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Calls for the Tories to pursue and embrace the non-existent “radical centre” are a dangerous Siren song for conservatism at a time when the country needs conviction and clarity of purpose
We must know what a Tory government will have to achieve, before thinking about the way in which it must win office, because simply “winning a majority” on the wrong terms may not give it the authority it needs for success.
In normal times a majority is enough. The task of government is to steer a basically healthy socio-economic system past hazards which are primarily external, while ensuring that the system’s fabric is maintained and making improvements to it here and there.
But once the system itself starts to show signs of fatigue, instability, disintegration, then we start to talk of discontinuity. In discontinuity, solutions can only be found by breaking constraints which we had assumed were unbreakable. It is not enough to settle for policies which cannot save us, on the grounds that they are the only ones which are politically possible or administratively convenient.
– John Hoskyns and Norman Strauss, “Stepping Stones Report”, 1977
For over a week now I have not been able to bring myself to write anything new for this blog. Why? Because the patterns of failure in British politics are now tediously familiar beyond all endurance, as are the mistakes, missed opportunities and blunders routinely committed by politicians and thinkers who call themselves “conservative”.
Yes, the past week was a particularly torrid one for Theresa May’s shambolic government, but it did not teach us anything new. So more evidence emerged that Boris Johnson is totally unfit to be Foreign Secretary, the Tories no longer even seek to act like the party of Defence while the prime minister is utterly dependent on her questionable deputy Damian Green – these are not new revelations. They have been relentlessly, depressingly drummed into our consciousness over a matter of months and (in some cases) years.
Besides, even if Theresa May’s Cabinet were a precision-engineered Rolls Royce jet engine operating at maximum power and efficiency it would not matter – we would simply reach the same dismal destination somewhat faster than is currently the case. This is not an ambitious and visionary government let down by flawed execution and unfortunate scandal; it is a government which never had any real purpose to begin with.
Every two-bit conservative commentator is now saying what this blog has been screaming for years – that aimless, centrist government devoid of purpose is a dogma of the quiet past, inadequate to the stormy present; that we may as well not have bothered deposing New Labour in 2010 if we were only going to replace Gordon Brown with a bunch of slavish centre-left devotees wearing blue rosettes instead of red ones.
Well slow hand clap, guys. What do you want, a medal? Some of us have been making this point for years now, back when the well-paid and ubiquitous journalists and TV commentators were purring over David Cameron and Theresa May, predicting an uninterrupted decade of energetic, fruitful Tory rule even as their timidity and incompetence led us ever closer to the abyss.
Already there are a number of travelling quacks offering their own dubious potions and cures for the Tory malaise, most of which are vague at best or completely misguided at worst. A few thoughtful people have genuinely interesting ideas, but many seem to propose a further shift to the left, as though additional concessions to Corbynism will do anything other than validate Labour policies in the eyes of the electorate. Others suggest that “compassionate conservatism“, that hateful, self-sabotaging and worn-out phrase, is the magic solution. But most common are the tedious, meaningless calls for the Tories to recapture the “radical centre” of British politics.
The latest to take up this cry is Tory MP Johnny Mercer, who offers a fairly blistering (and by no means inaccurate) critique of past Conservative failures, taking Theresa May to task for her failures of leadership and the party as a whole to task for their ideological drift.
From the Telegraph:
“It smells of decline, and the people won’t have it” said Mr Mercer, MP for Plymouth Moor View, who bucked the national trend and increased his majority by five-fold at the last election.
“There becomes a cross-over point in seats like mine, it becomes about your personal integrity, about your credibility. You have to step back and question what your party is doing – of course. Yes we are beginning to get there I fear”.
[..] He went on: “A Corbyn/McDonnell Government would fundamentally change Britain and what it means to be British. We would not be forgiven as a party for 20 years. We must remain, if nothing else at the moment, credible.”
[..] “We have a duty to the Nation to ensure the Cabinet is comprised of the best people in parliament, not the most famous names. Theresa May had to make a decision where she formed her cabinet: whether to select members to manage the fall-out from Brexit or select the best modernisers to bring about social change. She chose the former – I understand that, but now is the time for bold, outward facing leadership in my view.”
But then, just as you are expecting something radical or attention-worthy proposed as an alternative, Johnny Mercer merely proposes a further attempt to “grab the middle ground”.
This is so incredibly disheartening, coming from somebody whose profile and biography would potentially make him a very attractive future leadership candidate. Having diagnosed the problem, where is Mercer’s solution? More grasping for the centre?
People: THE CENTRE IS NOT A FIXED PLACE. It merely describes a point equidistant between two other, polarised positions on the political spectrum – usually the status quo, or today the groupthink of a pro-EU establishment who are becoming increasingly extreme in their contempt for democracy. The centre is not and cannot be a place from which to build effective policy because it is rooted in nothing but triangulation and brazen political calculation as opposed to any kind of firm conviction as to how society should be ordered, or the rights of the people and the role of government set out.
If the last few years in British politics have taught us anything, it is that the people respond surprisingly warmly to sincere politicians who hold clear convictions springing from a coherent and easily explainable worldview. People may not agree with Jeremy Corbyn, but even many of his detractors admire the fact that he has held and advocated for many of his ideas in good times and bad, back when they were on the discredited fringe and now, when they are being taken more seriously once again.
The Tories need a Jeremy Corbyn of their own, but instead they got Theresa May, who frittered away the Conservative majority because she stood for nothing. She is an authoritarian pseudo-traditionalist whose intellectual blood bank (in the form of Nick Timothy) has thankfully been exiled from government, but not replaced by anything better.
