Blair's guru warns `hype will not win'

NEW LABOUR must offer policies of substance and not just media hype if it is to stay in office, Tony Blair's favourite intellectual guru has warned.

Anthony Giddens, director of the London School of Economics and the UK's leading advocate of the "Third Way", states in a book, published next week, that the Government should realise that image manipulation alone is not enough to keep it in power.

Professor Giddens's book, Third Way, is the first detailed view of the political doctrine to be discussed by the Prime Minister and other left of centre western leaders at a conference in New York this month.

The book suggests that both socialism and the unbridled free market have failed and should be replaced by a new approach that combines social justice and equality with individual responsibility.

However, he stresses that unless Labour can adopt such ideas and identify concrete policies, it will find it difficult to remain in power.

"Many who praise the scale of the victory also see the New Labour project as an empty one. New Labour is widely seen as depending on media-oriented politics, and as creating `designer socialism'," he writes.

"Personal images, symbolic stagings, sound bites, visual gags, all count for more than issues, arguments, projects and the evaluation of campaign promises.

"A precept of successful advertising, however, is that image alone isn't enough. There must be something solid behind the hype, otherwise the public see through the facade pretty quickly.

"If all New Labour had to offer were media savvy, its time on the political stage would be short. I hope such will not be the case."

In the book, Professor Giddens calls for the welfare state to be modernised by the greater use of compulsory savings schemes, and voluntary and private sectors to provide care services. However, welfare spending should remain at European rather than US levels.

The statutory pension age should be abolished in recognition of the fact that more Britons than ever before were retiring early or changing the way they worked.

"Civic culture", made up of small, local self-help groups, should be revived, while work practices should be made more family-friendly.