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A chip off the old block?

What do Fascism's belligerent founding father and our own democratically elected Prime Minister have in common? A great deal more than you might imagine, according to Nicholas Farrell, the author of a major new biography of Benito Mussolini.....

When, during the second Bill Clinton presidency, Blair and Clinton started holding summits on the Third Way, they really were verging on the truly Fascist. The Fascist Third Way between capitalism and communism aimed to abolish class war and replace it with class collaboration. This meant the promotion of the productive elements in society from whatever class and the abolition of the parasitical elements from whatever class.

The means by which the Fascists attempted to impose their Third Way was the corporate state. This did not involve the nationalisation of the workplace as in Marxist-inspired solutions, but its incorporation. Shareholders, whether in the form of the state or private individuals, still owned the means of production. Both workers and bosses, however, were members of the corporations that ran enterprises, with the state acting as referee if the need arose.

The Fascist corporate state was never really tried. But one finds traces of its corporatist ideas in Blair's Government. The Prime Minister has quickly but quietly dropped the phrase "Third Way" from the vocabulary. But he talks, with mounting frenzy, of "public-private partnerships".

I assume that Clinton and Blair were unaware of the Fascist origins of their much-talked-about crusade for a Third Way. Otherwise, surely they would have run a mile before associating themselves with such a phrase. But the similarities between Blair and Mussolini do not just end there.

Take their respective attitudes to war. Like Blair, who was a member of CND, Mussolini started out as a pacifist and led anti-war demonstrations. He even went to jail for six months after an anti-war demonstration in 1911 in which he was responsible for criminal damage to trains and railway lines at Forli, the provincial capital near his birthplace.

But it was war (the issue being whether or not Italy should enter the First World War) that caused Mussolini to abandon the Socialist Party. The socialists wanted no truck with what they saw as a bourgeois war. Mussolini, on the other hand, like Lenin, realised its revolutionary potential....