Tony Blair And The Twilight Of The Third Way

REMEMBER THE Hosannas when the Third Way rode into town in the 1990s? How the media loved Bill Clinton, who was going to show us a middle way between the extremes of right and left.

And then the British got to have their very own Bill Clinton in the person of Tony Blair, and the British people fell in love too.

What was it all about, really? The Clintons threw away all the good will in a disastrous two years that ended up with a Republican Congress. And now Tony Blair, who promised “education, education, education,” is shuffling into the sunset with a pathetic Education Bill that changes nothing, that leaves the “bog-standard” comprehensive schools in place to level the school kids of Britain down to mediocrity (Of the 100 best schools in Britain, one is a comprehensive school).

What was it all about? Well, it was about sleaze, for one thing. Remember the Sleaze Factor with which the media regaled us here in the US in the 1980s? The British media went chasing Tory Sleaze in the early 1990s.

But then when Blair and his New Labour got into office, the media weren’t interested in sleaze. And that’s odd, points out Matthew Parris in the London Times, because there was plenty of it from the start. “Mittal, Dr Kelly, Scarlett, Caplin, Campbell, Hutton, Butler, Berlusconi, Cherie, Patel, Garrard, Townsley, Levy,” the roll of the Blair scandals is long and sonorous, just like the Clinton scandals from the White House Travel Office to the White House silver. But nobody was interested.

But now they are. Now finally Blair has got everyone’s attention.

Parris has decided to put it out “delicately.”

I believe Tony Blair is an out-and-out rascal, terminally untrustworthy and close to being unhinged. I said from the start that there was something wrong in his head, and each passing year convinces me more strongly that this man is a pathological confidence-trickster.

And then he goes on to liken Blair to that notorious cad in David Copperfield: “the engaging, handsome and popular James Steerforth,” the well-born man that scarred his governess when a boy and in his adulthood despoiled Little Em’ly, the childhood friend with whom David had innocently played on the beach by the old boat in which Em’ly lived with Mr. Peggotty, Ham, and Mrs. Gummidge.

It is occasionally reported that some poor woman falls in love with a professional fraud and remains his wife for years without realising what she has married. The British electorate are such a woman. Mr Blair’s misdeeds are persistently overlooked, and his excuses credited. By the time we wake up he may have torn his party and its programme apart.

In the last week it came to light that Tony Blair had received several loans from rich benefactors to help finance the last election. Blair had not reported the loans to the Labour Party. Now he is all contrition and wants to reform party funding.

But why should Blair want to reform fundraising now and not earlier. “You know why. He never meant to put matters right. He has been caught out.”

We, who always had our questions about the Third Way and its immaculate conception, are left to wonder. Both Blair and Clinton were so gifted, how could it have come to this?

What exactly was the Third Way all about, apart from being a marketing ploy?

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Christopher Chantrill blogs at www.roadtothemiddleclass.com. His Road to the Middle Class is forthcoming.

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Chappies

“But I saw a man yesterday who knows a fellow who had it from a chappie that said that Urquhart had been dipping himself a bit recklessly off the deep end.” —Freddy Arbuthnot
Dorothy L. Sayers, Strong Poison

Civil Society

“Civil Society”—a complex welter of intermediate institutions, including businesses, voluntary associations, educational institutions, clubs, unions, media, charities, and churches—builds, in turn, on the family, the primary instrument by which people are socialized into their culture and given the skills that allow them to live in broader society and through which the values and knowledge of that society are transmitted across the generations.
Francis Fukuyama, Trust

Hugo on Genius

“Tear down theory, poetic systems… No more rules, no more models… Genius conjures up rather than learns… ” —Victor Hugo
César Graña, Bohemian versus Bourgeois

Education

“We have met with families in which for weeks together, not an article of sustenance but potatoes had been used; yet for every child the hard-earned sum was provided to send them to school.”
E. G. West, Education and the State

Faith & Purpose

“When we began first to preach these things, the people appeared as awakened from the sleep of ages—they seemed to see for the first time that they were responsible beings...”
Finke, Stark, The Churching of America, 1776-1990

Conversion

“When we received Christ,” Phil added, “all of a sudden we now had a rule book to go by, and when we had problems the preacher was right there to give us the answers.”
James M. Ault, Jr., Spirit and Flesh

Postmodernism

A writer who says that there are no truths, or that all truth is ’merely relative’, is asking you not to believe him. So don’t.
Roger Scruton, Modern Philosophy

Faith and Politics

As far as the Catholic Church is concerned, the principal focus of her interventions in the public arena is the protection and promotion of the dignity of the person, and she is thereby consciously drawing particular attention to principles which are not negotiable... [1.] protection of life in all its stages, from the first moment of conception until natural death; [2.] recognition and promotion of the natural structure of the family... [3.] the protection of the right of parents to educate their children.
Pope Benedict XVI, Speech to European Peoples Party, 2006

China and Christianity

At first, we thought [the power of the West] was because you had more powerful guns than we had. Then we thought it was because you had the best political system. Next we focused on your economic system. But in the past twenty years, we have realized that the heart of your culture is your religion: Christianity.
David Aikman, Jesus in Beijing

Religion, Property, and Family

But the only religions that have survived are those which support property and the family. Thus the outlook for communism, which is both anti-property and anti-family, (and also anti-religion), is not promising.
F.A. Hayek, The Fatal Conceit

Conservatism

Conservatism is the philosophy of society. Its ethic is fraternity and its characteristic is authority — the non-coercive social persuasion which operates in a family or a community. It says ‘we should...’.
Danny Kruger, On Fraternity

US Life in 1842

Families helped each other putting up homes and barns. Together, they built churches, schools, and common civic buildings. They collaborated to build roads and bridges. They took pride in being free persons, independent, and self-reliant; but the texture of their lives was cooperative and fraternal.
Michael Novak, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism

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