What the Third Way got wrong: Giddens's own verdict and Donald Warren's forgotten radical centre

The best critic of the Third Way turned out to be the man who named it. In May 2010, as Labour left office, Anthony Giddens wrote a long assessment for the New Statesman. He called the record "distinctly patchy" and concluded that New Labour as such was dead. Read next to a much older book, Donald Warren's The Radical Center of 1976, his verdict explains a lot about European politics since.

What Giddens says worked

Giddens gives his side its due, and the list is serious. Ten years of unbroken growth, which he insists was more than a credit bubble. A national minimum wage. About 600,000 children lifted out of relative poverty before the recession, and roughly twice that on an absolute measure, even though the child poverty targets were missed. Large-scale investment and reform in health and education, with the New Deal for the unemployed, Sure Start and tax credits having mostly proved their worth. Devolution to Scotland and Wales, peace in Northern Ireland, a Freedom of Information Act, civil partnerships. Britain, he writes, became a more liberal and tolerant society.

So the Third Way delivered on opportunity at the bottom. The trouble lay elsewhere.

What he says went wrong

The Iraq war comes first in Giddens's list, and spin second. The third failure goes to the heart of the project. Being friendly to business was right, he writes, but the prawn cocktail offensive in the City turned into fawning dependence, and Britain became a kind of gigantic tax haven. He criticises the attitude of being intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich, which he says made inequality worse and encouraged a culture where bosses protected themselves from the risks they imposed on staff. Inequality, in his words, was contained and not significantly reduced. Blair and Brown never criticised market fundamentalism or exposed its limits. And Labour should have backed proportional representation and wider constitutional reform as a matter of principle.

Germany tells a parallel story. In 1999 Blair and Gerhard Schröder published a joint paper for Europe's centre-left calling for flexible markets, closer partnership between government and business and lower corporate taxes, with a safety net turned into a springboard to personal responsibility. The political scientist Helmut Wiesenthal, looking back in 2010, describes the shock inside the SPD, whose members expected the language of opposition and got a break with tradition many saw as cynical. He links the party's failure to work through that conflict to the fate of Agenda 2010, a rapid turnover of leaders and the creation of the WASG, whose merger with the PDS produced the Left Party and a five-party system.

The voters Warren had already described

Donald Warren was a sociologist at Oakland University in Michigan. He surveyed white American voters in 1971 and 1975 and published The Radical Center: Middle Americans and the Politics of Alienation with the University of Notre Dame Press. His subject was a group he called Middle American Radicals. The publisher's description says as many as one in five Americans shared their outlook.

John Judis, writing about the book in 2015, summarises who they were. Middle or lower-middle incomes, no college degree, skilled or semi-skilled manual jobs or clerical and sales work. Their defining belief was that the middle class was under siege from above and below, and that government favoured the rich and the poor at the same time. They were the group most likely to say corporations had too much power and were too big. They backed Social Security, Medicare, federal aid to education, national health insurance and even government-guaranteed jobs. They were also the most conservative group on race, welfare agencies and crime, they distrusted Washington, and they liked strong leaders. Judis traces a line from them through George Wallace, Ross Perot and Pat Buchanan to Donald Trump.

Put Warren next to Giddens and the Third Way's blind spot comes into focus. New Labour and the Neue Mitte offered the squeezed middle a deal with two parts: opportunity for the poor through investment in skills, and a warm relationship with finance and big business to pay for it. Warren's radicals wanted a social floor for themselves and a fight with concentrated power at the top. They got the opposite emphasis. In America, Judis argues, their outlook explains the run of insurgent candidates from Wallace to Trump; in Germany, Wiesenthal's account shows the SPD's base leaking to a new party on its left.

The lesson for a radical centre

This is where the two books combine into a position. From the left comes the conviction, which Giddens reached in 2010, that concentrated corporate and financial power is a political problem, and that inequality at the top deserves as much attention as poverty at the bottom. From the right comes what the Third Way got right and should keep: fiscal prudence, which Giddens credits to Gordon Brown as a precondition of social spending, and an economy where business can grow. And from Warren comes the idea that fits neither map: a large group of voters who distrust big government and big business with equal energy and still want strong social insurance.

A radical centre built for them stands for markets and against rent-seeking in the same breath. It writes rules on competition, tax and lobbying that apply to the City and the incumbent utility as firmly as no rights without responsibilities applied to the unemployed. It protects the social insurance the middle relies on. And it takes up the institutional reform Giddens regretted skipping, starting with the voting system, so that the anger Warren measured has a channel inside democratic politics. The Third Way was half of that programme. Radical centrism should be the whole of it.