Continuing my series in defence of liberalism.
Centrism is a tactic that became a strategy, that metastasized into an ideology — and threatens to drag us all down into hell.
Centrists like to define themselves as “sensible”, “pragmatic”, “realists” and “moderate”. There is nothing inherently wrong with any of those notions; indeed, I think they are positively good things. Trying to find a middle way between two opposing positions is ultimately the only way we can get anywhere in life. But all of these things have to be in service to a principle. The problem is, a lot of centrists have either lost sight of that, or completely reject the notion.
I’m not a historian of politics, but I suspect that the idea of trying to find a middle way forward has been a core component throughout human civilisation; it certainly goes back to Aristotle and Gautama Buddha. It seems however that there was a significant shift in the 1990s.
In the US, Bill Clinton won the Presidency in 1992 with his focus on triangulation; shutting down the Republicans’ traditional critiques of the Democrats by shifting ground in certain key positions. In 1997, Tony Blair’s New Labour did the same here in the UK. This was going beyond merely trying to present policy in a more appealing way; this was often about adopting policy that went completely against the principles the party had traditionally held in the interests of shutting down debate.
So it was that Clinton adopted a position on crime which ultimately lead to the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act, famed for it’s “three strikes and out” principle which lead to a massive increase in incarceration — disproportionately for black Americans. For Labour it meant, most strikingly, Tony Blair insisting on changing Labour’s “Clause IV” — which while draped in fluffy language represented a rejection of the party’s traditional support for common ownership of public utilities.
I would argue that centrism has gone much further since, and that modern centrists reject the notion that parties should have any core principles at all in favour of adopting whatever policies command public support. I’m hardly the first person to highlight how this has lead to the rise of the far right, but since this is ultimately an article about how centrism is ultimately antithetical to liberalism, it bears repeating.
Centrism and the Liberal Democrats
Weirdly, in recent history the Liberal Democrats have a more complicated relationship with centrism than the modern Labour Party has. From the end of World War II to the end of the 1980s (I won’t go into pre-War Liberal history, which is frankly a mess), the Liberal Party were indeed the UK’s “centre party” standing squarely between the Conservatives and Labour. That was only reinforced with the formation of the SDP in 1981 and the SDP-Liberal Alliance, which very much sought to present itself as the reasonable middle between two increasing extremes.
But by 1987 and the rise of Neil Kinnock, the centre-left space vacated by Michael Foot had been reclaimed by Labour and the Alliance found itself with nowhere to go. That resulted in the formation of the Liberal Democrats, while Labour continued its journey to the centre under Tony Blair (ironically, this is the moment Spitting Image sought to personify centrism in the form of Paddy Ashdown’s puppet espousing the virtues of “neither left nor right, but somewhere in between”).
So it was that in 1997 and 2001, Labour and the Lib Dems found themselves competing over much the same terrotory. In 1997, that lead to a de facto electoral pact, with both parties focusing on defeating the Conservatives. In 2001, the Lib Dems found themselves in the position of attacking the Labour government on a number of issues from the left — mainly in terms of tax-and-spend — but in truth there wasn’t a lot to differentiate them.
2005 was different however. The Iraq War had changed everything. The Lib Dems had found that the level of outrage over the war and the party’s opposition to it from the outset proved to be an election winner, and combined with that came a fiercer critique of Labour’s internal policies as well. That election however, while a step forward for the party in terms of both profile and parliamentary seats, did not end up as quite the breakthrough that at one point it appeared it might represent.
This lead to a public debate about how the party had tacked too far to the left, but the truth is that rumbles of that debate had started far earlier. During the nadir of the Conservatives in the late 1990s, a tiny breakaway faction calling themselves the Pro-Euro Conservatives formed to public indifference. The leading voices behind that party joined the Lib Dems in 2001.
Meanwhile, there was much consternation within the party in terms of where the party was headed in terms of its position on public services — how they should be funded and who should run them. The resulting policy debate turned out to be a bit of a damp squib, with vocal agreement breaking out on all sides as the party more or less kept the same position that it had before — broadly pro-government owned and funded services.
To cut a long story short, a vocal minority (including some of those former Pro-Euro Conservatives), were very unhappy about this and began agitating for a shift in position. This lead in 2004 to the Orange Book — both the book and the “movement”.
The Orange Book deserves more focus on at another time, but while it was fairly blatantly an attempt to shift the Lib Dems to the right, at the time it was presented as an attempt to make the Lib Dems “liberal” again and to reclaim the centre ground. Indeed Clegg was ultimately to make centrism the defining tenet of his leadership.
