THE THIRD WAY IS DECEPTION

 LAST SEPTEMBER, the Fabian Society, which now describes itself as 'Britain's senior think tank', published a pamphlet entitled The 'Third Way': New Politics for the New Century. This is attributed to the Prime Minister.

 HIS "THIRD WAY" IS SUPPOSEDLY THE MIDDLE WAY between two unacceptable extremes. During the 1930s, when many people thought of Sweden as following an all-attractive middle way between the USA and the USSR, the regimes of those two extremist countries were indeed as near to total opposites as we could hope to find. Nor was it difficult to discover what policies were being both advocated and implemented in Sweden.

 NEITHER OF THESE FEATURES is paralleled in Blair's 'Third Way'. One of his unacceptable extremes is of course Old Labour, with its Clause IV commitment to socialism as "the public ownership of all the means of production, distribution and exchange." Blair wants to discover an acceptable opposite to this but without undertaking to reverse the massively successful privatisation policies of his predecessors. So he starts by describing those predecessors as the 'New Right' and then proceeds to condemn them for failing to do things which they actually did do, and for doing things which they actually did not do.

 THE THATCHER GOVERNMENT, for instance, is denounced for "damaging key national services, notably education" and for "its positive desire not to act in key areas such as education." I have heard, and indeed myself made, many objections to the Education Reform Act of 1988 and to its immediate successors. But the Prime Minister must surely be the first to pretend to see these Acts as expressions of "positive desire not to act."

 THE DIFFICULTY OF DISCERNING WHAT POLICIES actually are being proposed and promoted can perhaps be most immediately appreciated by considering that favourite Prime Ministerial sound bite "tough on crime and tough on the causes of crimes". For he never reveals what he has in mind as the putative causes of crime. The reason for this reticence is, surely, that he knows what his Guardian-reading supporters typically assert to be the causes of crime, and what they will therefore take it that he is promising to be tough on; namely, poverty, unemployment and social inequality. But he must have been told by his advisers, even if he was not already aware of this himself, that these things cannot have been the prime causes of rising crime in recent decades. For there was, in fact, far, far less crime in the 1930s, when there was far, far more of those supposed causes.

 IN THE SECTION ON EUROPEAN UNION REFORM, the meaning of the Prime Minister's statements is by contrast absolutely clear. The trouble here is that although what he says should be done should indeed be done, there is compelling reason to believe that it is not going to be done. Thus he says that "Europe should develop as a 'Third Way' between the nation state . . . and a European superstate too big, too remote, and no respecter of Europe's diversity of language, nationhood and tradition."

 BUT THIS "THIRD WAY", as he presumably does know and as he certainly has no business not to know, is not on offer. The leaders of France and Germany, and of all the allied and/or client countries which are joining with them in the first stage of economic and monetary union, have all made it clear that for them, the purpose of this exercise is not so much economic as political. They hope and believe that this is a step which, once made, will necessarily be followed by the establishment of a centralised European superstate.

 AGAIN, BLAIR SAYS THAT "Europe needs to pursue economic reforms to make its product, labour and capital markets more flexible" and: "We support . . . the reforms in Europe's policies, especially the CAP, necessary to make enlargement affordable."

 BUT, FIRST, IF THE OTHER MEMBERS of the EU actually were prepared to make their labour markets more flexible they would not have adopted the Social Chapter, any more than Blair Ð had he really wanted to retain the flexibility which Britain's already had Ð would have abandoned our opt-out.

 AND, SECOND, WHAT IS THE POINT of saying that you are going to work for reform of the CAP when you and everyone else who has attended to the politics of such reform recognises that there is an irremovably stubborn blocking minority, if not indeed majority, making such radical reform impossible?

 MY ANSWER IS THAT THE POINT of proclaiming such desirable but in fact unattainable objects is simply to deceive. For if the British people were to be allowed to understand that the object of E&MU was what the leaders of all the continental members of the European Union frankly proclaim and desire it to be, then that would be good-bye to all British Europhiliac hopes of railroading us into their European superstate.

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