At the core of this type of politics lies the view that there is no alternative to the present economic order and that the only thing a progressive government can do is to help people ‘cope’ with the new conditions created by the new global economy. For New Labour, ‘globalisation’ is a fate to which all have to submit and which imposes drastic limits to the role of government. Indeed, as Fairclough indicates, one of the cornerstones of the third way is a vision of globalisation as a given. Contrary to other analyses of globalisation which present it as an uneven and partial tendency, the discourse of New Labour takes the new global economy for granted. Consequently, the issue is always how to adapt to it, not whether it can be transformed. Moreover, the role of multinationals is constantly overlooked. In the political discourse of New Labour, the multinational corporations are not responsible for what happens in the global economy. Fairclough shows that, when there are references to the role of capital—as in the White Paper on competitiveness and the building of a knowledge-driven economy—the multinationals are not envisaged as social actors. Thanks to the use of passive sentences, actions are represented as being without any responsible agents. Moreover, when ‘business’ appears it is always British Business, presented in an anachronistic way as ‘national’. This, of course, chimes with the consensual discourse of the third way which tries to hold together a wide ‘one-nation politics’ type of alliance in which all interests could supposedly be reconciled.

The attempt to reconcile what has often been seen as irreconcilable is one of the dominant themes of the third way and this provides the author with a particularly fertile terrain on which to bring to the fore the rhetorical strategies at work in the language of New Labour. By a frequent use of expressions like ‘not only but also’, ‘as well as’ and ‘yet also’ attention is drawn to assumed incompatibilities while at the same time denying them. Thanks to this rhetorical device, notions belonging to the political discourse of the right like ‘responsibilities’ and ‘enterprise’ are combined with other ones coming from the left like ‘rights’ and ‘attacking poverty’. This allows New Labour to claim that it has managed to ‘go beyond’ and to ‘transcend’ the left/right divide. But the main consequence of attempting to reconcile the irreconcilable is, as Fairclough notes, to obscure important differences and to blur the distinctions between several types of antagonisms. Indeed, combining rights with responsibilities is not of the same nature as benefiting enterprise while attacking poverty. The first can only be a matter of definition while the second might involve real conflicts of interest.

Among the many interesting analyses of the book is the clarification of the relation between Blair and Thatcher and between the third way and neo-liberalism. Having designated New Labour as ‘post-Thacherite’, Fairclough scrutinises which elements of its discourse are derived from the political discourse of Thatcherism and where it departs from it. He finds not only a clear commonality of themes like national renewal, individual responsibility, maximising competition and limitations of government, but also a similarity of language. Both Blair and Thatcher have a propensity to use tough, populist language and key words like ‘responsibility’. Nevertheless there is also a significant difference: Thatcher’s discourse was highly polemical and always tended to define an adversary, while Blair’s style has so far been mainly consensual and aiming to be all-inclusive.

In a chapter entirely dedicated to Tony Blair’s rhetorical style, the author notes that he has a distinctive repertoire of ways of speaking and that he operates within a variety of genres. He likes to present himself as an ordinary person and not a politician. So far he has been able to play with this image—no doubt little Leo will help at that respect!—and this is probably one of the reasons for his popularity. Fairclough detects some authoritarian tendencies which he sees as being mitigated by the search for consensus. For my part I would rather establish a link between the authoritarianism of New Labour and their so-called consensual politics. It is precisely because of the rejection of any form of dissent entailed by their obsession to impose an enforced and artificial consensus that they are authoritarian. ‘Control freakery’ and consensus politics clearly go together, and it is only by acknowledging that democracy requires the legitimate expression of dissent that this kind of ‘consensual authoritarianism’ can be challenged.

There are many other insightful analyses in this book which, through an examination of its political discourse, help us to grasp the nature of New Labour. Very accessible and clearly written and with an useful glossary, it will certainly provide ammunition for those who are critical of the claims of the third way to represent ‘a new politics for the new century’. There is no better way than a careful study of the political language of a party or of a government to reveal its hidden strategy and debunk its false pretensions. In the case of a party which, like New Labour, has elevated spin to an art-form, to scrutinise its language constitutes the best way to defend oneself against the risk of passively absorbing ‘the message’. This book is therefore to be recommended as an antidote to spin doctoring.