Intellectual ballast is the key to success for any political administration. A government that
loses sight of the "big picture" can easily be swept off course by events, riven by
splits, and bogged down in administrative minutiae. They risk becoming little more than
exercises in crisis management.
Thus, Britain's intelligentsia greeted New Labour's election victory three years ago with an
audible sigh of relief.
The academics were heartened by new Prime Minister Tony Blair's stated belief in the need
"to start building a common thread between the ideas of academics, thinkers, and
intellectuals on what Labour is trying to do." Like the New Democrats in America, Blair
recognized that progressives had lost the philosophical battle with conservatives during the 1980s
and needed to replace its failed interest group politics with a rejuvenated intellectual movement.
And under Blair's leadership, New Labour has relied heavily on intellectuals to chart his
government's course.
Certainly, Blair has assembled an impressive and productive staff at the Downing Street
Policy Unit, which has doubled in size since he came to office. Headed by the youthful David
Milliband, it is a testament to Blair's desire, expressed while leading the opposition in
Parliament, to "draw on a coalition of thinkers, including people outside the party."
True to his word, Blair appointed Roger Liddle and Derek Scott as top aides, both former
leading members of the Social Democratic Party, a group of mainly right-leaning
Labourites who broke from the party in 1981. The SDP soon formed an alliance with the centrist
Liberal Party and the two merged in 1988 to form the Liberal Democrats. Blair has long been
determined to expand the "vital center" of British politics by bringing SDP leaders,
thinkers, and voters back into the Labour Party.
The Prime Minister is also close to Roy Jenkins, a former Labour Cabinet minister, SDP
candidate for the premiership in 1983, and now leader of the Liberal Democrats in the House of
Lords. Lord Jenkins, who is also the Chancellor of Oxford University, is a proponent
of the idea that the Conservative Party's domination of British politics in the 20th century rested
not just on its own strength, but also on the division 100 years ago between the Liberal and
Labour parties, both of which now share a commitment to progressive, center-left values.
It's a notion that Blair has often expressed, but which is anathema to many Labour and Liberal
activists.
Outside the ranks of government, the Prime Minister's most prominent academic admirer is
Anthony Giddens, the director of the prestigious London School of Economics. As The
Economist recently noted, Blair's Third Way philosophy of governance is "very much a
work in progress," leaving it open to charges of "intellectual opportunism."
Perhaps more than any other British intellectual, Giddens has strived to show that the
Third Way is neither soggy centrism nor "Thatcherism with a human face."
Giddens argues that while Third Way politics "stands in the traditions" of
European social democrats and American liberals, it transcends both "old-style social
democracy" and its reliance on Keynesian economics as well as the New Right and its
reliance on "market funda-mentalism." His writings, which clearly have influenced
Blair, challenge some of the laziest orthodoxies of both political extremes.
For instance, Giddens takes issue with traditional liberal approaches to fighting poverty. The
welfare state, he suggests, is inefficient, bureaucratic, and often fails to help those most in need.
He gives short shrift to the notion that the surest route to reversing inequality is to raise taxes on
"the rich" including both the Bill Gateses of the world and those who are
"merely affluent" and give to "the poor." Tax cuts that stimulate
the labor market and help the working poor, he says, yield profoundly progressive outcomes.
Yet in contrast to conservatives, Giddens believes the welfare state should be reformed and
not abandoned. Social democrats, he says, should provide the poor with a rich seam of
opportunities and recognize that welfare-to-work and microenterprise policies often benefit the
poor more than cash handouts. Giddens also argues that responsibility is a two-way street
encompassing mutual obligations between the government and the people whether they are poor
or rich (a point that many conservatives often seem to forget).
