What is the third way?

Brexit has not only dominated the UK news agenda for more than three years but also changed the way that we assess our politicians.

Lawmakers today are polarised as Leave and Remain, a form of categorisation that looks set to continue for the immediate future, at least. Yet before the UK’s relationship with Europe took centre stage, politics was traditionally divided in terms of “left” and “right”.

In the UK’s largely two-party system, voters right-of-centre voted Conservative, and those left-of-centre voted for Labour.

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However, in the late 1990s and early 2000s, a new centrist ideology rapidly gained popularity in Western democracies - the “third way”.

So what is the third way?

The third way is a centrist position that broadly adopts - and attempts to reconcile - centre-left social policy and centre-right economic policy.

It was developed by sociologist Professor Anthony Giddens, a former director of the London School of Economics, who said that old class-based divisions of left and right were redundant in modern society, explains The Guardian.

In the late 1990s and early 2000s, the third way was embraced by Tony Blair and his New Labour party in the UK, and by Bill Clinton and his New Democrats in the US (1993–2001), and Chancellor Gerhart Schroder of Germany (1998–2005), says Encyclopaedia Britannica.

Indeed, Blair’s Labour won a landslide victory in the 1997 general election after shifting from the party’s traditional left-wing policies to a version of the third way.

In an article for The Independent the following year, Blair wrote that the third way “stands for a modernised social democracy, passionate in its commitment to social justice and the goals of the centre-left”.

“It moves decisively beyond an old left preoccupied by state control, high taxation and producer interests, and a new right treating public investment, and often the very notions of ‘society’ and collective endeavour, as evils to be undone,” he continued.

What else do fans say?

Blair described the third way as “new politics for the new century”, aiming for “social democracy” through “flexible, innovative and forward-looking” means.

By appealing to the centre ground, third-way parties tend to be popular with the electorate and therefore tend to do well in elections. Blair won three terms in government on a centrist platform, despite drawing criticism over his handling of the Iraq War and close ties to then US president George W. Bush.

This long reign in government gave New Labour plenty of opportunity to do social good. Between 1997 and 2010, policies announced by Blair’s party included introducing the National Minimum Wage; passing the Human Rights Act; doubling NHS spending; scrapping homophobic “Section 28” legislation; lifting 900,000 children out of poverty; reducing operation waiting times; passing the Climate Change Act; passing the Equality Act; banning tobacco advertising; and banning hunting.

The current left-wing Labour Party might claim to have policies that are more radically progressive and that better benefit working people, but if they can’t get elected on their left-wing platform then they will never get chance to enact them.

What do critics say?

Critics on the left - many of whom occupy the current Labour leadership - say that neoliberal policies and social justice cannot be reconciled.

“For Corbyn and his team, the figure that sits highest in their demonology is Tony Blair,” City A.M. notes.

Such critics say that Blair was responsible for increased privatisation, deregulation and the marketisation of the welfare state, and made no progress towards the redistribution of wealth.

In a 2007 article for The Guardian, left-wing film director Ken Loach argued that New Labour was also to blame for Corbyn’s lack of electoral success, and criticised their record in government.

“A vulnerable working-class that knows job insecurity, low wages, bogus ‘self-employment’, poverty for many including those in work, whole regions left to rot: these are the consequences of both Tory and New Labour’s free market economics,” Loach wrote.

“Blair, [Gordon] Brown and Peter Mandelson years were central to this degeneration.”