From Thatcher to the Third Way: think-tanks, intellectuals and the Blair project
Robert Carl Blank
Stuttgart: ibidem-Verlag, 2003, ISBN 3-89821-277-7
This illustrates the hazards of Amazon’s ‘search inside the book’ feature: I read an interesting couple of pages of this and bought it for about $30 and it isn’t worth the money.
This is a detailed account of some of the intellectual processes behind ‘New Labour’, focusing on IPPR and Demos in particular. The author has read the documents, articles and pamphlets produced by the little group of intellectuals who paved the way for NuLab’s historic compromise? sell-out? He has also interviewed many of them, though for reasons not explained the interviewees are not identified.
Looked at again, all this thinking from the 1990s still looks like the piffle it appeared to be at the time. Which raises the question: why was it taken seriously? It was taken seriously because the central (but never stated) message of this ‘discourse’, the elephant in the nice Islington kitchen, was the victory of the bankers: there would be no challenge to the City from NuLab. And kowtowing to the City was then a necessary condition of being taken seriously by the commentariat. When the NuLab leadership did briefly consider something the City didn’t like, the notion of wider stakeholder power in the economy, being promoted by Will Hutton at the time, the City vetoed it and Hutton disappeared immediately from NuLab’s Christmas card list.
The City was then and is now largely owned by Americans. After ‘big bang’ the City was ‘Wimbledonised’ – nice conditions were provided for foreign players. London became the barely-regulated, off-shore banking centre for American (and eventually world) banks. None of this is discussed here because it is missing from the writing of Demos, IPPR etc. who were concentrating on other less politically-sensitive subjects. But if you want to know what Geoff Mulgan, Jacques, Leadbeater, Giddens et al were writing and thinking, and how this fed into Nu-Lab’s policy-making (such as it was), this is the book.(1) (NuLab policy-making seems to have been this: since we can’t do anything about the big issues – the City, America, distribution of wealth – lets find something we can do. Elliot and Atkinson call it ‘displacement activity’. This book is a detailed account of lots of displacement activity.)
There is one telling quotation. An unidentified interviewee said this of the (to me inexplicable) appeal of Anthony Giddens:
‘The policy intellectuals love him because Giddens is prepared to summarise globalisation on a page and a half. He is a beautiful summariser, very elegant….he has been pivotal during New Labour in Power.’ (p. 72)
So there you have it: policy-making done by reading one sheet of A4.
One final point: this reminded me again that among the leading architects of the creation of the current muddled but fundamentally neo-conservative NuLab were a group of ex-CPGB members and one ex-Trot (Mulgan), who in their left incarnations despised the Labour Party, and finally got to help kill it off.(2)
Notes
- Leadbetter’s views on the current economic crisis in late October are at <www.spectator.co.uk/article_images/articledir_4654/2327266/1_listing.jpg> A sample: ‘This is the high-water mark of the deregulated, bonus-driven, free-market triumphalism that blossomed after 1989. For years to come people arguing for a laissez-faire approach to any issue — health, transport, carbon trading — will be met with as much scepticism as advocates of state planning.’ Genius, right?
- On Demos, if you want to go beyond who-wrote/said-what, the best analysis is William Clark’s on his Website, <http://pinkindustry.word press.com/ >.