the third way project in britain: the role of the prime minister's policy unit

The reputedly pragmatic Prime Minister’sPolicy Unit focuses on ‘what works’, but hasalso sought to elaborate the governing phil-osophy of the ‘third way’. By explaining whatthe government is doing and why, the thirdway is meant to improve electoral perform-ance and policy co-ordination, enhancedemocracy and unite the party. This articleidentifies conflicts within and between these goals. It concludes that electoral con-cerns and party unity have been paramountfor the Policy Unit.

Labour came to office an avowedly prag-matic government, focusing on ‘what works’and eschewing the ideological politics ofThatcherism and the old left. Yet the primeminister soon launched well-publicisedtrans-Atlantic ‘third way’ seminars withClinton’s ‘New Democrats’, and he has sinceenergetically debated the ‘new social democ-racy’ and die Neue Mitte (the ‘new middle’)with centre-left European Union partners(Blair, 1998; Blair and Schroder, 1999). PrimeMinister’s Policy Unit (PMPU) head DavidMiliband has been searching for an over-arching narrative to pull together govern-

ment priorities (Miliband, 1999), initiating anonline forum on the third way (Halpern andMikosz, 1998), and supporting the popular-isation of third-way debate (Giddens, 1998and 2000).

The PMPU might have isolated the keyissues facing the government, such as socialsolidarity in welfare state reform, therelations between the rights and duties ofcitizenship, the changing nature of work,‘globalisation’ and the ‘knowledge economy’,viewing them as an array of challengesrequiring a series of pragmatic and inde-pendent policy responses. In contrast, aideshave instead tried to provide a coherent andoverarching response, most usually in theform of the third way (TW).

I identify four positive roles a publicnarrative such as the TW can perform:improving electoral performance, enhancingpolicy co-ordination, restoring legitimacy tothe political process and securing party co-hesion. I explore tensions within these rolesand between them. I conclude that NewLabour needs a different approach to therelationship between grand narrative and apolitical project if TW is to be more than an

Politics (2000) 20(3) pp. 153–159

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The Third Way Projectin Britain: The Role ofthe Prime Minister’sPolicy UnitAnthony Butler 1

Anthony Butler, Birkbeck College, University of London

instrument of party management and short-term electoral gain.

The third way and the British electorate

Clinton’s influential third way was advertisedas a combination of small but progressivegovernment, fiscal discipline and a pro-gramme to secure economic freedom withsocial cohesion – countering critics of both‘tax-and-spend’ and ‘permissive’ liberalism.In addition, it helped to sustain among votersand activists a sense that the administrationmanifested a coherent and purposefulresponse to the scale, party decentralisation,constitutional balance and administrativefragmentation that impede presidentialleadership.

Electoral performance was at the heart ofthe US third way, and on this score at leastNew Labour learnt much from its dialoguewith the New Democrats. But while Blairbenefited from electoral and analyticaltechniques pioneered in the United States,notably the use of focus groups to probevoter aspirations and concerns, the content-indeterminacy that suited Clinton’s ‘thirdway’ to US conditions is out of place inBritish electoral politics. Any government, itis true, must stave off the inevitable onset ofvoter disenchantment, and a plausible taleabout the government’s intentions andactions may help it to do so. But Labour,elected in 1997 on a low turnout, faces a coreproblem of voter apathy, and the abstentionit might induce. Only low turnouts – quitefeasible given recent European, London,local and by-elections, and the immobilis-ing lack of Conservative competition – candeprive Labour of another large majority(Whiteley, 2000; Taylor, 2000).

Labour must send some primitive signalsto its core constituency closer to the election,and TW hardly represents a suitable cam-paigning vehicle. While it embraces certainpositions (in welfare to work, education

and criminal justice) that may resonate withtraditional supporters more strongly than theold ‘ideological’ politics, its technocratic andcentrist approach rules out symbolic gesturesof solidarity with the party’s electoral heart-lands. Moreover, boosting turnout above allrequires mobilised party activists to identifyand energise recalcitrant voters. Party activ-ists, however, currently bemoan Labour’sdomestic record and represent an especiallyproblematic audience for TW narrative.

