From Principles to Policies
Mapping Out the Third Way

 

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Introduction

1. Let me begin with a health warning. This lecture is about how we may build social cohesion in a market economy. It is not a Manifesto, nor a report on fourteen month’s government. I am not covering the whole of the waterfront. The meaning of life and why we are out of the world cup are only two of a huge number of subjects this lecture does not address. Its focus instead is limited, but I hope interesting.

2. The first question to be tackled is - why do we need a "way" at all, first, second or third? Why bother with an ideology, a political theory, when what matters to individuals in our society are the consequences of government, more prosaic and more immediate than any theory, namely their standard of living and the quality of their life.

3. This is a theme which has reappeared with remarkable regularity in British politics since the war. The refrain from some on the old Left that there is no difference between the parties (or, alternatively, that we are simply Tories in disguise) has echoes in each decade. It was implicit as in Francis Fukyama’s claim that the eighties had seen "The end of history", as it was in the writings of the political scientist Professor S. M. Lipset who said this in "Political Man" published in 1955:

"The ideological issues dividing Left and Right have been reduced to a little more and a little less government ownership and economic planning", and it makes little difference in the West "which political party controls the domestic policies of individual nations".

4. The last Labour leader to win a General Election - Harold Wilson -famously brought "pragmatic" to the contemporary political lexicon, and made a great virtue of his deliberate ignorance of political theorists, especially of Marx and his followers.

5. It was also this sense that ideology did not matter which, over a 35 year period, led so many in the Centre and on the Right of the British Labour Party to be resistant to any idea that changing Labour’s neo-Marxist creed of clause IV was worth the candle. "A sentimental souvenir, best ignored" was how one leading Labour figure on the Right advised me, when some years ago, I suggested that it was time to take the axe to this particular totem.

6. But political theory really does matter. However secular our society may have become, people cannot live by bread alone. They need a framework of belief. Those who govern in their name, in Parliament and the executive need to share that framework - indeed to have marked it out, to have some pretty clear sense of direction, so that there is some template for the scores of individual decisions which they have to make every day.

7. Aside from any other consideration, ideology in the best sense of that term makes government so much more efficient and effective and decision-making swifter.

The Lessons of Labour History

8. Two of the previous three post-war Labour governments failed not simply because of specific mistakes of economic and social policy. No Government can be immune from these. They failed because they were caught in the cross-fire between two sets of intellectual forces - of the neo-Marxists on the Left and the social democrats in the Centre-Left - and were never able satisfactorily to resolve the conflict. It is worth recalling that the protagonists in this conflict asserted that Labour could not win unless either it became more dogmatically socialist ("no compromise with the electorate"), or dropped all semblance of principle or purpose (as the SDP appeared to wait).

9. My bookshelves are full of books, pamphlets and essays compiled with what seemed like inevitable regularity and which dismally analysed the collapse of another Labour government, or another defeat from Opposition.

10. Take "Socialism Now" which the late Anthony Crosland wrote after Labour’s defeat in 1970. Two things are striking about this. The first is the categoric admission of defeat by this man, one of the brightest intellects of his generation. "No one disputes the central failure of economic policy" was his verdict on his own government (1964-70) [P.18], adding, for good measure, words which applied equally to the obituaries of the next (1974-79) Labour government. The trade unions, said Crosland, had "wholly defeated the Labour government".

11. Second, and much related (if indirectly) to the first, was the extent to which Marx was still the man to argue with. "Revisionism" Crosland wrote in his introduction to "Socialism Now" was "theory about means as well as ends", and "contrary to traditional Marxist doctrine ..... the ownership of the means of production was no longer the key factor which imparted to a society its essential character" [P.17].

12. This argument with Marx continued in the nineteen eighties - as can be seen in the 1984 Fabian Essays in Socialist Thought edited by Ben Pimlott.

13. However, as often is the case, the best and most timeless wisdom is to be found in the writing of R. H. Tawney. After Labour’s shattering defeat in 1931, he published his classic work Equality. There, he wrote in the section "The Task before the Labour Party" that:

"If Labour is to do the job for which it was created, it must accomplish three things. It must be returned to power. It must succeed when returned, in carrying out its programme. It must defeat such attempts .... as may be made to frustrate it. It will not do so except on the spearhead of a strong  body of convictions .....". [P.203].

