Last night I broke my moratorium on buying new books, again.First it was Lord Ashdown (whose book has lamentably sat in a draw since then) who broke down my defences, and last night it was Lord Giddens. Clearly I can’t resist the authority of aristocracy!
To be fair, I think it was a special case (inevitably!). Anthony Giddens was the author of The Third Way, which in 1998 provided a seminal outline of the New Labour mindset and laid out (perhaps for the first time) the supposed philosophy underpinning the Blair-Brown government.
Ten years on, one of the two architects of that government is on the verge of handing over to the other, and Giddens has taken the opportunity to pen a sequel. This is important, he argues, because if New Labour is truly to renew and to constructively address the issues facing Britain today and in the coming decade, it needs to repeat something which it did in the 1990s and which, tellingly, the Conservatives have not done. Giddens argues that before New Labour came up with ideas, let alone policies, it conducted a thorough analysis of the world in the 1990s, and from that its philosophy and policies emerged. The world has (naturally) changed over the ensuing 15 years, and a new analysis is needed. Giddens seeks to provide that in his new book.Last night I attended a book launch at Policy Exchange, where both Giddens and Danny Finkelstein discussed the book and the future for Gordon Brown. This, reading the first two chapters, and Question Time stimulated my brain so much that I was awake until 4am. Much note-taking ensued.
Over the next few days and weeks I’ll share with you a few interesting snippets of Gidden’s insights. Like him or hate him (and just 30 pages of his book is enough to convey a clear bias that at times causes him to deliberately obfuscate or misrepresent the facts) he is the nearest New Labour had to a philosophical guru. His Third Way was essential reading for the opposition as well as for aspiring ministers in the last ten years. If he has managed to repeat his success (and that is by no means guaranteed) then the better we understand it the better we will be able to counter it.
The Third way is a new, dynamic socialism. We ignore it at our peril.
