Politics is raw in Britain today. Remainers rage against Brexiters and vice versa. Pensioners are set against millennials; nationalists against immigrants; populists against elites; rural traditionalists against city liberals. Party politics is characterised by contempt and dogma. To his many enemies, Jeremy Corbyn is an extremist and will never be a legitimate national leader. To Corbynistas, his internal critics are bad losers and traitors to Labour. To many non-Tory voters and MPs, Theresa May’s government is an immoral experiment in austerity and pandering to prejudice.
On seemingly every fundamental issue, the country feels even more divided than it did in the turbulent 70s and 80s. There are furious battles over free speech, minority rights, the size of the state, the shape of the economy, social and cultural values, even the truth and selection of relevant political facts. In many other democracies, from the US to Italy to Australia, politics has become just as tribal, fragmented and apparently out of control. Opposing factions no longer seem able to talk to each other, or even to agree on what they might talk about.
For the many voters who dislike confrontation and feel that democracy should be about dialogue and compromise, the new political disorder is frightening. Even the most self-assured political veterans are horrified and baffled. As Tony Blair put it in a 2016 interview: “I’m not sure I fully understand politics right now.” The adjective commentators repeatedly use to describe it is “toxic”.
Yet not very long ago, western politics was not like this at all. For much of the 90s and the 00s, our politics was – by historic standards – extraordinarily mild, orderly and stable. There was broad agreement about what made a good government. Most mainstream parties were led by consensus-seeking, seemingly pragmatic, not obviously ideological figures such as Bill Clinton, Jacques Chirac, Gerhard Schröder and Blair himself. Many voters seemed satisfied by them: all four premiers won re-election. Political life moved slowly and predictably: most western democracies seemed much the same from one year to the next.
This undramatic politics, moreover, was rooted in what seemed to many a persuasive analysis of the modern world. One of its key early texts was a 1994 essay by the eminent British sociologist Anthony Giddens. In Brave New World: The New Context of Politics, he argued that most societies were becoming more cosmopolitan, less traditional, less tribal, more individualistic. This more fluid, interconnected world, with its linked capitalist economies and common environmental crises, he argued, needed a politics that was calm and not divisive, “a public arena in which controversial issues … can be resolved, or at least handled, through dialogue”. Conflict, whether between ideologies, social classes, political parties or other interest groups, ought to become a thing of the past.
During the mid-90s, Giddens’ ideas were enthusiastically absorbed by New Labour, which was excited by their apparent modernity and saw them as a way to escape the left-right battles that had often bogged down the party. Giddens became probably Blair’s favourite intellectual. The revered sociologist and the young party leader, who was looking for a big idea to guide his premiership, distilled their political thinking into what they hoped would be a lasting philosophy: the third way.
Its outlook pervaded New Labour’s first general election manifesto, in 1997: “We aim to put behind us the bitter political struggles … that have torn our country apart for too many decades. Many of these conflicts have no relevance whatsoever to the modern world – public versus private, bosses versus workers, middle class versus working class.” Instead, a New Labour government would unify previously opposed interest groups and dispassionately solve the country’s problems: “What counts is what works.” Blair won a famous landslide. The following year, he declared that the third way was a “new politics for the new century”.
It didn’t turn out that way. Since the Brexit vote – a kind of civil war in referendum form – and the capture of Labour by Corbyn, one of the third way’s most implacable Labour opponents, many who believed in a more consensual politics during the 90s and 00s have responded with incredulity. For three years, the press and social media have resounded with centrist politicians, activists and journalists refusing to accept that Blair’s “new politics” may now be obsolete – that it was a passing phenomenon, rather than a permanent solution to the problems of the modern world. From less bullish believers in the third way, meanwhile, there has been a stunned silence. As a former New Labour minister who helped Giddens refine the third way put it to me: “A catastrophe has befallen my kind of politics.”
The return of anger and ideology to a political culture that was supposed to have outgrown them has been attributed to many forces: from the 2008 financial crisis to the 2014 Scottish independence referendum, from Twitter to the MPs’ expenses scandal. Much less attention has been paid to whether the seductive promise of a politics without conflict – and its reality in Britain during the 90s and 00s – also contributed to the third way’s downfall. Did the attempt to create a politics without conflict help create its opposite?
In 2005, the year New Labour won its third consecutive general election, Chantal Mouffe, a Belgian political theorist who had been living and teaching in Britain for more than 30 years without attracting much attention outside academia, published a short, sharp book called On the Political. Its anodyne title concealed an original and unsettling argument, which Mouffe had been honing for two decades.
Despite being a supporter of the radical left, Mouffe defined “the political” in a similar way to thinkers often associated with the right, such as Machiavelli: as an arena of competing interests and perpetual conflict. “Liberal theorists are unable to acknowledge … the primary reality of strife in social life,” she wrote. In a democracy, different groups compete for economic resources, and cultural and physical space. Politics, therefore, involves incompatible choices and dilemmas “for which no rational solution” – meaning objective solution – “could ever exist”. Such conflicts result only in temporary victories; then the balance of power between the winner and loser shifts, thanks to social or other change, and the conflict starts again.
Such unresolved battles, Mouffe argued, were not a threat to democracy, but its vital essence. “To be able to mobilise passions,” she wrote, “to have a real purchase on people’s desires and fantasies … democratic politics must have a partisan character.” A healthy democracy required “opposed camps with whom people can identify”: in order to be politically engaged, people needed to have a “we” and a “they”. And besides, any attempt to eradicate such tribalism by building a consensus was bound to fail – no consensus could include everyone.