A Strong Body of Convictions

14. It was to establish that "strong body of convictions" that Tony Blair set about fundamentally recasting Labour’s statement of belief in Clause IV, part 4 of Labour’s constitution. Our Prime Minister is only able to be that most consensual and inclusive of politicians in approach because he is the most determined and single-minded of politicians in principle and purpose.

15. By 1994, the lessons of history for our party were stark. These were that we would, in very practical ways, be hobbled in government if we remained trapped in our past, trapped by an ideology which could not be our own even if we had wished, because it had become so comprehensively flawed. In contrast, the new Clause 4 is the Third Way - a clear, coherent route between the Right (especially the nineteenth century Liberal New Right) and the old, neo-Marxist Left.

Marx Right About One Thing

16. But one key thing which we had to learn, a little from our own history, a great deal from that of eastern Europe, was that in one important particular Marx was more correct than his revisionist critics like Crosland. Contrary to Crosland’s assertion which I have just quoted, economic structures do help to impart to a society some of "its essential character".

17. We can see that when we examine the social consequences of the extremes of state ownership, or of unbridled capitalism. The Soviet system broke down under the weight of its own contradictions, under the demand of individual freedoms which must include the freedom to trade, which freedom could simply not be accommodated within the bureaucratic constraints of a controlled economy. At the other end of the spectrum, unrestrained market power plainly can lead to private monopolies in the hands of political elites, with all the misery, corruption and inequality which that brings - as we have seen just recently in Indonesia.

The Social Failure of the Right

18. Indeed, Governments which simply allow social policy to be a consequence of economic philosophy cannot achieve the well-being of communities and of society. Nowhere has this been better illustrated than by the Thatcher Governments of the 1980s.

19. The Thatcherite Right believed that the market could deliver social as well as economic well-being. If reducing state intervention in industry and commerce and deregulating markets could produce economic prosperity then why could the same principle not be applied to all aspects of human behaviour?

20. But the effect of Thatcherism was to do exactly the reverse. Far from reducing dependency on the state, the 1980s saw a huge increase in the number of people who relied on its handouts. In 1979, when Labour was last in Government, one in ten working age households had no breadwinner. Today that figures is one in five. [A New Contract for Welfare, page 10].

21. Defining individuals as mere players in a competitive market place devalued and limited people’s mutual relationships. It undermined the responsibilities and duties which each owed to the other. The overall effect was to define responsibility as responsibility not for oneself but to oneself.

22. As a result, the 1980s saw the rise of the "me-first" society. Individuals were encouraged to get what they could regardless of its effect on others. The "invisible hand" would automatically produce widespread benefit for everyone in every area of our lives.

23. The oft-quoted "no such thing as society" phrase from Margaret Thatcher was a particular reminder of the crude reductionist experiment in which the Tory Right had engaged. This led on to a culture of dutiless rights - where rights are exercised without due recognition being given to our mutual responsibilities towards each other.

24. But we must acknowledge that the old Left contributed to this culture, too. It failed to argue against the development within the Left in the sixties of a social attitude which asserted that an extension of individual freedom had to mean a licence to do almost anything, and that the State existed as some sort of universal great provider, which made no moral judgements regardless of the merits of those who were dependent upon it.

25. All this has had two consequences. First, it has reinforced the natural tendency in each of us towards selfishness. One need only look at neighbourhoods across the country where people exercise their "right" to enjoy their own lives, without proper regard to the effect on others.

26. Second, it has made rights appear like ready-made consumer items which the state can dispense at will and often for which the "consumer" never need pay.

27. As the philosopher David Selbourne has written:

"In its thrall, the citizen comes to be perceived and treated by the civic order (and its instruments, the state and government) not as a citizen but as a consumer, customer, and bundle of wants; and the citizen, perceiving himself in like fashion, loses sense of his duties, as a citizen, to himself, his fellows, and the civic order, at worst without sense of honour or shame." [Principle of Duty, p70, Abacus, 1994]

28. The consequences of such an approach were, and are, potentially disastrous for communities and society as a whole. For how can the market deliver the social results we all want - safe streets and public places, our children educated to cope with a rapidly changing world, modern health services which are accessible to all? Markets have a most important role, but on their own they cannot deliver social well-being.

