unequal society—despite moderate GDP growth. The Blairite state, following the neither-Left-nor-Right “Third Way”, has withdrawn further from infrastructure investment, especially from Britain’s once-highly regarded public services.
Failing schools, acute teacher shortages, postponed operations in National Health Service hospitals, cancelled trains, and the growing disappearance of the reassuring bobby, have become hallmarks of British life. Today, British policy-makers speak longingly of the “French health system, the German education system and the Dutch transportation system”—in all of which spheres Britain had established decisive superiority long ago.
In public expenditure, the UK scores poorly in relation not just to countries with evolved social security, such as Sweden, Denmark or Germany, but even to Portugal, Spain and Greece. When Mrs Thatcher took over, net public investment stood at 2.7 percent of GDP. Under Mr Major, it fell below 2 percent. In the past four years, it has been consistently below 0.5 percent. Overall public spending has decreased by 4.4 percent a year since 1997—a decline bigger than under Mrs Thatcher. This is despite an overall annual tax growth of 4.8 percent. British public expenditure on health (5.6 percent of GDP) is the lowest among all G-7 countries. The number of patients treated in private hospitals has increased from 700,000 in 1997 to over one million. Britain’s expenditure on education is lower not only than in “high achievers” such as Canada or the Nordic countries, but even than the US, Ireland, Italy or Spain.
New Labour’s much-touted macro-economic “stability” was achieved through miserly public spending, which has cheated people of their rights. Despite Britain’s unhappy experience with privatising railways, telecom and water, New Labour has mulishly persisted with privatisation. An example is Abbeylands School in Surrey, the first to be entirely run by a private firm, Nord Anglia, in return for generous bonuses for improved enrolment and exam results. Abbeylands is running a deficit of £160,000. One-third of its 540 seats are unfilled. Britain’s biggest education “partnership”, involving 29 Glasgow schools, is already a scandal. The £160 million project has resulted in fewer and smaller classrooms, bizarre laboratory designs, and cutbacks in other facilities.
Private business is being awarded subsidised contracts for urban improvement and renewal projects. Even policing is being handed over to private agencies, including in Mr Blair’s own constituency. The experiment with private takeover of prisons has been far from successful. Three jails are being handed back to state services. Private takeover of health services has also run into problems. For instance, in one town (Kidderminster), patients have to travel nearly 30 km to the closest hospital for most ailments.
In its latest manifesto, Labour promised to raise public investment, but only in conjunction with private funding, and that too till 2003. The manifesto lacks a serious re-distributive agenda. Of the UK’s three major parties, the Liberal Democrats alone have one. Indeed, they have emerged much stronger from the elections, with 18 percent of the national vote. The Lib-Dems have moved to Labour’s Left, and emerged as its moral Opposition. Mr Blair himself recognises the limitations of Labour’s victory. He admits this is a “mandate to reform” and “an instruction to deliver.” He promises to “invest in the future”.
In some ways, New Labour’s ideology, performance and promise show up the limits of the Third Way, the path of least resistance to capitalism adopted by the bulk of Western Europe’s formerly Social Democratic parties. Even after Mr Silvio Berlusconi’s victory in Italy, these broadly Left-leaning parties rule in as many as many as 10 of the European Union’s 15 member-countries. Today, Europe’s Conservative Right is in a big mess. Britain’s badly battered and demoralised Tories are a good example. Their main counterparts elsewhere, the Christian Democrats, are barely able to cobble together a coalition or agenda. Parties to their right are not a Europewide force.
How will the Third Way parties perform in other EU countries where elections are due next year: Denmark, France, Netherlands, Germany and Sweden? Electorally or politically, they are not on the downswing and may yet do well. But they have failed to enthuse the people or the intelligentsia. In particular, they demonstrate little strength or spirit in resisting the more unsavoury aspects of contemporary capitalism: predatory globalisation, jobless growth, deindustrialisation of large areas, the state’s inability to intervene even in emergencies, Today’s capitalism is comprehensively unable to generalise prosperity—even remotely in relation to its own Golden Age (1945-73).
Even starker is the Third Way’s failure to conceptualise a grand political project which offers an alternative to the Right, based on participatory democracy, high-quality governance, maximum regional autonomy, and enrichment and extension of human rights—including economic and social rights as well as civic and political rights. In many ways, the values that Third Way parties stand for are somewhat more tolerant, incrementally better—not radical—versions of centrist or “middle ground” liberalism. They don’t form a new paradigm. They fall well short of an alternative conception of a just society based on equality, and on caring and sharing—within a framework that puts popular control of economic activity above private privilege.
Globally, the Third Way parties don’t match the strength of conservatism, reflected above all in the US government, now strongly inclined to unilateralism. They remain tied to a West-obsessed, largely Atlanticist worldview which doesn’t effectively resist the emerging US hyperpower. That explains the supine to mild, and hence inadequate, reaction from the EU to aggressive US postures on economic, security and environmental issues. On Missile Defence, no Third Way government, including Mr Blair’s, has endorsed Mr Bush. But none has provided the kind of leadership needed to dissuade him from that disastrous path. The Third Way has proved timid at the global economic level too. The EU, even more the US, demands a fresh round of WTO negotiations.
What the world Socialist project or movement needs today is the Fourth Way—a bold anti-capitalist agenda to reform the world by promoting human-centred, gender-just, ecologically sound, development involving radical social transformation. The Fourth Way must have a broad vision of today’s asymmetrical world, with its tremendous maldistribution of power and the vulnerability of its existing global-governance mechanisms. It must regulate global capital, trade and investment in the interests of equity and balanced development. It must limit the use of unilateral military force. Its social agenda must be conceptualised in pluralistic, uncompromisingly democratic terms.
More than a decade after the end of the Cold War, and the
collapse of the USSR, which was based on undemocratic ultra-centralisation, the
time has come to fight for a human future based on decentralised popular
democracy. Mr Blair rightly says the election results are an “instruction to
deliver”. But unless he moves away from the Third Way, such talk will be all
spin and no delivery.—end—