On the matter of trade and internationalism, Giddens attacks the liberal belief that
globalization is the prime source of inequalities in the modern world. Yet in contrast
to conservatives, he sees "a greater role for government in a globalizing world rather than a
diminished one." His writings on the topic echo calls by American New Democrats to
expand trade in tandem with initiatives to "expand the winner's circle" at home and
write new "rules of the road" for the global economy. To those who say that the
Third Way cannot deliver broad-based prosperity in a global economy, he points to the sharp
decline in poverty that has occurred in the United States during President Clinton's seven years in
office.
Giddens' enthusiasm for Blair's Third Way is also evident in the number of academics at the
London School of Economics who have played a role in shaping government policy. Economist
Richard Layard, for instance, advises the government on welfare-to-work policies, and
academic John Gray is a former Thatcherite turned eloquent exponent of New Labourism. The
school also has a Center for the Analysis of Social Exclusion that monitors the government's
Social Exclusion Unit.
Beyond academia, New Labour draws heavily on the ideas of the British left's three leading
think tanks: the Fabian Society, the Institute for Public Policy Research, and Demos. Although
Blair has friendly relations with all three (for instance, Matthew Taylor, head of the IPPR,
was the Labour Party's assistant general secretary until 1998 and still writes speeches for the
Prime Minister), the bonds are looser than the one between President Clinton and the New
Democrats' Progressive Policy Institute.
The Fabians have long adopted an iconoclastic approach to Labour Party policy. For
instance, they were promoting the idea of welfare reform long before it became fashionable.
Now, they are raising questions about impact of reform that some in Blair's government might
find irritating. The Fabians also recently published both Blair's book The Third Way: New
Politics for a New Century and Modern Socialism by French Prime Minister Lionel
Jospin, who is challenging Blair from the left for primacy among Europe's social democrats.
The think tank also may have opened a Pandora's Box by creating a commission to study tax
reform. While the Fabians say they want to examine the overall system as opposed to the
narrower question of tax rates, Downing Street is likely to recoil at any suggested tax
hike on the middle class in the runup to the next parliamentary election.
Although the IPPR and New Labour are close, their relationship is hardly sycophantic, either.
Taylor has, for instance, been keen to point out the paradoxes in the Blair government's promises
of decentralization and devolution. While the government claims to be committed to dispersing
power from Whitehall, he argues, it is simultaneously centralizing power at a different level.
Thus the creation of the Scottish Parliament, Welsh Assembly, and Greater London Assembly
have been accompanied by a host of new targets and guidelines for schools, the National Health
Service, and other social services drawn up by civil servants in London.
Demos is perhaps best known for its willingness to tackle hot topics such as the role of the
monarchy. But its less controversial areas of interest including social exclusion, the future of
welfare, and promoting responsible fatherhood mesh well with New Labour's principal
concerns.
Several Demos alumni have been tapped by Downing Street. Geoff Mulgan, the founding
director, now works full time in Blair's Policy Unit, focusing on social exclusion.
Ex-Demos researcher Mark Leonard now heads the government's Foreign Policy Center, which is
building a network of Third Way sympathizers across Europe to challenge the staid thinking of
the foreign policy establishment.
Blair also admires the work of Demos research associate Charles Leadbetter, who writes
about government's need to grapple with the challenges of the new economy. For instance,
Leadbetter's most recent study, The Independents: Britain's New Cultural Entrepreneurs, argues
that policymakers are paying scant attention to a segment of the workforce that is growing both
in size and economic and political importance: young workers in cultural, multimedia, and
Internet services who work in small businesses or are self-employed freelancers. His
earlier work, Living on Thin Air, suggests that the left should abandon Scandinavia as its
economic and social model in favor of Silicon Valley.
The Labour Party has traditionally embraced intellectuals of a rather redder stripe than the
present breed. This, perhaps, explains why many British left-wing thinkers feel alienated from
Blair. Nonetheless, in its battle to replace interest group politics with an ideas-based
movement, New Labour has done more to give intellectuals rein to shape government philosophy
and policy than any of its predecessors in government.
Blueprint Keywords: Extra Blair