Despite all of this, and the policy debates preceding it, the Lib Dems ended up fighting the 2010 general election from a leftwing position. Famously, the resultant Conservative-Liberal Democrat coaltion government was anything but, adopting austerity economics and defunding both public services and welfare benefits. With it’s focus on defending Nick Clegg’s legacy, the the Lib Dems’ 2015 election campaign was very much fought from the centre, with its slogan being “Look Left, Look Right, Then Cross.” I will politely restrict my comments on this campaign by merely stating that it was not a success.
The 2010s were, as most people in the UK can attest, an odd time in politics — with Brexit becoming the predominent issue. On Brexit, the Lib Dems found themselves on one side of the debate with Labour again in the middle in both 2017 and 2019, but even in terms of issues such as tax and spend, there was not a whole lot of clear red water between the Labour and Lib Dem manifestos (I should point out before anyone else comments, manifestos don’t ultimately have a lot to do with how parties govern in practice — of course a Corbyn government would have behaved very differently to a Farron or Swinson one — but they are an important snapshot revealing their preoccupations going into the election). In 2024 the Lib Dems again found themselves campaigning to the left of Labour, this time on a more fundamental level.
And yet, the Lib Dems are still seen as a “centrist” party. This is very much not to say that this perception is wrong; indeed, I think the party has largely found itself in that position due to various positions of Labour over the last two decades more than due to it taking control of its own destiny. It has still arguably shifted slowly rightwards over the past few decades, and we are a long way from the 1992 manifesto commitment to a “citizen’s income”.
It is worth observing however that the decisive shifts it has made to the centre ground have not been startlingly successful, merely resulting in a rightwing coalition government followed by near obliteration.
It is also worth observing where the leading lights of this push for the centre are now. Mark Littlewood, a pro-Euro Conservative refugee who went onto found the Liberal Vision ginger group and run the Institute for Economic Affairs, was one of the architects of Liz Truss’ disastrous mini-budget and now director of her pet think tank Popular Conservatism.
Paul Marshall‘s journey has been even more extreme, setting up the rightwing blogging platform UnHerd, GBNews and the Alliance for British Citizenship, with Jordan Peterson. Far from reclaiming liberalism, Paul Marshall has now dedicated his billions to destroying it utterly, in defense of something called “The West” which most people in Western Europe appear to be opposed to.
And Nick Clegg? He famously went on to become vice-president of global affairs and communications at Meta, only to be fired in favour of Trumpite Joel Kaplan following the 2024 Presidential election. By all accounts of the reviews of his latest book, he is now a “critical friend” of the tech hegemony which now dominates our political economy (unaccountably I have not been sent a review copy, and would not wish to offend Clegg’s sensibilities by actually paying for intellectual property which he owns). For all his barbed wit and avowed radicalism, his centrism has never, in practice, amounted to anything more than an apology for whoever happens to be in power at the time.
Centrism and the Labour Party
You obviously cannot talk about centrism within the Labour Party without talking about Tony Blair. Not only did he represent a fundamental shift within the Labour Party, which continues to have reverbarations today, but he continues to espouse his own brand of centrism on a daily basis as he is not at all shy about intervening in the public debate whenever he feels like it.
It’s interesting to note therefore how unrecognisable the Blairism of 1997 was from Blairism as we understand it to be today. The Blair-Brown partnership not only lead to a landslide victory, but introduced reforms that any egalitarian liberal would be proud of: the human rights act, devolution, the national minimum wage, Surestart, the Nolan Principles, greater transparency of political party funding, seperation of the Supreme Court from the House of Lords, the Freedom of Information Act; I’m sure the list could be extended.
Despite being someone who was on the other side of the political fence at the time, at the time it felt like political discourse was fizzing with possibility and debate about the future — not least of all because the Conservative boot was no longer on our collective windpipe. Of course, all this optimism and progressivism is countered, not insignificantly, by New Labour’s embrace of neoliberalism (a topic for another time), but there is still much from that era that should celebrate.
The reality is that many of these reforms were in spite of Tony Blair not because of him. He was highly suspicious of devolution, wary of the national minimum wage and has been outspoken about his opition that the Freedom of Information Act was a mistake. But at the time, Labour was a fragile coalition of pragmatists trying to overcome their differences to work together. It was about much more than Gordon Brown, but people like Robin Cook, Clare Short and Estelle Morris; people who as time went on would find themselves on the outside of the so-called Project.
As time went on and Blair’s self-confidence in government grew however, his contempt for that coalition grew. This found its focus in his growing conflict with Gordon Brown, but it went far deeper than a simple clash of personalities.
