For as long as Labour considers centrism to be ‘boring, managerial politics’, the public will continue not to listen to it – and they will be right not to, argues James Wood
It is a truth universally acknowledged that any political party seeking to be elected must wish to find the centre ground. Though many in politics are now writing the obituary of managerial centrism, the truth is that owning the centre ground has never been more vital to turning your party from a voice for the dispossessed into a government that can act in their name. Donald Trump’s claims regarding women and immigrants may have caught the eye, but across the key battleground states it was he – not Hilary Clinton – who was trusted to bring back jobs and raise living standards. Huge swathes of the United Kingdom may have voted for what is considered by many to be an economically ruinous Brexit, but by controlling immigration they saw the opportunity to increase job availability and reduce the strain on public services and housing that they need to access on a day-to-day basis. In each case, the winning side was the one that had voters’ trust on the most key and pressing issues of the day.
The centre ground is often misunderstood by socialists and social democrats as a Trojan horse for a so-called neoliberal agenda. An appeal for parties of the left to abandon principle and support the policies of their opponents for no more reason than electoral expediency. It is this fundamental misunderstanding that has allowed the Labour party to wander into the political wilderness and hand power to its opponents.
The centre ground, properly understood, is not an ideology but an attitude. The attitude that managing the economy, keeping crime as low as possible, ensuring the National Health Service treats the sick and our schools educate our children is a serious business. And that no political project, of any kind or ideological hue, is more important than keeping those organs of the state functioning. In short, the most import job of government is keeping the ship of state afloat and on course. In keeping the show of government on the road.
This attitude has two things to recommend it. First, it is shared by the vast majority of voters, with whose help governments that best occupy the centre ground are elected. In this history of universal suffrage the UK has never elected a government promising major disruption to those basic functions of government, although many party leaders have proposed just such a programme.
Second, it is morally correct. When governments take decisions the effects on people are huge, both now and across decades to come. A few months of unemployment at the wrong stage in life will fundamentally affect someone’s prospects for future happiness. Pupils in school subjected to ill-advised meddling will never get back the years they lost when they fell behind their contemporaries. A spike in crime may make the government of the day look bad, but it will affect the very personhood of people who fall victim to it who no longer feel safe in their own homes.
Away from the centre ground, political projects are important. They define us by ideology and allow us to categorise people into parties and form political alliances. For many of us they will form a cornerstone of our lives, even if we should find ourselves as one of the few people working on it. Whether that is arguing for devolution of government powers, LGBT rights, leaving the EU or nationalising the railways political projects are what give every individual their ideological lodestar. Without such projects politics would be the intellectually vacuous management-focused enterprise that so many ideologues claim that it is.
Parties of the left lose when they change their attitude to the centre ground. When keeping the show on the road stops being the key job of government and instead comes to be seen as an obstacle to achieving the political projects that leftist activists and politicians hold dear. Most people do not define their views by their projects. They hold the centre ground attitude, and allow the few projects they do have to guide them to a party. But vitally, they can be persuaded to support new political projects. New Labour abolished pensioner poverty, drastically reduced child poverty and introduced civil partnerships. These were ideologically driven projects that it had wished to achieve for decades. Labour was able to bring the country, which did not at large share those projects with us, only because we held the centre ground attitude.
It is this that Labour most often does not understand. Few people listen to its declarations of virtue that it and only it truly cares about the wrongs of the world, and are persuaded. Most people living in the 1980s wanted to abolish pensioner poverty. Most people today would like not to have to make the cuts to support for the disabled that have been made, would like to end the outrage of homelessness taking place every night on Britain’s streets. But they do not think this can be achieved while keeping the ship of state afloat. To take a direct quote from my (lifelong Tory voter) mother:
‘I don’t agree with everything the Conservatives do, and obviously it’s terrible when you see people sleeping on the streets and I help out when I can at the food bank. But we’ve got to pay our way in the world. The government can only spend what it brings in’.
No matter how worthy, no matter how morally righteous, the left’s demands for a better government that does not treat the penury and immiseration of the most vulnerable in society as a price worth paying will continue to fall on deaf ears until it can persuade the British public that these things are not an unfortunate but inevitable consequence of keeping their children in school, their parents in medicine and their partner in work.
On issue after issue – from decriminalising homosexuality under Harold Wilson to banning foxhunting under Tony Blair – Labour persuaded the country to support its political projects when it gave them the assurance that they did not have to choose between a worthy cause and paying their mortgage. That they could have a government that would do both the thing that was morally right and the one that was economically sensible. That freed them from a binary choice between voting with their hearts and voting with their heads.
It is this attitude that the party must rediscover if Labour is ever to govern again. That though it may be campaigns against homelessness or fighting racism that get us out of bed every morning, it is looking after inflation and providing sufficient school places that get us listened to. That the voters are not being selfish, they are challenging us to show that Labour can discharge the basic duties required of government. For as long as the Labour party sneers at the centre ground attitude, for as long as it dismisses sensible running of the country as ‘boring managerial politics’ the public will continue not to listen to it. They will be right to.
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James Wood is a Labour party member
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The fact that Jeremy Corbyn is the Leader of the Labour Party and the Leader of the Opposition is the reason why Theresa May is even talking about workers’ and consumers’ representation in corporate governance, shareholders’ control over executive pay, restrictions on pay differentials within companies, an investment-based Industrial Strategy and infrastructure programme, greatly increased housebuilding, action against tax avoidance, a ban on public contracts for tax-avoiding companies, a cap on energy prices, banning or greatly restricting foreign takeovers, and banning unpaid internships.
