Hutton has been very influential with his book "The State We're In", 1995, against financial "short-terminism" - actually the domination of neo-liberal market fundamentalism, with no regulation of short term money.
Before the election he appeared to feel somewhat closer to Brown, and to find that he ought to address Blair on surname terms.
His review of Gidden's book on the Third Way, welcomes the linking of the third way to some sort of traditional social democratic politics. This is clearly different from the emphasis of Mandelson and Blair, which despite Blair's article on the Third Way, is more centrist and about the technical management of pluralist consumer capitalist society.
Although the wave of Geoffrey Robinson revelations may have more compromising stuff on Brown than on Mandelson, it is Mandelson who has fallen and the perception is this strengthens Brown and social democracy versus Blair and centrism.
I personally, for reasons argued as introduction to the earlier post today on voting intentions, think it is safer for Labour to go for a centrist agenda (I mean the term in the bourgeois party political sense and not the Trotskyist sense). And I think Hutton underestimates the degree of technological means now available to government to guide society without central planning, that have come in with the advent of computers. (There are for example 20,000 CCTV cameras in London alone.)
See what you think of the editorial.
Chris Burford
London.
Sunday December 27, 1998
Things can only get bitter...
By Will Hutton
Peter Mandelson's spectacular rise and fall has underlined, as if we did not know it already, just how intensely brittle a political construct New Labour is. It has become a commonplace to observe that the Government is factionalised and riven by personal animosities, but that only betrays a deeper malaise. The party is at odds over what it should become, what values lie at its core, what coalition it should build and how it relates to the British progressive tradition - and it is those real differences that fan New Labour's factions and individual rivalries.
Mandelson had and has a very particular answer to these questions, which he pressed a receptive Tony Blair to impose upon the party. Openly boastful of his lack of any left-wing credentials and a keen admirer of the Thatcherite approach to economic management, he was the Prime Minister's chief supporter and ally in Cabinet of moving Labour away from its social-democratic roots and instead making it the centrepiece of a new, progressive liberal coalition committed to laissez-faire economics and a loose notion of social justice. Thus, the sympathetic approach to PR and close links with Paddy Ashdown; thus the widening chasm that threatens to divide New Labour and which potentially could engulf it.
For this is an extraordinarily hazardous and contentious political enterprise. Even those profoundly committed to the New Labour 'Project' have doubts about whether it is intellectually right to bury all traces of Keynesianism and social-democratic concerns about the inequities of contemporary capitalism, and instead invent a new liberalism that is to the right even of the definition of the 'Third Way' recently offered by Tony Giddens. There is a political coalition to be built, certainly, but the issue is whether its central pole should be 'Third Way' social democracy or free-market social liberalism.
There is now a vast political territory opening up between the Old Labour Left and the centrist liberalism of Blair, but it has no champions and no voice. A number of key Cabinet members are keenly aware of the fact; they are in politics to express a social-democratic philosophy which they recognise is disenfranchised. The enmity to Mandelson was rooted in this realisation.
Blair is faced with a choice. He can heed those concerns, and reposition New Labour as social-democratic modernisers without the poisonous factionalisation that Mr Mandelson's single-mindedness and style helped to foment, or he can push on with his drive towards liberalism.
It is not too grandiose to argue that upon this political judgment the future of left-of-centre politics in Britain depends - and it is for this reason that Mandelson's resignation is so portentous. It could allow the healing of New Labour or it could presage its open factionalisation.
At first sight, it appears that Mandelson's going has been managed swiftly. There is talk of Mandelson making a swift return to the political mainstream, and, while managing his comeback, retaining his influence over Blair. This is a misreading of the political dynamic now in train.
Mandelson cannot return to the formal position he had during New Labour's first year. The ministerial post he occupied and the committees he chaired are now filled; if he returns it will not be at the heart of policy-making but the fringes.
In any case, Blair is angry; he will necessarily regard advice from someone whose judgment proved so sadly wanting less compelling than he used to. This scaling back of Mandelson's influence is of huge importance in the emerging struggle for the heart of New Labour. Blair is ever more bold in telling business leaders that he has discovered himself as a Gladstonian liberal. In a key speech two weeks ago, he declared his aim was to forge and lead a new liberal progressive coalition into the next century.
The modernisers around Blair have come to support this basic thrust for a variety of reasons. For Philip Gould, his psephologist, the issue is voting patterns and the way the progressive vote has been divided between liberals and Labour. For Alastair Campbell, at heart closer to the Labour tradition than the other key modernisers, the reason for such an approach is that tactically it allows him to handle an otherwise implacably conservative press.
But for Mandelson, constructing a new liberal progressive coalition is a matter of conviction. He believes that government initiative in the contemporary economy obstructs the natural course of markets and entrepreneurship. Social-democratic ideas of extending public services, tackling inequality or using the state to reshape capitalism are just moonshine in current political and cultural conditions. We must accept capitalism as it is and equip individuals better to adjust to it.
It is this vision that Blair has begun to share. No other member of the Cabinet would go so far. John Prescott openly opposes working with the Liberal Democrats and stands by core Labour values. The same is true of the majority of the Cabinet, most of whom still describe themselves as socialist, libertarian socialist or democratic socialist if asked. Nobody would sign up to be members of a party purporting to develop a modernised version of Gladstonian liberalism.
And nor would Gordon Brown. The Brown camp was horrified by Mandelson's presentation of his White Paper on Competitiveness 10 days ago, with his disdain for every element of Labour's post-war economic record and espousal of Thatcherite free markets. Brown can see the political space that is opening up, and how it could yet force a party or even Cabinet rebellion.
Some members of the Cabinet, for example, are worried about the regressive element in social and welfare reform - the new treatment of incapacity claimants particularly rankles. Others worry about the new capping regime of local-government finance which will hurt poorest councils hardest. Then there were the considerations of resignation over bombing Iraq. So it goes.
Mandelson's resignation shakes Blair's political geography; there is the loss of a key ally and the need to rebuild a political base. Brown knows that Blair must move to re-emphasise the social- democratic credentials of the Government and accepts that if this implies a narrowing of New Labour's coalition, that is the necessary price to be paid to preserve the party and Cabinet cohesion.
How Blair responds will be decisive. Mandelson's fall is a warning that a Labour leader must keep his moderate Left onside to succeed; if he does not, the tensions at the top of New Labour can only grow.
After all, the truth about Gladstonian liberalism is that it failed. It was an inadequate philosophy upon which to manage capitalism and build a just society.
It needs to be complemented by the social-democratic tradition if it is to succeed. If that lesson is learned, Mandelson's personal tragedy may yet be the making of New Labour - and its ultimate success.
© Copyright Guardian Media Group plc.1998