Social and Economic Management

29. Nevertheless, the starting point for our social philosophy and policy has to be the economy, the way it is managed and the reality that national economies cannot insulate themselves from what is going on in the rest of the world. Rapid technological change, instantaneous international movement of capital, free trade and low-wage economies, all impose constraints on national governments. They can no longer protect their populations by Canute-like economic and social policies, if ever they could. New Labour has had to face up to these economic realities.

30. In less than 14 months, the British public has witnessed the new government practice what we preached. The relationship between Labour and business have been transformed, for the better, not just of Labour and business but for society as a whole.

31. In contrast, the irreconcilable ideological forces in which Labour was trapped in the past had the most deleterious consequences for economic management and for Labour’s political future.

32. Two years into the 1964-70 Labour government there were the July 1996 measures - something which had a much more profound effect on Labour’s prospects than England winning the World Cup in the same month. Those measures were public expenditure cuts, followed the next year by sterling’s devaluation, the year after by further cuts.

33. The same, but worse, happened in 1976. In the two preceding years of 1974 and 1975 the Labour government had had to allow public spending to grow too fast. I say "had had to allow", for I am clear that the Cabinet Ministers whom I saw at their work (from my ringside seat as a special adviser) knew that a day of reckoning would come. Yet a combination of an inflationary "N+I" incomes policy inherited from Ted Heath, a world recession, and the overwhelming pressure for pay increases and other public sector expenditure from the trades unions meant that the application of the word "prudent" was virtually impossible for fear that it would provoke the cry "traitor".

34. Those few who now lament the passing of the old ways in which too much power - not least for their own good - was placed in the hands of a Party Conference dominated by unaccountable trade union delegations, need to recall the ultimate humiliation the party as a whole suffered at its 1976 Conference. Then the Chancellor of the Exchequer, no less, was given just three minutes to explain the case for prudence - too late, as it turned out, to save Labour from defeat for a whole generation thereafter.

35. Far better, I suggest to start and continue with caution and care, to set "golden rules" for public spending, and to stick to them, as Gordon Brown has done. There were those who criticised Gordon’s proposal, agreed in 1997 by the Shadow Cabinet, that for the first two years of government (Welfare to Work aside) we would adhere to the previous government’s spending plans. In practice, this has turned out to be the single most important pre-Election decision we made, imposing a discipline on the whole of government, and causing a step-change in attitudes and approaches which might otherwise have taken many more years to fulfil.

The Changed Economic Environment

36. The climate in which Labour developed its policies in the first three decades after the war was different not just in terms of the ideological climate, with the ever present competition from the apparently successful Soviet-style economies. It was also very different in the way in which the economic and industrial structure of our society helped to underpin the social structure.

37. By today’s standards, many individual places of employment were huge. The numbers employed in individual factories was often measured in thousands -sometimes tens of thousands - rather than hundreds. Even where this was not the case, a few employers, or a single one as in pit towns and villages, often dominated the local economy. The unit of employment in textile areas like my Blackburn constituency was typically smaller than in heavy engineering areas. Even so, in the sixties there were three firms which together employed around 10,000 staff - the Royal Ordinance Factory (principally making fuses for shells), British Northrop making looms and other textile machinery and Mullards (Philips) making radio valves.

38. I have always been very sceptical about golden ages, and such is no part of my thesis today. But this kind of employment meant that there was a greater level of shared experience in the town, and so fewer strangers.

39. When we meet someone we do not know, we want to establish points of connection with them. In a town of 100,000 like Blackburn almost everyone knew someone who worked, or had worked in one of these places. This helped give the town its social as well as its economic identity. This factor alone helped support relative social stability. But there were two other factors which reinforced it.

40. First, because of low car ownership and a poor intra-urban road system, most people who worked in the town lived in it, and vice-versa. So work-based networks - particularly trade union branches - were community networks as well.

41. Second, and crucially, industry still required a great deal of semi-skilled and unskilled labour, male as well as female. This meant that there was a natural transition from adolescence to adulthood for that core group of the population - under-achieving, under-skilled males - who are most likely to commit crime, and whose lack of connection to the rest of society today lies at the root of so many other social problems, like the level of teenage pregnancies and the huge number of absent fathers. And then there was the apprenticeship system which in many ways lay at the heart of the development of male esteem. The lad who previously could not aspire to a university education would aspire to a craft, and gained much from the tutelage of older men.