Arguably, Blair’s most significant decision in government was not centrist at all. His decision to back George W. Bush’s Iraq adventure, almost certainly illegal and without doubt at unforgivable human cost, was certainly not the “middle way” position. But it did signify the start of the second half of the Blair era which was predominantly pre-occupied with unpicking many of those earlier reforms in favour of embracing the private sector in public services and adopting increasingly authoritarian legislation and policies such as a national identity database.
Blair was ultimately forced to step down in 2007 and was replaced by Gordon Brown, whose own premiership turned out to be a disaster. Since then, he has developed an almost mythic quality amongst certain people within the Labour Party, akin to how Thatcher and Churchill were revered within the Conservatives (at least until the mid-2010s when the Tories began to eat themselves). He is held up, crucifix-like, to ward of any suggestion that the party to tack to the left and cede the centre ground.
This is weird because many of the policies which now get held up as anathema to modern Blairites have more in common with landslide-winning 1997 New Labour. By contrast, Blairites tend to espouse policies much more aligned with the deeply unpopular 2007 Blair. Of course, the existence of the Tony Blair Institute, which remains embedded within Labour circles, helps. But I’ve always found this cognitive dissonance fascinating.
After electoral defeat, Labour went on to elect Ed Miliband as its leader, who promised to take the party in a more leftwards direction. He was immediately beset by the majority of Labour MPs who did not support his election and a number of senior figures who actively undermined this shift at every step. Labour under him managed something which I found astounding at the time; snatching defeat from the jaws of the disastrous coalition and easing the Conservatives into outright power (Cameron’s personal self-own a year later with the Brexit referendum was equally astounding of course).
After Miliband we had, of course, Jeremy Corbyn. This is often characterised as due to some kind of vanguardist movement that swept to power due to Corbyn’s ability to cunningly outmatch his opponents. What I witnessed was an absolute farce of establishment Labour figures looking deeply tired and depressed, deciding that the best way to defeat Corbyn (a man who had been nominated by accident), was to be utterly condescending and dismissive towards him — and as such present themselves a completely dislikable.
I’ve never before witnessed so many bald headed men and women make such lacklustre arguments for why they are entitled to having access to the People’s Comb. But again, this was Labour politicians making the case that the only way forward was to be “sensible”, “responsible” and “pragmatic” while being entirely unable to articilate what purpose any of that was to serve.
And so we had Corbyn, the resoundingly least unlikable and least inarticulate choice by a country mile. Yet while his leadership election was ostensibly a rejection of centrism, his leadership almost immediately adopted a centrist position on the most significant issue of the day: Brexit.
Corbyn is of course no centrist, but he does highlight one of the reasons why politicians end up adopting centrism: intellectual disinterest. For Jeremy Corbyn, Brexit was a complete distraction to the important issues of why Vladimir Putin should be allowed to take over Crimea, and why Vladimir Putin was right to oppress the Syrian people on behalf of Bashar al-Assad; and an issue which divided his own party. He knew he had vociferous supporters of both sides of the debate in his party who would raise hell if he came down on one side of the other. So he simply didn’t.
I’ve often heard people talk about how the cause for Remain was lost in 2019 due to their strategic blunders. But the truth is that moderating Brexit was a lost cause when the supposedly “centrist” Prime Minister Theresa May adopted a far more extreme vision of Brexit than the Leave campaign had called for, while the supposedly principled Leader of the Opposition responded with a massive shrug. Everything after that was just a lot of shouting.
If you are keeping score, that was the second time in six years that the “pragmatic” centrists had argued themselves into ceding the political direction of the country to the right.
The fact that Corbyn was eventually replaced by Keir Starmer, the key architect of Labour’s fence-sitting Brexit position, was a clue to what would happen next. While initially claiming to adopt the best aspects of Corbynism with added pragmatism, Labour very quickly set about purging itself of any remaining Corbyn influence. The 2024 Labour election prospectus was the most studiously centrist position the party had ever adopted. Notably it didn’t want to make much in the way of promises on anything.
It resulted in an even larger majority than in 1997, but a very shallow one, with many seats with incredibly small majorities. At the same time it saw a rise in support for the hard right in terms of Reform, several victories of candidates standing on a pro-Gaza platform, the Greens, the Lib Dems and, ironically, Jeremy Corbyn standing as an independent.
Younger readers: I cannot emphasise enough how different this landslide election felt in the immediate aftermath compared to the one in 1997. People talked about Blair winning due to the Tories’ unpopularity at the time, but at least there was a sense of direction. The only thing Starmer seemed to stand for was quelling the worst aspects of the post-Brexit chaos — and even then not by much.
