London school of Blairism

Spectator, The, Mar 14, 1998 by Hunt, Tristram

Tristram Hunt on the LSE's role at the heart of `the Project'- the other name for New Labour

My object as the occupant of this chair is not to create a body of disciples who shall go forth to preach the peculiar doctrines I happen to hold.

Harold Laski, Inaugural Lecture, 1926 FROM its birth at the hands of Sidney and Beatrice Webb, politics has always been at the heart of the London School of Economics. Under William Beveridge's directorship during the 1930s, the combined power of Harold Laski, R.H. Tawney and M.M. Postan influenced a generation of students to become the shock troops for the post-war welfare society. At the same time, Friedrich von Hayek established his own powerful school of free-market ideology, while Michael Oakeshott provided much of intellectual conservatism. Later, in the 1970s, the school's economics faculty, dominated by one Professor Alan Walters, provided the intellectual groundwork for much of Thatcher's first term.

With its new director, Professor Anthony Giddens, the LSE is entering upon its `Third Republic', which is apposite, as the guiding light for the Third Republic is to be the mystical `Third Way'. Since taking over from his austere predecessor John Ashworth, Giddens has constructed a faculty to provide just the kind of intellectual ballast for Blair's `radical-centre' scheme that his predecessors achieved for the 1940s welfare state and then for Thatcherism.

As a former Cambridge professor of sociology, Giddens is an academic of world renown. Many American universities now offer undergraduate courses on 'Giddens'. Yet he is also a public intellectual in the mould of some of his most distinguished LSE forebears - Laski or Richard Titmuss being the most obvious. And whereas Laski taught the great Marxist theorist Ralph Miliband, Giddens has become a close political ally of his modernising son David, head of the No. 10 Policy Unit.

Giddens is a fan of `the Project'. His 1994 book Beyond Left and Right, The Future of Radical Politics rehearsed many of Blair's arguments about a third way between Old Left and New Right, a theme he elaborated further in his contribution to David Miliband's book, Reinventing the Left, and in public utterances since. In turn, Giddens has been feted by the Prime Minister and his advisers as that rare breed, a weighty intellectual actively supporting the government. He was at the Hillary Clinton Chequers seminar in December, and more recently travelled with Miliband and other No. 10 inhabitants to Washington for the Blair-Clinton 'wonkathon'. There he struck up a close relationship with Clinton's oleaginous `director of vision', Sidney Blumenthal.

Yet he is not uncritical - he has frequently expressed concerns about New Labour's moralistic tinge masking an inability (or refusal) to address inequality. However, he stands as one of the few intellectuals Blair actually likes. More at home with high-achieving CEOs and sportsmen, Blair, unlike Clinton, has never been one for meandering political discussions late into the night. Giddens, as an entrepreneurial academic with his own successful publishing company (Polity Press) and a Porsche, is the kind of thinker Blair can deal with.

When, therefore, Blair recently announced on the trip back from Washington his plans for a standing conference of worldwide Centre-Left parties, no one was more happy than the director of the LSE. Insiders now regard it as a `shoe-in' for the school to act as resident host. Giddens's strategy has paid off.

The planning has been impeccable. Since taking over, Giddens has attracted the cream of Centre-Left academia. Stephen Nickell, one of Oxford's most distinguished economists, has joined as professor of economics; the former Thatcherite, and now slightly confused social democrat, John Gray, has also left Oxford to become professor of something called `European thought'; and Linda Colley, a historian who has been helping Labour behind the scenes on devolution and national identity, will leave Yale in July for the LSE's Holborn site. Perry Anderson, the old New Left political philosopher, is giving up California to take up the Ralph Miliband professorship, and Ulrich Beck, the leading German sociologist, is to become a visiting fellow.

Many of Clinton's favourite academics have also been purloined to join the Crusade of the Third Way. Oliver Hart, the Harvard economist, Kenneth Sepsle, the political scientist, and Richard Sennett, the United States's leading urban sociologist, are all on their way. Never one to be left out, David Puttnam has managed to climb aboard as visiting professor of media and communications.

Giddens has been host to a number of events intended to promote the LSE's return to the intellectual centre of things. In March of last year, the Blairite thinktank Nexus held their pre-election conference, fascistically entitled `Passing the Torch', at the school. It was a who's who of Centre-Left politics - from the bigwigs (or big Whigs) Jenkins and Blair to the usual suspects such as Will Hutton and Polly Toynbee. Nostalgic alumni wandered the corridors wondering if the LSE would once again usher in the new dawn.