The third way and policy co-ordination

The New Democrats also communicated the idea that a grand narrative, vision or bigidea might promote policy co-ordination. US presidents must mobilise a uniquelyfragmented administrative apparatus in acontinental-scale polity. State and city gov-ernments hold the levers of domestic power.Congress and the courts are entrenched andwell-resourced adversaries. Representativesat all levels are electorally exposed and partydiscipline is weak. US presidents, for allthese reasons, lack reliable machinery forpolicy co-ordination and implementation.Indeed, in a ‘paradox of power’ (Huntingdon,1968), a president perceived to be powerfulloses the legitimacy on which his real powerultimately rests – the power to persuade(Neustadt, 1960). Presidents must thereforerely on what former key Clinton aide RobertReich has called ‘public ideas’ (Reich, 1988)to mobilise government agencies, federaland state representatives, and city and localadministrations.

The Whitehall Village, by contrast, remainsa close and closed world. The impedimentsit provides to a government programmehave distinctive institutional roots. Policy-making on the family, the elderly or poverty-reduction, through heavy-spending ministriesin health, housing, social security and edu-cation, is famously disjointed and depart-mentalist, creating a range of perverse

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consequences, duplications and oversights.Information circuits are wired into theTreasury, whose bilateral budgetary nego-tiations hinder interdepartmentalism and theformation of ‘difficult policy’. Along with this‘hole at the centre of the state’ (Dynes andWalker, 1995, p. 29), ‘joined-up’ implemen-tation is hampered by weak regional insti-tutions, and local authorities that are mereagents of Whitehall, adding value to policydetermined far away by central governmentdepartments.

Labour has advanced appropriate institu-tional reforms (Cabinet Office, 1999a). Con-tinued ‘expenditure reviews’ may ultimatelypush the Treasury’s ‘abominable no-men’further back from day-to-day departmentaloperations. Cabinet Secretary Richard Wilsonis avowedly turning the Cabinet Office froma machine for lateral interdepartmental com-munication, with an important Europeandimension, into an agent of the government’spolitical will. ‘Joined-up’ and ‘strategic’government, a new focus on delivery, newforms of interdepartmental communicationand ‘revised performance managementarrangements’ are in the pipeline (CabinetOffice, 1999a). Boundary-breaking ‘socialexclusion’ and performance units, ‘evidence-based policy making’, and the threats of on-the-job training and performance-related pay(Cabinet Office, 1999b) incline mandarinsto bend to the government’s overarchingagenda.

The PMPU has itself expanded from 8 to 25 members since 1997, vetting policyproposals and rudimentarily overseeingpolicy co-ordination across Whitehall, whileacting as a court of appeal between depart-ments and ministers in conflict. Ministerialspecial advisers, more than doubled innumber to around 75 since 1997, liaise withthe PMPU over co-ordination, keep an eyeon the long term, shadow interdepartmentalcivil service committees and appraise civilservants’ performance (discovering youngradicals and identifying dark forces ofreaction).

Enthusiasts of co-ordination, however,currently lack a framework of longer-rangegovernment priorities – a public narrative orbig idea such as the TW was meant to be –to which civil servants, ministers and outsideinterests can appeal. Departments cannotpull together to form the component parts of a ‘project’ if they lack the interdepartment-alist Esperanto to appraise each initiativealongside others. TW cannot now be such alanguage. Stretched between the demands ofsentiment (making the ruthless post-socialistlogic of Brown’s welfare entrepreneurialismpalatable to a nostalgic party) and opposition(building Millbank’s invincible electoral coali-tion out of an unreliable citizenry), TW canoffer policy co-ordinators little more than thevery general injunction to favour ‘whatworks’. Indeed, ‘co-ordination’ today seemsarbitrary or personalised, with one commen-tator explaining that ‘the No. 10 or “Tonywants” angle is so pronounced that any signsof [mandarins’] professional detachment canall too easily be interpreted as “not one of us” by evangelists of the Blair project who… fill the considerable number of specialadviser posts in the extended No. 10’(Hennessy, 1999). The rolling back of trad-itional Treasury cost-containment has exposedthe absence not so much of alternativemechanisms of co-ordination, but of analternative rationale for it.