It’s been just over a year since that election, and the shallowness of that victory has only become more apparent. We’re now talking about Reform winning the next election, although we have a very long way to go before that happens in (presumably) 2029. At the very least they are set to make serious strides forward. A Labour majority seems almost inconceivable at this point.
How has Labour responded to this? It has determined that it has to respond to the rise of the hard right by meeting them half way. This isn’t merely like the dog-whistling “controls on immigration” mug we were treated to in 2015. This is a full throated attack on the concept of immigration itself, with Keir Starmer evoking Enoch Powell with his “nation of strangers” speech (a phrase which he has gone onto say he regrets — but notably not the substance of the speech itself). Starmer has gone out of his way to ape Trump by posting videos on X of immigrants being rounded up by immigration officers.
On trans rights, Labour has simply embraced the entire hard right agenda, while claiming to deplore the “toxic and divisive” debate on the issue. Meanwhile, it remains silent on how to tackle growing inequality, poverty and the high cost of living. Indeed for disiabled people — another expendible minority — the future looks bleak (it remains to be seen what the outcome of the current review of disability benefits will conclude, and whether rebel Labour MPs hold firm in opposing cuts).
None of this has helped Labour in the polls. Indeed, the government seems to be simply revealing why Jeremy Corbyn found it so easy to defeat so many “responsible” and “pragmatic” centrists in the Labour leadership election 10 years before.
This weekend, London was forced to witness the largest far right demonstration since the 1930s (people protesting that they attended the rally but are not hard right should question how many people who attended Oswald Mosely’s demos felt the same way, and how history judges them). This has come at the tail end of a summer where the Labour government has lionised thugs attempting to intimidate immigrants outside the hotels they are stuck in as having legitimate concerns, while threatening the mass incarcaration of pensioners opposing genocide (there has been a vanishingly small amount of violence at pro-Gaza demos over the last couple of years, in stark contrast to the Unite the Kingdom demo).
This is where we’re at now: a Labour Party following the logic of centrism by attempting to appease the far right, and seemingly having no concept of there being any alternative. The centrism stopped being a means to an end and became an end in itself years ago. It is hard to see how this can lead to anything other than a victory for totalitarianism.
Centrism and Liberalism
I could talk a lot more about how centrism has some to dominate politics worldwide, particularly in the US where, post-Trump, the centrist-lunatics truly have taken over the Democrat-asylum, but I’m in danger of simply regurgitating the news. I’m also parking discussion on the other side of the centrist coin at this point, neoliberalism (or market fundamentalism if you prefer) — but I most definitely intend to return to that.
What I’m here to talk about is how centrism relates to liberalism. Superficially, why liberalism and centrism make natural bedfellows. Liberals are pragmatists too, sure. What’s more, one of the core aspects of liberalism is being open to being wrong, being optimistic about human nature, and of broadly considering democracy to be a good thing. So what could be more natural than accepting that when the public shift in opinion, liberals ought to position themselves at the heart of the debate and not risk being outside of it?
The problem is, that all starts to resemble Rousseau’s “general will,” the notion that political legitimacy lies at the heart of the will of the people as a whole. Liberal commentators have tended to argue, with more than a certain amount of historical evidence to back them up, that resorting to the general will as the foundation of legitimacy tends to lead to totalitarianism. Firstly, how to we measure it — Elections? Opinion polls? Focus groups? Secondly, who gets to interpret it? Thirdly, assuming you can find a perfect encapsulation on what the vast majority think, and someone who can perfectly implement those findings, where does that leave the rest of us who may dissent?
We all contain multitudes, so even those of us who do tend to go along with most social norms will find ourselves in opposition to some of them. And that’s to ignore the vast numbers of people who dissent more significantly.
Looked at like that, the other area of political philosophy that centrism tends to more closely resemble is utilitarianism, at least in it’s objectives. Again, let’s park discussion on utilitarianism for now, but it is hard to make the case that centrism has lead to “the greatest happiness of the greatest number”, let alone Karl Popper’s redefinition of minimising pain. The history of centrism is a history of political parties attempting to appease the majority, but in turn leaving more people left behind and discontent. Perhaps that is a criticism of utilitarianism itself, and why liberal philosophers have wrestled with it so much over the last two centuries, but it’s hardly an endorsement of centrism.