42. In 1998 in Blackburn, these three firms together employ not 10,000, but fewer than 3,000. British Northrop has closed altogether; the ROF employs just 300 (most of the site is now a Barratt’s housing estate) whilst the old Mullards site contains a much slimmed down and rebadged Philips factory with the rest of the site an industrial park with many smaller employers in place of one large one.

43. Much about the town has improved, especially in the last 10 years. At long last, it has moved its position in the employment league, from the "blackspot of the North West" as it was in the thirties, to levels just below the national average. People in work have much greater freedom, not least through car ownership and overseas travel. Jobs are often far more interesting for those in work. The physical condition of the housing stock has much improved. There is a sense of dynamism about, encouraged, not least by a vibrant Asian employment sector. But whilst life has got better for most, it has got worse for some, at the margin. Like virtually every town in the UK, there are pockets of serious community breakdown, estates which do not function; groups who are, or who feel, socially excluded. And if all this is true for such a free standing town, still in many ways a big village, with a strong sense of identity (reinforced by its football team), this is all the more true for larger towns and cities across the land.

Social Impact of Economic Change

44. As my Blackburn example shows, at least up to the end of the sixties, economic structures naturally underpinned social structures, and communities. Greater economic regulation and security meant less need for direct social intervention, and regulation. Now, the opposite is true. For good reason, economic structures have become more dynamic, less regulated and more international. Of course, Government has a responsibility to ensure that we have a well educated and well trained workforce. But if left to themselves then economic forces may undermine social stability.

45. Even when people are in good employment life is less secure. People are much more likely to have to change jobs or careers during their lives, to travel long distances to their work and to move more often. All this has profound implications for social cohesion, and for the role of government.

46. In short, less economic regulation argues for more social intervention, if communities are to be kept alive and vibrant. This alone made the case for a new approach. There are other related forces which argue for this as well.

47. First, is the huge change in the position of women in society. As a society, we have made major strides to ensure greater opportunities, equality and higher achievement and attainment by women. This has, however, had a destabilising effect on some sections of the male population, whose own sense of security was to a significant degree buttressed by a notion (albeit wrong headed) that if they were not equal to other men, they were better than women - and needed by them.

48. The second and related force at work is the all pervasive effect of crime. There have been many periods in history when the real level of crime was significantly higher than it is today. In the middle of last century, the murder rate was approximately 20 per million compared with the current figure of about 14 per million. There was plenty of serious domestic and alcohol related violence three decades ago, much more of it than today wholly unrecorded. But there were far fewer consumer durables to steal, virtually no drugs problem at all, and less fear of crime. (When Gallup asked people in 1963 the unprompted question "what is the most urgent problem facing the country today" no-one said crime. Today it’s between 5% - 10%). It is as a result, noteworthy how little crime featured in political debate. In Harold Wilson’s auto biographical record of the 1964-70 government the main reference is only to the fact that crime (as a Times leader reported in 1971) had slipped off the political agenda despite a pre-Election effort by Ted Heath in early 1970. In Dennis Healey’s biography there is no index reference to crime at all - only to the Crime Writers Association, whose Golden Dagger Award he presented in 1971. In Richard Titmuss’s 1964 introduction to Tawney’s "Equality", crime is oddly referred to only "as the remaining major form of acquisitive social mobility" [P.13].

A New Social Philosophy

49. So, in responding to the changing economic and social challenges of our age we have to craft a new social philosophy. Our approach must be to use social intervention to produce greater social cohesion, social order and social inclusion. It turns its back on the first and second ways - the free market individualism of the 1980s and the statism that went before it and to which it was an extreme reaction.

50. The fact that this Third Way recognises the need for much more active social intervention to moderate, and in some instances stem the impact of market forces is my answer to those of our critics who claim that we have simply accepted the "economic doctrines" of our predecessors. This, for example, was exactly the assertion of Peter Selby, Bishop of Worcester, writing the cover article in the current issue of "Christian Socialist" [Summer 1998, no 169]. He says there that whilst as a Government we had done many important and exciting things, we did not believe that we needed to challenge the "prevailing view that there is no alternative to the economic doctrines it learned from its predecessor". But Selby is wrong. We have accepted the imperative of the prevailing world economic system in its broadest sense, both because of its intrinsic merits, and because there is no alternative better system on offer. But we have neither accepted the economic management of our predecessors nor their economic doctrine, with its elevation of the power of money as some sort of moral principle.

