In British politics, the centre no longer holds

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Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.

As an anthropological study of the political tribes, I found this year’s UK party conferences intriguing. Labour, urban and blokeish, are bizarrely miserable despite being in power. The Tories, shambling and earnest, are weirdly upbeat, relieved to be out of office. The unexpectedly large number of young men and women in Birmingham was perhaps testament to the fact that politics is exciting when you have a chance to change it. 

With four candidates vying to lead the Conservatives, a common argument — put forcefully by former West Midlands mayor Andy Street — is that the party needs to find the centre ground. But where is it? In an age of polarisation and identity politics, does it even exist?

The idea that parties win from the centre dominated postwar political thinking. Bill Clinton extolled the “vital centre”, a phrase coined by Arthur Schlesinger in 1948 to describe a middle way between fascism and communism. Tony Blair’s Third Way ideology was a muscular version of what Harold Macmillan, in his 1938 book The Middle Way, described as a means of blocking off the “extremes” of collectivism, on the one hand, and laissez-faire individualism on the other. 

Centrism, on these definitions, is moderate and pragmatic. It sits midway between two extremes — and political strategists expend a great deal of energy working out how to split the difference. The assumption is that the majority of voters sit in the “centre”. But what if they don’t? 

Some interesting analysis of 2020 polling data by Matteo Tiratelli, of University College London, challenges the idea that most Britons hold moderate political opinions on most issues. When asked whether the government should try to make incomes equal, for example, as many people agree very strongly as put themselves in the middle; with almost as large a group disagreeing completely. 

It’s also possible that commentators mistake where the centre is. Many prominent people who describe themselves as “centrist” are, broadly speaking, Remainers who care about the environment, believe that business and immigration are generally a force for good, are socially liberal and want government to play a positive role in the world through aid and diplomacy.  

They assume that a majority of voters are like them. But what if they’re wrong? What if many voters think those people have been shoring up the status quo in their own interests — with cheap money making the rich richer, the costs of the green transition loaded on to energy bills, tech companies selling misery and mass immigration putting intolerable strain on public services? 

The 2008 financial crash shook faith in free markets. And widespread discontent showed up in 2016, in the US election of Donald Trump and the UK’s vote for Brexit. A new gulf was revealed between voters with and without university degrees. Were people who voted for Trump and Brexit victims of disinformation, misled by populists? Or did their material circumstances lead them to issue a riposte to those who conflated their own world view with the virtuous centre?

Moderate centrism has lost its energy. Political dynamism now lies with angry, single-issue movements like Just Stop Oil. In this summer’s general election, the combined share of the vote for Britain’s two main political parties, both run by moderate technocrats, was the lowest in our era. Offered a wider range of options, the electorate gave significant backing to Reform UK and the Greens. The fact that Reform UK came second to Labour in so many seats suggests that the desire for drastic immigration control is not “rightwing”, but mainstream — just as concerns about the environment may no longer be “leftwing”. 

If centrism means anything, it must mean decency, respect for facts and pluralism. These are the lifeblood of democracy, and worth fighting for. In 2022, Sir Keir Starmer claimed that Labour was “now firmly in the centre ground of British politics”. He also asserted that this was “not a place of mushy compromise”. Centrism don’t have to feel soggy, but it has to be more than technocracy.

Where does this leave the Conservatives? David Cameron’s leadership-winning conference speech in Blackpool 19 years ago was remarkable not because he delivered it without notes but because he looked like the future. He challenged his party to be “comfortable with modern Britain” and to believe that the “best days lie ahead”. Those words still resonate today. 

None of the current candidates to lead the Tories is in Cameron’s league. But the job of whoever wins is not to run the country — it is to reestablish trust in the Conservatives as decent and competent. If that is even possible, it can only be done with humour and optimism, not with anger. I also don’t see how it can be achieved by anyone who served in Boris Johnson’s cabinet, which rules out James Cleverly and Robert Jenrick.

The current debate within the Conservative party is between those who think elections are won in a virtuous centre and those, like the late Keith Joseph, architect of Thatcherism, who once derided the middle ground as the lowest common denominator. Joseph preferred what he called “the common ground”: a place which better reflected people’s real values and aspirations. This does not have to mean the Liz Truss “moron premium”. It does mean Conservatives working out what they are in politics for. That would be a good start.

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