What should we do about the people that centrist policies leave behind? It is hard to see how the liberal answer is to simply shrug. If we look at centrism from the position of the harm principle, it quickly becomes intolerable. This is doubly the case now that centrists seem to have made a decisive shift away from merely ignoring issues such as income inequalities and the marginalisation of certain groups to reversing the very policies that were designed to help them. I don’t want to go all trolley problem on you, but it’s one thing for Tony Blair to decline to scrap Section 28 for years; quite another for Keir Starmer and Bridget Phillipson to reinvent that legislation to further marginalise transgender people. The fact that Labour is now talking about weakening all of our human rights protected in law, most notably Section 8 of the ECHR, would suggest that we have reached a point where liberalism and centrism are now in firm opposition.
Pragmatism and Strategy
We have always been sold on centrism as the pragmatic approach. The problem is, that pragmatism always seems to mean thinking no more than one move ahead.
It also needs to be emphasised that centrism hasn’t actually resulted in much in the way of electoral success. It was certainly a factor in getting Labour elected in 1997, but on a wider political platform that was about far more than triangulation and managing the status quo. It helped the Conservatives in 2010, but even then they needed to form a coalition to govern. The centrist platforms of both the Liberal Democrats and Labour in 2015 lost out to the decisive shift to the right at the same time by the Tories. And while the increasingly destructive tendencies of the Conservatives were decisively rejected in favour of a centrist Labour manifesto, the resultant government has been on the backfoot ever since and poised for annihilation at the next election. Where it has succeeded it has been because of other factors, not enthusiastic support for centrism.
There has been a lot of talk about the Overton Window in recent years; the notion that there is only ever a narrow range of political options which are possible due to where the mainstream public discourse is at at any given time. Recent political history would suggrest that this theory is fundamentally correct. However, while the rightwing response to this has been squarely focused on how to shift the window — and has been extremely successful as a consequence, the centrist position has simply been to focus on implementing whatever is politically possible at the time, generally by aping whatever the right is preoccupied by at the time.
As they say, the road to hell is paved with good intentions. Centrism’s main achievement in political discourse over the last 30 years has been to dismiss the notion that we should seek to go in any other direction. Far from the master strategists that its proponents seek to present themselves as, centrism has signally failed to ever articulate a vision of where they see us in 10, 20 years time. In lieu of that, it has been up to others to dictate — typically from the right and almost always the wealthiest, and in an increasingly scary and totalitarian direction.
This is possibly a result of me no longer being so focused on it on a daily basis, but do political parties talk about their hopeful visions of the future any more? I see lots of think tanks pumping out policy papers on behalf of whoever is funding them, but much less in terms of what you might call amateur policy discussion. Back when the aforementioned Orange Book was published, it was part of a flurry of journals, books and pamphlets being pumped out in Liberal Democrat circles on a regular basis, which people would in turn respond to with delight, outrage or indifference. I still have Lib Dem people in my social circle these days, but the only time they seem to want to debate policy these days is at their party conferences, usually over the precise wording of policy motions which will almost certainly be ignored as soon as the debate is over.
Is that just true in the case of the Liberal Democrats, or is it a common problem? I feel I’d have seen at least some of it leaking out on social media if it was. No-one pamphlets any more. Where blogging does sill exist, largely behind corporate paywalls, it seems to be done by an increasingly small minority of journalists and policy wonks. Popular discourse has become limited to social media, and is increasingly reactive.
What does this have to do with centrism? Well, because I think it’s replaced political parties’ collective ability to talk about the future. Policy has largely become restricted to deciding on a manifesto, to go largely unread, and reacting against whatever the government of the day is proposing at any given time. Every attempt to take a wider view has been shouted down for being too idealistic and everyone, even the loudest critics of centrism, have been largely cowed into submission.
I work in the tabletop games industry now and it may surprise you to learn that creativity, theory, strategy, economics, politics and even visions of the future, are discussed with more effervessence within those circles than I see in the political sphere these days. Micropublishing is everywhere.
To be clear, I’m very aware that I’m as guilty of this deafening silence as anyone.
The dismal logic of centrism seems to suck out any scope for debate and leave political parties with increasingly limited options about where they can go next.
I don’t believe in utopia, and I’m wary of people who seek to create one; but I do believe in better. In my more optimistic moments, I can see a lot to be hopeful about: renewable energy; increasing literacy rates worldwide; vaccines; a recognition of the baleful legacy of imperialism and colonialism; better understanding of — and compassion for — neuro-, sexual and gender diversity. But I can see much if not all of that going backwards over the next decade or so. And I can see the proponents of centrism patiently and condescendingly explaining to me why that is now completely necessary. They need to be put back in their box.
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