Snubbed Jospin calls Blair's bluff

Tired of being patronised, the French PM is defining his own 'ism' as an alternative to New Labour's 'Third Way', reports John Lichfield

TONY BLAIR and Hillary Clinton should have known better. If they had remembered their bedtime stories, they would have known that it is hazardous to leave one fairy god-mother out of the christening.

The christening in question is the international centre-left jamboree at the New York University Law School tomorrow, which was originally billed as an attempt to launch a Blairist-Clintonesque new "Social Democratic" International, to replace the "old labour" Socialist International.

The socialist Italian, Swedish and Dutch prime ministers were invited, as well as several Latin American politicians. But there was one brazen omission from the original guest list - Lionel Jospin, the Socialist Prime Minister of France.

This may have been a simple error. It was the head of the law school who drew up the invitations, not Mr Blair or Mrs Clinton (the main movers behind the meeting). When he visited Mr Jospin for a shirt-sleeves summit at his constituency in south-west France last month, the British Prime Minister said there was no problem. He could still fix a ticket for his friend Lionel.

Mr Jospin declined, politely. He was visiting China later the same week, and could not spare the time. He went on to give Mr Blair, equally politely, a hard time about the intentions of the meeting and the pretensions of the Blairist "Third Way" between the old left and the new right.

If it involved abdicating from all regulation of market forces, Tony should count Lionel out. If it involved adjusting social democracy to the realities of the modern, global economy, he could count Lionel in. But there could not be a "new" social democracy unless it was rooted in the caring values of the old.

In the month since then, Mr Jospin has done something very unusual, for him. He has tried to define his own reformed centre-left approach to late-20th, early-21st- century politics.

Until then, the Jospin approach seemed to be a question mostly of a shrewd muddling through, combined with a refreshingly direct and honest manner - the "Jospin Method". In the last couple of weeks, he has set out, deliberately, to create an "ism" of his own.

In a speech to the summer school of the French Socialist Party on 30 August - a speech little reported outside France - Mr Jospin set about the Blairist "Third Way" directly. "If the Third Way is between communism and ultra-liberalism, I'm for it. If it's between liberalism and social democracy, I'm against."

He tried to define what he saw as the true path for modern left-of-centre politics, implicitly criticising Blairism for having abdicated government responsibility for controlling the worst excesses of market forces. "Capitalism is a force which moves the world, but does not know where to." (A free translation of "Le capitalisme est une force qui va, mais ne sait pas ou elle va.")

It remained the responsibility of government to "shape", to "balance", to "harmonise" and (a mildly rude word in the Blairist lexicon) to "regulate". Copies of the speech were sent to every socialist or social democratic party leader in Europe. French journalists were heavily briefed on its significance.

In other words, the inevitable, undeclared battle between Jospin and Blair for the mind and soul of the European centre-left has finally come out into the open, albeit, so far, in a polite and friendly way. The New York snub was the spur. A Socialist MP close to Mr Jospin says that he - and the French Socialists generally - are tired of being treated like dinosaurs in the Anglo-Saxon press.

In truth, despite the rhetoric on both sides, there are many similarities between what Messrs Jospin and Blair - elected within a month of each other last year - have done in government. Many of the differences can be explained by the divergent economies of the two countries and their different political circumstances - Mr Blair's huge one-party majority; Mr Jospin's narrow, disparate majority of pinks, reds and greens.

Until now, the most obvious difference was the constant running commentary of New Labour on the cleverness and newness of what they were doing. Mr Jospin, meanwhile, preferred stolid managerialism.

There are several reasons too, other than the New York snub, why Mr Jospin has abruptly broken out now to try to define "Jospinism". First, there is a strong possibility that there will be a third kid on the centre- left block from next week - Gerhard Schroder, the SPD candidate to be Chancellor of Germany. Mr Schroder has said that he regards himself as more of a Blair than a Jospin. The French Prime Minister is convinced that, in practice, German circumstances are more like those in France, so Mr Schroder will inevitably be a Jospin, not a Blair.

He too will have a pink-green coalition, though probably no reds; he too will inherit high unemployment and a recovering economy which has neither enjoyed nor suffered the benefits and blasts of Thatcherism. Mr Jospin wants the credit for inventing Jospinism before Mr Schroder takes the credit for inventing Schroderism.

Looking around him, Mr Jospin senses, that, against all expectations, history (and market forces) may be on his side and not Tony Blair's. The British economy has declined under Mr Blair's stewardship (possibly through no fault of the Prime Minister), while the French economy has boomed under Mr Jospin's (possibly through no virtue of the premier ministre).

If a year from now, as seems likely, the French economy is weathering the Asian economic flu and Britain's is not, people will be asking how Mr Jospin did it. He does not want them to say it was all luck and circumstances.

In any case, if he is to make a successful bid for the French Presidency in 2002, French political tastes dictate that he must have a vision and an "ism". The need to appeal to Communist and unreconstructed Socialist voters means that this must be defined as something more caring, more traditional, than Blairism.

In truth, Jospinism remains mostly a kind of centre-left managerialism. Its novelty, in French terms, is a willingness to embrace market forces; Mr Jospin, despite his promises in the election, has turned into a more effective privatiser than his centre-right predecessors.

In La Rochelle, Mr Jospin defined his approach as "realist voluntarism": which seems to mean finding ways of protecting people from the jagged edges of global competition while finding better ways of providing the services - education, health, the justice system - governments must provide. Stripped of the rhetoric, does the Blairist Third Way amount to anything more?