Since New Labour lost power in 2010, one of the most distinctive sounds of British politics has been centrists saying what they’re against. Brexit, populism, identity politics, Corbynism, “extremism” in general – all have been loudly and repeatedly condemned.
Much quieter – in fact, barely audible – has been the sound of centrists saying what they’re offering instead. While the Tory right and Labour left have been bursting with ideas about how to transform Britain, the self-styled moderates of both parties and their many media allies have suggested few concrete solutions to the crises in the economy, the climate and Britain’s ever more divided society.
This negative approach hasn’t worked. An ability to read and win over electorates used to be a hallmark of successful centrists, from Michael Heseltine to Tony Blair. But since the latter’s increasingly distant heyday, centrism has suffered a succession of defeats: the Brexit referendum, the 2015 and 2016 Labour leadership races, the 2017 and 2019 general elections. Last year 21 centrist MPs were suspended from the Conservative party without it suffering electoral damage. In the current Labour leadership contest, since Jess Phillips’s chastened withdrawal, there hasn’t even been an openly centrist candidate.
Social liberalism used to be one of centrism’s main principles. Yet at last year’s election, Ian Austin and John Woodcock, former Labour MPs who had advertised their supposed moderation by becoming independents, ended up endorsing Boris Johnson’s xenophobic, authoritarian Toryism – as did the far right’s Tommy Robinson. Once a dominant force in Britain and beyond, centrism now increasingly looks like a movement that has lost its bearings.
If they’re going to become relevant again, centrists need to stop lamenting the fact that Britain hasn’t become the haven of stable politics, social mobility and benign capitalism that they hoped and worked for during the 1990s. Instead, they need to come up with some new ideas, and a plan for achieving the power needed to apply them.
That might not be as difficult as it sounds. The current appetite among politicians and voters for radicalism, such as it is, won’t last forever. A few years of Dominic Cummings experimenting on Britain may persuade many Tories that explicitly ideological, disruptive politics isn’t such a good thing after all. And the Labour party’s predominant focus on leftwing policies may not survive another general election defeat. In our impatient political world, the circumstances could be right, sooner than we imagine, for a modernised version of centrism to seem quite appealing.
What might it consist of? There are a few signs that more forward-looking centrists are starting to think about this. On the website of Progress, a Labour pressure group usually associated with stubbornly unreconstructed Blairism, there is an essay by Alison McGovern, the Labour MP and chair of Progress, which departs strikingly from previous centrist orthodoxies. “We no longer live in a global economy where we can guarantee that growth will benefit everyone,” she writes. “The rigging of the market system in favour of monopoly capital has left many workers trapped.” Labour must “redistribute power” in the economy and “consider radical transfers” of wealth.
The actual policies she proposes are either modest – “means-tested baby bonds”, or personal investment funds for the neediest, from birth – or tantalising sketches, “giving everyone shares in our nation’s land wealth”. But there is a sense of centrism belatedly coming to terms with today’s ever more unequal and unsustainable world. Rather than the gradualism and weak compromises with the powerful which centrists previously favoured, perhaps they don’t have to accept quite so much of the status quo.
A similar seam of new thinking ran, almost unnoticed, through last year’s Liberal Democrat manifesto. While the rest of its election campaign positioned the party as an alternative to “extremist” Labour – largely to the Tories’ benefit – the manifesto was much less traditionally centrist. It proposed a more active role for the state and showed less reverence for the free market than the Lib Dems have had for decades. After a string of disastrous middle-of-the-road leaders, it’s possible the party is becoming more adventurous again.
It’s harder to envisage that happening to the few remaining Tory centrists. The Conservatives once had a confident and open-minded centrist tradition, exemplified by books such as The Middle Way, an eloquent call to reform capitalism published in 1938 by the future prime minister Harold Macmillan. But these days even the liberal Tory thinktank Bright Blue, which claims to be “pro-market not free market”, seems submissive to the right, with a website dominated by defences of Thatcherite policies such as the right to buy, and by calls for yet more economic deregulation. Especially for a party as prone to complacency as the Tories, the aftermath of a big election win tends not to be a time for nuanced thinking.
If you’re on the left, it’s easy to think that the crisis of centrism doesn’t matter. You may well think it’s a good thing. In recent years centrists have certainly done the left no favours. Before they got to work on Jeremy Corbyn, they undermined even Ed Miliband and Gordon Brown’s much more tentative efforts to adapt Labour to the new world that the 2008 financial crisis created. Much is made of the sectarianism of some on the left; but it has a centrist mirror image.
Yet as all the remaining Labour leadership candidates seem to realise, judging by their carefully inclusive rhetoric, the left is probably going to have to join forces with the centre if Boris Johnson’s xenophobia and authoritarianism is to be defeated. As for centrists who think they can beat the radical right without the left’s help – or who still imagine they can replace the left – the best response probably is: you’ve tried that.
• Andy Beckett is a Guardian columnist