Mouffe regarded New Labour’s third way as a prime example of such a doomed strategy. “Far from creating the conditions for a more mature and consensual form of democracy”, she wrote, it would lead to “exactly the opposite”. It would create a society where the conflicts that New Labour had tried to suppress, or whose existence it had denied altogether, would resurface, more vicious than before. Their antagonists would no longer see each other as legitimate competitors, but as “enemies to be destroyed”. In Britain and across the west, she warned, “conditions are ripe for political demagogues … [for] disaffection with political parties [and] the growth of other types of collective identities … nationalist, religious or ethnic.” In particular, she foresaw a surge in “rightwing populism”.
With eerie accuracy, Mouffe anticipated today’s political world. But in 2005, her book was seen as too alarmist by the few people who read it. She told me: “I remember quite a few people saying to me, ‘Your model doesn’t work. The centre of politics is in charge. There are no populist parties worth taking seriously.’” At the 2005 election, Ukip got barely 2% of the vote. “And I would say, ‘No, you’re right, the moment for populists and ‘enemies to be destroyed’ has not yet come. But all the conditions are there.’”
Mouffe lives in an elegant but slightly austere flat in north-west London, an area long favoured by better-known leftwing provocateurs such as Ken Livingstone and the late Stuart Hall. When I interviewed her this spring, she seemed pleased that her warnings about the consequences of consensus politics were receiving some belated recognition. “What I said in 2005,” she said briskly, over strong black coffee, “has been proven right.” She is 75 now, still writing and teaching, and in person as in print does not mince words.
Yet despite her efforts, and all the disasters suffered by centrists in recent years, the dream of a less confrontational politics has not disappeared – in fact, the longing for such a politics is rising again. Often, this longing takes the form of a hope that today’s roiling politics can be calmed by rational, moderate people coming together.
A fortnight after I met Mouffe, in April, it was reported by the Observer, probably the newspaper most sympathetic, still, to New Labour, that the launch of a new British centre party was being considered by a wealthy group of former Labour and Conservative donors, led by Simon Franks, the co-founder of LoveFilm and an informal adviser to Ed Miliband when he was Labour leader. The group were said to be disillusioned by the “tribal nature” and “polarisation” of current politics. Their mooted party, the report went on, would have a “policy platform that borrows ideas from both left and right”. Its name had a consensual, bland-but-uplifting, perfectly Blairite ring: United for Change.
Since the spring, speculation about this and other new centre parties has grown steadily louder, along with constant laments in the media and elsewhere over the state of today’s politics. Meanwhile, inside Labour and the Conservatives, in parliament and in constituency parties, the divides between those who still believe in consensus politics and those who believe in confrontation have become ever starker. Behind their battles over Brexit and Corbynism lurks an ever bigger dispute: what should the tone and substance of politics be in a democracy?
In politics and much else, the early 90s felt like a time for fresh starts. “You have to think back to that feeling of liberation,” Giddens told me. “[Soviet] communism had disappeared just like that” – he snapped his fingers – “and now there was a new world.”
From South Africa to Northern Ireland, previously unthinkable political reconciliations suggested a new mood. It spread through journalism and academia: “Thanks to people like Giddens and John Rawls, [mainstream] political theory was basically supporting the idea that the more consensus, the better,” Mouffe remembered. In Britain, Margaret Thatcher’s profoundly divisive premiership was terminated in 1990. The clashes between left and right that had dominated politics during the 70s and 80s seemed to be quietening.
In 1991, as a rising and self-assured Labour MP, Blair surveyed the state of world politics for the magazine Marxism Today. “All fixed points on the landscape have changed,” he wrote excitedly. “Everything and anything can be thought or rethought. We start again.”
Though officially still the journal of the small and shrinking Communist party of Great Britain, since the late 80s Marxism Today had ambitiously been trying to formulate a whole new politics, in many respects a precursor to the third way. This politics, it was hoped, would be less dogmatic and tribal, and more attuned to what the magazine called the “New Times”: the huge changes wrought by the global free-market revolution over the previous 20 years. Like Giddens, Marxism Today saw this revolution as permanent, and believed much of it should be accepted; but the magazine also thought remedies needed to be found for the damage the revolution had caused.
The magazine considered most of the left, inside and outside Labour, to be hopelessly out of date in its worldview and strategies, compared to the Thatcherites – “the cavalry against tanks” – and yearned for a Labour leader who was not. The magazine’s editor, Martin Jacques, identified Blair as a talented politician who was looking for fresh ideas and agreed with at least some of the Marxism Today analysis, and got to know him. “I thought he was something new,” Jacques told me. “He had no roots in the Labour tradition” – Blair’s father was a Conservative – “and when he came up with lines like, ‘tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime’ [as shadow home secretary in 1993], it suggested he knew you had to think differently to how Labour had previously. I liked that.”
Blair’s crime soundbite secured him his first national attention, by cleverly making him seem both rightwing and leftwing at the same time, and in some ways neither – responding to crime simply as a social problem to be solved rather than a matter of ideology. He became Labour leader the following year. Presenting himself as an almost apolitical figure came easily to Blair, because that was how he…
