No matter what one’s view of the political implications of the Act (if, indeed, it even registers on the political radar in a significant way), the contours of the Civil Partnership Act should not come as a surprise to any observer of New Labour ideology. I have elsewhere tried to understand New Labour’s ideological construction of lesbian and gay sexualities, and I have identified six key elements of New Labour’s ‘Third Way’ discourse:
• the centrality of the idea (and ideal) of social inclusion (as opposed to economic equality and redistribution);
• the linking of rights and responsibilities: the enjoyment of rights as being conditioned upon the acceptance of (moral) responsibilities as citizens;
• the importance of community as performing the key function of inculcating the values of citizenship, social inclusion, and the social control of deviant behaviour;
• the importance of the family in producing responsible, active new citizens, and as providing a counterbalance to rugged individualism and atomisation;
• the desirability of consensus within One Nation in which acceptance of multiculturalism and tolerance of ‘difference’ (within limits) prevails;
• a faith in managerialism and law, in which social problems can be solved through the state and through law.[117]
The Civil Partnership Act, I want now to argue, can be located squarely within this set of Third Way characteristics.