It's end of the road for 'third way' politics

William Keegan, Observer News Service, London

When his shuttle diplomacy in Syria, India and, Pakistan is long forgotten, Britain's Tony Blair will still retain a footnote in history for his "third way."

The "third way" has attracted interest from all over the world. With communism, like Captain Oates on Scott's Antarctic expedition, having gone outside for sometime, and "bourgeois capitalism" triumphant, Europe's left wing political parties had a problem on their hands in the 1990s.

Tony Blair, aided and abetted by various think tank gurus, came to office in 1997 promising a "third way" in politics. Blair is the master of the vague and the opaque. The third way thrived and prospered, without anybody, not least its propagators, understanding what it really was.

One thing was for certain, however, and that is that it was not a Blair invention. The Popes of Rome had been credited with propagating a "third way" in the early twentieth century. If anything the third way became associated with a form of politics that stood somewhere between capitalism and communism.

But the third way has earlier origins than that. In 1869, when Napoleon the Third was worried that France was torn between the prospect of internal revolution and foreign war, Emile Olivier suggested a "third way": Liberalism, as practised in one or two other European countries. The Emperor asked Olivier to form a government, and the "third way" Liberal government came into office on Jan. 3, 1870. Alas for the third way: Within a month France was at war.

Now, a mere 132 years later, Tony Blair's third way has bitten the dust. In a recent press interview Stephen Byers, the British Government's Secretary for Transport, has confessed: "Some of the softer edges of the third way have been shown to be flaky."

The third way, Byers wryly noted, "has been tested in the cauldron of being in government."

The significance of Byers' admission is twofold. First, he is a Blair loyalist, the ultimate "third way" Minister. Secondly, he has been close to the cauldron himself, because the "third way" in transport policy -- namely the Blair government's form of "public-private sector partnership" has been seen to be, in the language of Napoleon the Third, a cul-de-sac.

The Labor Party in opposition had vehemently opposed the privatization of the rail network by the Conservatives. But in office they tried to live with it. Then, as Britain's rail system became a music hall joke, and the "private" Railtrack company demanded more and more public money, Byers pulled the plug on it last autumn and Railtrack was put into administration.

Byers now says his Railtrack decision is "the first major rolling back of the Thatcher/Major legacy on privatization that we've seen."

Under the third way Labor tried to drop its traditional attachment to the unions and its hostility towards business and the financial markets. At times Blair and his acolytes have seemed to worship at the altar of big business,and to have believed that businessmen could do no wrong.

Now they seem to have grown up. Byers admits "what we've got to do is to be as robust in dealing with the failed private sector as we would be in dealing with a failing public sector."

Well, well. Welcome to the club of seasoned cynics, Byers. The fact of the matter is that the third way was a slogan that suited New Labor's policy of doing what they thought the financial markets and a broadly right wing "middle england" would allow them to do. But now the financial markets and middle england want a government not only that makes the trains run on time but that makes them run at all. Third Way? No way...