51. Maybe Selby takes this view because he mistakenly believes that we, in acknowledging the case for less economic regulation than in the past, somehow believe that business and society are wholly separate, the one value-free, the other overlain with values. Of course, I do not believe that. Indeed, to come back to the point where I am more at one with Marx that with Crosland, our economic structures and systems have a profound effect on how we interact as social beings - not only in providing the resources for prosperity, health and happiness, but also in providing leadership and a role model for social behaviour. What business does matters for the rest of us, as well as for its own employees. The best companies, without question, are those which run the most inclusive societies within themselves, which treat each employee - and customer - with proper respect, which have clearly established norms of conduct. At the other end of the scale, those companies which entice consumers by irresponsible means - for example, by encouraging excessive under-age drinking with high pressure marketing of alcopops, or which indulge the hard-drug culture with powerful images of so called "heroin chic" can hardly complain about the consequences of their behaviour when reflected in greater disorder and more crime.

52. All sections of society should show a greater degree of responsibility to others. That goes for the corporate boardroom just as it does to the anti-social behaviour of some in run-down estates. But the need for business to act in a socially responsible way, both for its own benefit and for society’s, does not argue for the kind of excessive regulation which our party once advocated. Government is there to set the external framework for business, to ensure that where social obligations are imposed on business these are fair. Government is also there to provide a competitive environment in which enterprise and not monopoly can flourish; to ensure a proper flow of adequately trained and educated people; to maintain research and development. But the old agenda went beyond necessary regulation almost to the point of interference and second-guessing businesses’ own decisions. "Planning agreements" to which the party became attached in the early 70s are the best and worst examples of that. They also reflected in tangible form an uneasy and thus unworkable compromise between the neo-Marxist and social democratic sides of the party.

53. And there is an interesting paradox here. By Government treating business with greater respect, giving it proper distance, business is responding with a greater degree of responsibility to wider society than many might have expected a decade and a half ago. That is part of the rather uplifting experience of Welfare to Work programmes in which we can witness a wide range of businesses devoting management time and effort to getting the young and long term unemployed back to work. Cynically to argue that such companies must only be doing this to satisfy their self-interest is to miss the point. Enlightened self-interest, maybe, narrow profit-taking interest, no.

Social Intervention Versus Social Engineering

54. There is another important difference between our approach today and that of the Party in the past. Of course, all parties - but especially those on the Left - are profoundly interested in the social outcomes of their political programmes. But Labour’s problem in the past was that too often we sought to achieve this through social engineering rather than social intervention, and considered that by engineering institutional structures we could engineer the outcomes, too. Our designs in the past were sometimes too grand: the results in consequence too often disappointing. I give one example; that of the reorganisation of secondary education in the sixties and seventies. The move to comprehensive education was necessary and desirable, not least because the old secondary modern schools stunted opportunity and achievement. But the outcome which many desired from this - the eradication of class divisions - was far too grand for a school system to deliver. The emphasis on the external structures - the engineering - missed the paramount importance of intervening inside the classroom to monitor and to raise standards as David Blunkett is now doing. Higher educational standards will do more to lift people from poverty than any attempt at social engineering.

55. The social engineering approach was also the statist approach, in which direct Government action, always by paid public servants, was greatly preferred. The fact that this was bound to be the most expensive of options was almost the least of its problems. Worse was that the statist approach - in housing, in policing, in education, in welfare - treated our citizens as passive recipients of services. The man in Whitehall may have known best in the immediate post-war context in which the late Douglas Jay uttered that phrase, but the injunction hardly did much for the self-esteem of men and women beyond Whitehall. (The Socialist Case, Jay, 1946).

56. In contrast, intervention - "steering not rowing" in the phrase on Reinventing Government" - seeks to treat our citizens as active participants in society, with rights yes, but with clear responsibilities too.

57. None of this is to eschew our past, to create some year zero. Our new approach is about traditional values in a modern setting, as John Prescott put it. Many of our programmes have plainly stood the test of time, especially the NHS.

58. The NHS is a unifying force in our society. We are all glad to turn to it when we need it. The NHS was the invention of the great reforming Attlee Government and we celebrate its 50th Anniversary this week. It embodies our key values - that we achieve more together than we do alone; that it is our duty to look after the weak as well as the strong; but most of all that health care should be available to all on the basis of need not ability to pay.

