Blair's Swansong: Third Way Just Hype

Clintonian Third Way politics came to an end in 2000. Now the Third Way politics of Tony Blair is coming to an end. It is time to come to judgment about Third Way politics. Was it really a Third Way between capitalism and socialism? Did it succeed in charting a new way? Or was it all just hype? The answer is pretty clear. It was mostly hype.

For years you couldn’t say that. Blair promised so much, and you wanted to believe him. But now the sands are running out for him. And the Third Way achievement has been to increase government employment by 800,000 workers. These workers have been absorbed into the government health system and the government education system. But the health system and the education system are still centrally run and directed, so the vast additional resoures—that have increased the British public sector to the level of Germany—have had little effect on the delivery of services.

And now the scandal of crime and illegal immigration has made a mockery of Blair’s promise to be “tough on crime and tough on the causes of crime,” a powerful sound bite that ended up meaning nothing.

Writes Simon Jenkins in The Times:

The two communities I know best, one in London and the other rural, are no longer policed in any recognisable sense, certainly not as they were in Blair’s golden 1950s. Police are never seen and phones are never answered. For Blair to put this down to terrorism and globalisation is ludicrous. Since the 1990s progressive centralisation has ended beat patrolling, disbanded the police solicitor network and bureaucratised the overnight magistrates’ courts.

Blair blames the “establishment” for all this, writes Daniel Finkelstein.

Last Friday Mr Blair attacked “the political and legal establishment”. He said that it “didn’t understand”, that it was “in denial”, that it was “out of touch”. And he argued the Establishment was letting down everyone else, “ordinary, decent, law-abiding folk”, and failing to get the balance right between victims and offenders.

Well, of course. But isn’t Blair part of the political and legal establishment? If reform is needed, isn’t it natural that the reform would be a reform of the establishment? It’s a little late in the Blair administration to be suddenly waking up and realizing that the problem all along was in themselves.

We can see in the death throes of Tony Blair our own struggles in the United States. The great conservative reforms of the last generation were all enacted in the teeth of opposition and scorn from the bien pensant elite. The supply-side economics: it was voodoo economics. The “broken-window” policing: it was racial profiling. The welfare reform: it would mean children starving in the streets. And the campaign to value once again the nuclear bourgeois family: why that is just bigoted.

But we know now that the Third Way was just hot air. It was the bien pensant elite complimenting itself on its enlightened world-view. Both President Clinton and Prime Minister Blair were excellent in their heyday in winning the hearts and minds of the media. But when it came to the boring stuff of boots on the ground, actually formulating policy and seeing it through to completion, they were nowhere to be found.

And that means that ordinary people suffer, with bad schools and lousy health care while the Third Way suits settle into a well-deserved retirement.