I've long harboured the belief that the third way was a dangerous ideological course. Like many very sensible ideas, it is, in practice, flawed.
The current state of politics seems to bear that out.
Some time ago, for reasons that were misguided, campaigning became a science.
We all became obsessed with 'turning out our vote', profiling the electors, working to the 'marked register' of voters etc. I think that has damaged democracy.
We complain about voter turnout falling and then spend most (in some cases all) of our time just talking to the people who voted last time. We largely ignore the non-voters and then wonder why they don't start voting. We don't do that here, because I believe that if what you say is right the majority will support you, we have courage enough to let the public decide without trying to manipulate them by 'focussed' campaigning on only those we know support us already.
That's partly why membership has dropped so badly too. A limited pool of supporters just dwindles, where is the new intake coming from?
And so it is with the obsessive pursuit of the 'middle' ground of voters. People are turned off by it. By 'scientifically' searching for the most popular line to capture the vote, I think we are cheating the people and being cowardly. Give them a choice, trust them to make it. Put real clear space between Labour and Conservative.
The notion of the Third way as a political solution has brought us to the point where people no longer trust politicians and no longer respect politicians. Because politicians no longer tell us what they passionately believe in and ask for our votes, they tell us what we want to hear and try to 'capture' our vote.
This is why people say 'they are all the same', we argue with them about that, maybe they're right.
This is why people say 'they can't be trusted', because we don't let ideology guide us and show that we believe what we say.
This is why people say 'we don't believe in them', because we, in return aren't believing enough in the them. We aren't setting out our stall and having faith enough to let them decide.
This is why, people are turning to extremists. Not because they buy into everything they say, but because they want to exercise a choice. They need a choice to have.
The nationalist lunatic elected to the mayoralty of Doncaster is the best example. He campaigned to everyone, he set out his policies warts and all and he was the only one in Doncaster to do that. And despite his awful rhetoric and extremist lunacy the people voted for him. It was our failure, as it will be if the BNP win Euro seat, that did this. We cannot hide from that any longer.
If we are to put the interests of the country first, before party, we have to look long and hard at what this means. It is in none of our interests to deliver the country into the hands of the far right Nazis. WE have to have the courage to face that, whatever it may mean for the Labour party in the short term. It's our duty to protect people, not from making their own mistakes, but by being there when they have and rebuilding the country with them afterwards.
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I'm not sure what the ideology of the third way is or was. Certainly, there are a couple of slim texts by Tony Giddens and others, but they generally say that Labour is no longer the party of Arthur Scargill and a little bit of privatisation isn't so bad.
While the first is true, that process had started under Kinnock and was nearly finished at John Smith's untimely death. There is an alternative short of Blairism but long of insanity. To do that, however, we need to acknowledge the mistakes we have made as a party in power - Iraq must be up there, as must be privatisation (viz. Metronet) and some of the failures of internal party workings. These are difficult to do in any case, and even more so when the party is damaged, the leadership shaky and with an election twelve months away.
xD.