The third way and the crisis of democracy

Established liberal democracies have beenplagued for two decades by anti-party popu-lism, perceptions of corruption, and discon-tent with political leaders and institutions.Labour’s policy specialists, many of whomwere preoccupied in opposition with thecrisis in western democracy (rather thanmerely with the crisis of Labour), had hopedthat the TW might help restore the health of democracy in Britain. Writing from thedepths of opposition, Miliband argued that

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politics ‘has rarely been held in lower esteem’with ‘the formal institutions of politics, and the politicians who populate them …held in low regard. At best, they are seen asimpotent in the face of economic complexityand social change; at worst, they are part ofa conspiracy to defraud the general public’(Miliband, 1993, p. 1). ‘Legitimising democ-racy’, a recent Labour director of policy has emphasised, ‘is an essential part of thecentre-left project, not an optional extra’(Taylor, 2000, p. 42; see also Butler, 1995;Nye, 1997; Hadenius, 1998).

John Smith’s Labour proposed in responseto ‘bring power closer to the people’, withdevolution, new deals for the regions, citiesand localities, electoral reform, and freedomof information legislation.2 But Miliband’sPMPU considers that the causes of disen-chantment also lie in citizens’ inability tomake informed appraisals of governmentperformance. Historical grand narrativessuch as the Cold War (which justified foreignand defence policy), the gains of classstruggle, development in the south and theperfection of the welfare state, until recentlymade politics comprehensible, explainingnot just what governments were doing butalso why they were doing it. Such narrativeshelped turn the inconceivable complexity ofgovernment into a comprehensible tale ofintentions, actions and outcomes. But theCold War is over. Narratives of planning,development and the welfare state havebecome tangled plotlines of perverse con-sequences and imperfectable institutions.International integration has undercut every-day assumptions about the nation as thearena of politics. Privatisation, ‘partner-ships’, international integration and civilservice and welfare reform have all cloudedcitizens’ vision of the state as an actorwhose performance they might praise orblame.

Thatcherism’s grand narrative of long-rangehistorical decline, determined leadership andnational renewal proved that even a tall storycan sometimes unite a party, cut through

civil service obfuscation and impress electorswith a government’s vision and integrity.However, thinking Conservatives’ fear thatthe market undermines its own precapitalistinstitutional foundations – virtuous citizens,the family, community, nation, hierarchy,deference and trust – has proven moreenduring than the grandiose rhetoric ofnational redemption (Willetts, 1999). More-over, Britons as electors and citizens werenot long fooled: popular discontent withpolitical leaders and institutions deepenedacross the 1980s.

The third way and ‘post-socialist’ party unity

Many TW ideas originated in debates overthe crisis and future of socialism (Miliband,1993; Mulgan, 1984; Cornford et al.,1992).From the late 1970s, the West European leftfaced a bewildering array of problems: aneroding class base, new social and politicalmovements, challenges to corporatism andthe welfare state, the progressive failure ofeconomic planning and the emergence of an increasingly international OECD-zoneeconomy (Dunn, 1984).

Socialism had provided Western politicaltheory’s only strong conception of collectivehuman assertion. It was championed as theaction of freedom on necessity (Gorz, 1982),as the search for subjective agencies capableof dislodging objective structures (Anderson,1983), or as the collective assertion of citizensto control the unintended consequences ofindividual action (Barry, 1991). The ‘end ofsocialism’ therefore left a deep sense of lossamong socialist intellectuals and activistseverywhere.

Labour was more deeply scarred, and lessfully intellectually remade, than continentalsocial democracy. Labour’s crude conceptionof economic intervention, its idealised wel-farism, its ties to a union movement unableto deliver on corporatism, the cant of parlia-mentary socialism and the parochialism of



party economic strategy, made Labour’s1980s disintegration uniquely devastating.

The twentieth-century state was socialism’sagent of collective human assertion, and thenational territory was its arena of activity, butsocialists elsewhere were less dependent ona nation-state framework than Britons. TheSecond World War exposed the vulnerabilityof both state and nation, and these wererestored to viability only by the EuropeanCommunity, which remade the nation stateas the continent’s key organisational principle(Milward, 1992). Mitterrand’s 1984 reflationand nationalisation strategy, for example, col-lapsed just as Labour’s similar if less ambitious1983 manifesto proposals would have done.But many French socialists, sceptical of thestate-nation, already proposed to dismantlecapitalism using a semi-federal Europe, andhad argued for the EC as a larger site of col-lective assertion against American capitalism.

