LONDON -- New Labour baffles just about everybody who comes across it. Is it "new" simply in the sense that a relaunched soap powder is new -- essentially the same plus a claim to have stronger power to wash away sins? Or is it really new, with just the Labour bit being misleading? And what on earth is the "third way," which apparently is the defining project of New Labour?
I think the third way means simply that the government will not count itself accountable to either of the two ancient class formations in Britain -- capitalist and working -- and as no other social group has ever come close to forming anything so cohesive and enduring as a class, that means no one. The New Labour government is constantly having to come up with new instruments of power and new ways of finding out where the hot spots in civil society are.
In the annual budget, Chancellor Gordon Brown announced substantial increases in state spending for the National Health Service, to be paid for out of increased National Insurance contributions -- the tax charged on both employer and worker for every working person, including the self-employed. That lets off the unemployed, pensioners and those who sit on piles of property wealth. The budget was well received, for there is hardly a person in Britain who has not been convinced since New Labour came to power in 1997 that the public services, especially health, cannot continue without much more money being spent on them.