Paving the Third Way

Writings from such thinkers as Ralph Miliband, David Coates, Leo Panitch, and Hilary Wainwright are collected in this anthology of leftist perspectives on the character, politics, and evolution of the British Labour Party.

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After the twenty year hiatus of Thatcherism, the character and politics of the British Labour Party are again centre stage. In the UK itself, a new generation of students, intellectuals and political activists are turning both their scholarship and their politics back towards Labour. Abroad there is widespread interest in the substance and potential of New Labour's 'Third Way'. Yet that turn has so far very little to bite on. For one consequence of those twenty years has been a dearth of informed scholarship on Labour, 'old' or 'New'. Fortunately one such body of scholarship exists, and is reproduced here for the first time in an easily accessible form: the writings of a group of scholars inspired by Ralph Miliband. The 'Miliband' voice in Labour Party historiography has been a strong and permanent one since the publication of Parliamentary Socialism in 1961, so strong in fact that even its most strident critics continue to cite it in their publications, invariably distorting its arguments in the process. These writings constitute one of the richest sources of material and analysis of the continuing limits of Labour politics.
These writers- John Saville, Colin Leys, Leo Panitch, Hilary Wainwright- have an immense role to fulfill debunking the wilder claims for novelty of New Labour. They constitute an insightful source on the true character of Old Labour; and exemplify the problems of reformism. In this edited collection, David Coates reproduces the best of difficult to obtain scholarship. His editorial comments act as a guide to the moments to which that scholarship was a response. His choice of extracts demonstrates the coherence of the approach that links them together; and his closing essay (written with Leo Panitch) makes clear their vital importance as a source of understanding of the contemporary Labour Party as well as of Labour Parties in the past.