The European project, indeed, hasbecome the consolatory narrative of the left across Western Europe. It is the new wayof conceiving the traditional socialist projectof collective human assertion in the face ofthe objective structures of global capitalism.Britain’s TW theorists, by contrast, are sig-nificantly reticent about Europe, while theyoften advance flowery generalisations about‘globalisation’ and the ‘world economy’ (forexample, Giddens, 2000, pp. 122–162). Inter-nationalisation does not make social democ-racy unviable – capital mobility and trade donot automatically curtail state policy auton-omy, and parties of the left are not reallyvulnerable to tax-abhorring electorates – butthe social democracy it allows cannot be aheroic project of collective advance. It would,rather, be a defensive social compact, basedon a shared perception of vulnerability tointernational economic and political forcesbeyond national control.

New Labour needs a grand project, in partto overcome Labour’s debilitating crises ofconfidence and its internalised self-image asthe party of opposition (Wright, 2000). Butwary electors and residual state-in-nation

socialists find unpalatable the only big ideaon the horizon: the New Europe.3

Conclusions

An overarching and coherent account ofwhat the government is doing and why hasproved elusive. The Policy Unit is lookingfor an overarching framework for strategicand joined-up government. Millbank mustjuggle the demands of a diverse electorate,the sensibilities of traditional voters and thesurly negativism of party activists. Some ofthe parliamentary party yearns for a ‘project’that provides a consolatory quasi-socialiststory of collective assertion against objectivestructures. The European vision that hasgiven continental socialism a sense of direc-tion and purpose is out of bounds.

New Labour should perhaps settle forsomething more modest than historicalgrand narrative: the re-creation of an every-day model of the role of government. Citizensmay reject any single story, no matter howgrand and persuasive. Rather, they are in-clined to make their own judgements aboutgovernment performance and to elaboratetheir own increasingly sceptical and diverseviews of the political trajectory of modernBritain. What might an everyday model ofgovernment be like? In post-war Britain,Keynesianism gave mass publics and theirinformants in the media and academia asimple framework for appraising govern-ment performance.4 Citizens believed (albeitinaccurately) that they understood what theirgovernment was doing, why, and even howwell. They possessed a model of causes andeffects that related the government’s inten-tions to the effects of its actions.

Blair’s government seems unwilling torecreate such a model, to win the peopleover to it, and to accept responsibility con-sistently on its terms for social outcomes, bethey good or bad. Instead, professional partystrategists continue to defer to popular modelsof political causality, recycled in the media



or revealed in focus groups, and seek todisplace blame for suffering to untraceablegeo-economic forces or to actors unaffiliatedto the government.

If TW debate has failed to make Britishpopular culture more hospitable to politicalmorality tales, it is none the less not likely tobe publicly abandoned. The carefully culti-vated idea that a debate is under way hasdramatised both the government’s principledcharacter, as it tries to act in accordance withan overarching idea of what is desirable, andits willingness to learn from others. For theforeseeable future, however, the overarchingnarrative of the government is likely to be‘modernisation’, a very old Labour chestnutindeed. Harold Wilson promised to modern-ise Britain’s economy, state and society all at once. Blair’s modernisation project for an age of reduced public expectations, bycontrast, may mostly confine itself to therealms of constitutional reform and politicalsymbolism.

Notes1 I am grateful to Tom Stannard and to two

anonymous referees for their comments onan earlier draft of this article.

2 The composition and narrow terms ofreference of the Wakeham and JenkinsCommissions, the truncated proposals onfreedom of information and the mach-inations that characterise relations betweenWhitehall/Millbank and devolved institu-tions, have done nothing to reverse populardisengagement.

3 Britain’s Euro zone participation, of course,is also impeded by a range of non-negotiable costs to entry and lost policyautonomy.

4 A good government used its policy instru-ments to minimise unemployment, inflationand external deficit. Its values were ex-pressed in the trade-off it purportedly chosebetween unemployment and inflation. Itmight also be praised or blamed for thequality of public services and for the com-passion and efficiency of the welfare state.For further analysis, see Butler, 1995.

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the third way project in britain: the role of the prime minister's policy unit

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