May’s risible pitch in the 2017 general election was strength and stability, but these are states of being, not a direction of travel. People jetting off in an aeroplane together would generally prefer less turbulence to a more bumpy flight, but more than anything they care about arriving at the correct destination. Jeremy Corbyn made his flight plan crystal clear to the British electorate. Theresa May didn’t even bother to produce one, preferring to pander to the Politics of Me Me Me.
You don’t win a convincing mandate to govern by chasing the centre. You win such a mandate by coming up with a clear plan of action flowing from a coherent and easily explainable view of the world, one which is so compelling that it makes sense to an election-winning majority of voters, thus causing the floating centre to shift in that direction.
Margaret Thatcher’s government did not rescue Britain from a failing post-war consensus and 1970s national decline by cautiously seeking consensus and the same elusive centre ground fought over by the previous Heath, Wilson and Callaghan administrations. She made her mark on Britain by charting a new course, braving resistance rather than capitulating to it, and dragging the centre to the right so that after the Tories finally lost power, New Labour had neither the ability nor the desire to undo many of the changes she wrought.
That’s how you run a government worthy of the history books. The Tories should stop slavishly chasing the centre, and come up with a new blueprint for Britain – the new Stepping Stones Report which we so desperately need, updated for 2017 – which will shift the centre of British politics back in the direction of liberty underpinned by the autonomous nation state (or some compelling improvement on it).
Whatever differs from this, to the extent of the difference, is just noise.
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Semi-Partisan Politics 
There are three ways in which it is possible to be a principled centrist. Firstly, politicians who find that their views are currently in the middle of the ever-shifting Overton Window can reasonably describe their positions as “centrist” as long as they are willing to drop that claim when the centre moves elsewhere.
The second option is to argue that the primary duty of government is to avoid disasters, therefore it should always seek to adopt the lowest-risk policies. In this view, keeping the ship of state afloat is more important than which direction it is currently travelling in, and chasing the centre is a “wisdom of crowds” approach to determining where the lowest risk lies.
The third option is to argue that the duty of elected representatives is to follow the instructions that they have been given by the electorate as closely as possible, so they have no right to do anything other than follow the centre wherever it moves.
Of course, all of these options require politicians to exercise great self-discipline. The first requires them to stick to a particular set of views and admit when they are becoming unpopular. The others require them to put their own policy preferences to one side whenever they conflict with a particular idea of what government should do. So, it’s no surprise that in practice “centrism” is nearly always a euphemism for opportunism.
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I do not disagree with anything in your objection to centrism. As you know, I have been advocating a different form of radicalism – using the Universal Basic (Citizens’) Income (UBI) to unite the outdated ‘left’ and ‘right’ to save us from ecological destruction.
http://www.clivelord.wordpress.com
But there has been one area where the Conservative government (since 2010) as been quite coherent and single minded – social security.
Where we could and should have a UBI which would put everybody, rich and poor, on the same starting line, and deduct the same from other income in tax (instead of as now, tax or benefit withdrawal), Iain Duncan Smith reinforced the false notion of ;deserving and undeserving benefit supplicants with a harsh and deliberately impossible regime of benefit sanctions.
His original ‘vision’ of a Universal Credit was actually a ‘no cost to the taxpayer’ version of the UBI, believe it or not, but Osborne et al destroyed any hope of that working.
No to centrism, no to Brexit, and certainly no to the one area where current Conservatism is heading.
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The UBI/CBI is one of those ideas that looks very neat in theory but which couldn’t survive contact with political reality. Imagine that we implemented a UBI tomorrow. At every subsequent election, there would be pressure groups and politicians demanding an increase in the rate. Some of them would do so out of sincere belief and some out of a cynical calculation of electoral advantage. Sometimes this tactic would work and sometimes not. But the effect would be to create a constant upward pressure on the level of the UBI, regardless of economic conditions. Indeed, the worse the state of the economy the greater the political pressure would be to increase the UBI for the benefit of the poorest.
In theory, a UBI could replace means-tested benefits with something far simpler and more efficient to administer. But in practice, politics would prevent that. We would start with a simple UBI and then at every election there would be pressure groups and politicians complaining that a simple flat-rate UBI wasn’t fair to some particularly deserving group. So, vote-seeking politicians would promise additional payments to single mothers, the disabled or whoever else was in the headlines at the time. This would happen over and over again. Every time there was a hard-luck story in the media about somebody struggling to survive on the UBI alone there would be a politician ready to promise additional government spending to help that particular group.
So, we would end up with the rate of the UBI rising faster than our ability to pay for it and a whole raft of means-tested benefits being added on top of it for reasons of political expediency. It would become just as complex and inefficient as the current benefits system but vastly more expensive. Eventually we would be forced to choose between returning to means-tested benefits alone or allowing the cost of the system to escalate out of control until it collapsed entirely. Faced with the prospect of the latter, people would choose the former and we would be right back where we started.
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I had considered the immediate behavioural effects of UBI before, but never the political effects. You’re quite right Andrew, I think. Even if the disincentives to work did not break the system from the get go, the political incentives you describe would likely cause the system to gradually unravel. Or quickly unravel, in the case of our current politicians.
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Andrew’s predictions cannot be refuted in advance, but I am aware of no reasons why they are a logical consequence. If you red my weblog, I have a precise definition which would rule out your perceived problem:
“The UBI should be sufficient so that no noe need do anything (or support policies) which damages the ecosphere, butit should be no mre than that”.
Sam, i have to accuse you of dishonesty. You are familiar ienough withthe fac thag it is MEANS TESTING which crrate work disincnetives. Although the UBI allows everybody not to work, it is the system which BEST makes work pay. The niversl Cfredit
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I don’t know what happened there, but it suddenly ‘published’ before I had finished.
The Universal Credit, even as originally planned, would merely reduce the work disincentive from in excess of 80% withdrawal rate to 63%, or 76% if you start paying National Insurance.
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And I hadn’t had a chance to correct the typos
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