This passage articulates what it was about New Labour and Tony Blair that I just didn’t trust, but couldn’t put my finger on. This book isn’t telling me anything new, but it is putting what I know in a different light. And it chimes with my distaste for the use of militaristic language in the student and other political movements.

“The ‘middle way’ sounds moderate and un-radical. Its appeal is that it sounds unideological and freethinking. But philosophically the Third Way is not mere difference splitting; it is utopian and authoritarian. Its utopian aspect becomes manifest in its antagonism to the idea that politics is about trade-offs. The Third Wayer says that there are no false choices – ‘I refuse to accept that X should come at the expense of Y.’ The Third Way holds that we can have capitalism and socialism, individual liberty and absolute unity. Fascist* movements are implicitly utopian because they – like communist and heretical Christian movements – assume that with just the right arrangement of policies, all contradictions can be rectified. This is a political siren song; life can never be made perfect, because man is imperfect. This is why the Third Way is also authoritarian. It assumes that the right man – or, in the case of Leninists, the right party – can resolve all of these contradictions through sheer will. The populist demagogue takes on the role of the parent telling the childlike masses that he can make everything ‘all better’ if they just trust him.”

*you’ll have to read the book in order to understand the way in which the term ‘fascist’ is being employed here (if you didn’t get it from the title, it’s what it’s all about)