59. Another consistent timeless theme of Labour, old or new, is its commitment to being a multi-cultural, multi-racial society and its stress on the importance of equality of opportunity in all areas of life.

60. But there are also obvious differences in other areas between our new approach and that which we followed in the past.

61. I am not going to go through a long list of Government policies and achievements, and say this and that is Third Way. But let me illustrate my point with these examples.

62. First, there is my area of tackling crime and disorder. Crime has risen, disorder has become far more persuasive, and above all the fear of crime has been so potent as to alter the way in which people go about their daily lives. A statist promise approach would have argued simply for more police, tougher police powers - for "them" to do something for "us". But that would be to raise expectations beyond the level at which they could be fulfilled, to presume that external engineering would do the trick. Such an assumption was made by the previous administration in its early years. Police numbers rose - but far from falling, crime rose even further. Better to say what is true - that it is misleading to imply that the police by themselves can make orderly those communities hit by crime. Instead what we are doing is to bind communities into fighting crime through, for example, the statutory partnership in the Crime and Disorder Bill and the empowerment of local communities through measures like the Anti Social Behaviour Orders and the Child Area Curfews.

63. Second, social welfare. It is no accident that our Green Paper on reform of welfare is called "A New Contract for Welfare". It is just that - a new contract between the State and the citizen to reshape welfare on the basis of some clear principles. Its aim is to deliver transparency, responsibility and responsiveness. Critically this contract reflects the Government’s intention to create a welfare state which promotes opportunity instead of dependence.

64. Third, in many ways the most important example of our approach is our commitment greatly to extend the idea and practice of volunteering - of people doing something for each other rather than having the State doing it for them and so diminishing them. We have described this voluntary activity as "the essential act of citizenship". Communities are underpinned by voluntary endeavour, by what Richard Titmuss called "gift relationships". The opportunity to meet people beyond their narrow family or works circle is greatly enhanced when people volunteer. The experience is a stimulus to personal development and often acts as first step into education and career development. We want to develop volunteering, to make it far more normal and expected, rather than the exception.

65. We also need to ask what sort of communities we want to nurture for the 21st Century. Rather than harking back to idealised villages and warm terraced cottages, we need to develop ideas for the future. We are trying to develop the concept of "the Active Community" in which the commitment of the individual is backed by the duty of all organisations - in the public sector, the private sector and the voluntary sector - to work towards a community of mutual care and a balance of rights and responsibilities.

66. Fourth, we strongly believe that people’s sense of engagement with their society is linked in part to their ability to have a say in how they are governed and whether they can influence decision-making. We are altering the balance of power between the citizen and the State to ensure a more accountable, open and honest government. Constitutional changes on devolution, human rights and freedom of information will radically empower individuals and communities by dispersing power from the centre. This is one of many answers to those who claim that we are authoritarians. We are literally handing over a huge amount of power to individual citizens and local communities away from the central State.

CONCLUSION

67. So our Third Way is built on a clear political theory, most succinctly set out in the new Clause IV. The Third Way ends the ideological paralysis which so weakened Labour for thirty years. It asserts our mutual responsibility, our belief in a common purpose. And it also asserts that there is no such "thing" as society; not in the way in which Mrs Thatcher claimed, but because society is not a "thing" external to our experiences and responsibilities. It is us, all of us.

68. There were those, in the 1980s and early 1990s who argued that Labour could not win power unless it either became more dogmatically socialist, or, at the other extreme, dropped all semblance of a coherent social purpose or moral principle.

69. But our Party’s past contains the very principles - social and moral - which guide our approach today. Those concepts such as community and personal responsibility, which have so long been buried in the futile arguments between Left and Right, are at the centre of everything we do.

70. We recognise the economic realities of today’s world but accepts the need for social intervention by Government to moderate the impact of market economic forces. It sees the role of Government as one of intervening to promote social cohesion, order and inclusion by strengthening communities and families, revitalising democracy, celebrating our multi-culturalism and reforming and strengthening the core of the welfare state.

71. Our philosophy rejects the crude state economic and social intervention of the Old Left and the neglect of the recent Right which was prepared to let unmoderated market forces undermine our sense of community. That sense of pursuit of the common good is crucial to our future as a civilised society. It places social obligations on all of us in all parts of society, rich and poor, old and young. It is at the heart of the Third Way.