Two years ago, the only politicians advocating all but one of those were Corbyn and John McDonnell, while the energy price cap, proposed by Ed Miliband, was being screamed down by the people whom James Wood wishes were now running the Labour Party. Those people, including most Labour MPs, are well to the right of the Prime Minister.
Corbyn has won two Leadership Elections as the only candidate to the left of May, opposing the austerity programme while having also opposed every British military intervention of the last 20 years, that period’s privatisation of the NHS and other public services, its persecution of the disabled, its assaults on civil liberties, its prostration to Saudi Arabia, and its demonisation of Russia. All of those have happened continuously since 1997, under the Conservatives, the Liberal Democrats and New Labour alike.
It is fascinating to read articles like this. James needs to do a bit more to tell us:
1. Who determines where the centre is? Is it the ‘Daily Mail’? Is it wherever the winner of an election is? Is the centre a fixed, eternal entity or something that changes with conditions and contingencies?
2. Who decides what policies are centrist? Mrs May would claim to be in the centre yet she favours curbing immigration, using weapons of mass destruction, using migrants to the UK as bargaining counters and selling weapons to authoritarian regimes.
3. Justify the claim that only centrist win elections. How about Trump, Syriza, SNP, Sinn Fein – and in the future we may see 5 Star win in Italy and Le Pen in France.
4. Does he think that concern for inequality and social justice is too left wing and should be abandoned by the party?
I would genuinely like to hear from someone who can answer Elizabeth McIntosh’s superb response. In the meantime I’m not going to sign up to James Wood’s ‘universally acknowledged truth’ either.
Millions of people buy the Daily Mail, Daily Express, Sun, etc.
Are they brainwashed or do they part with their cash to read views that resonate with them?
I read the i and the Observer because I am comfortable with their views and opinion.
The “centre” ground is to the right of where I and I assume the majority of Labour Party members are.
However the Corbyn/McDonnell position is far to the left of both myself and I am sure the majority of voters.
For Labour to be a party of government and thereby achieve greater social justice and income redistribution it needs to move to the Centre.
Jeremy Corbyn has had nearly 2 years to gain traction with the electorate and all the evidence (opinion polls/Copeland/ local by elections) is that he has not.
This is self evident and simply achieving a defeat in 2020 of historic proportions is unlikely to further and protect the disadvantaged in society
I will happily answer Elizabeth’s questions speaking as a rare Labour Cllr in Surrey.
1) The centre ground is where the UK electorate deem it to be compared with other options available to them. Unfortunately and as I say this as a long standing party member, every U.K. Election in recent memory has resulted in the winner being the most centrist. This is hardly surprising as the vast majority of people are not politically engaged and therefore not keen on extremes on either the left or the right.
2) The electorate who look at the package as a whole. Yes we can agree that some of the Tory policies are extreme but sadly the public seem to be telling us that the key planks of our policy on matters critically important to them namely economic competence is extreme and that despite the Tory failings, they still trust them rather than us.
3) UK parliamentary elections using the U.K electoral system demonstrate this. With respect, other countries are irrelevant here as many of them such as your examples of Greece and Ireland have PR systems or similar very different to our FPTP and in America, Trump actually lost the popular vote by 3 million votes. If the SNP ran across the U.K., would they win, I doubt it.
4) No, absolutely not. Every Labour member believes in that – the difference is between those who believe we are better able to do that in Government and those who believe we are better able to do that in opposition. Th former is better in my view as every Labour Government in the UK have been better than every Tory government in this area.
Seems to me from the responses that we mix up cause and effect. What we actually mean is that whoever wins an election must do so because they are in the centre. So there policies must be centrist – even if they are about deporting migrants, attacking foreign countries, cutting welfare to the poor, privatising health services.
It would be better to argue that the electorate are increasingly right wing. Evidence of this is the growth in readership of
the ‘Mail’, ‘Sun’, ‘Express ‘and listenership of LBC. We then know that Labour faces a grave problem that no matter how far it moves right to get to the centre the Tories can shift a little bit further – and while we shift to the right we lose significant sections of our supporters to the Lib Dems and SNP.
We need to stop the lazy nostrums and dogmas that blame Corbyn or outside agitators entering the party to mislead honest members and recognise that the current right wing views of significant sections of the electorate are going to cause a social democratic party which led the response to the financial crisis in 2008 difficulty – as it has PASOK, PSOE, Iceland’s SD Alliance. It is only when the Tories lose the mantle of economic competence, as they did in 1964, 1974 and 1992 that we will make a full recovery – so long as we stop the infighting and can set the terms of the debate. At the moment progress’s bottomless resentment and desire for revenge for its loss of leadership of the party are only making the problem s worse.
The point I am making is that political parties consist of a collection of people who actually have wildly different views but agree with sufficient enough areas for a broad theme. That differs from electors who look at the broad theme and then take a view at general elections as to which general theme to pick.
I don’t agree that there is any evidence that the UK has moved to the right or that the electorate are increasingly right wing. However, what does happen is that society views do change and modernise over time in various ways. For example, if we take the issue of civil partnerships and marriage, the idea of equality 20 years ago would have unthinkable whereas now, very few people see a problem. Was it right wing that this was changed, I don’t think so. This is the same with many issues and industries.
In terms of the readership of certain newspapers, their influence is highly overrated. It seems to me that newspapers merely strengthen or confirm the already held views of people in the same way of a Twitter bubble. How many readers of the Sun vote Tory or Labour for that matter?
The idea that we win by moving even further to the left is a total fantasy. There is a very good reason as to why the Socialist Worker Party, TUSC and other similar parties have been unsuccessful in UK elections and that is because very few people support those values. We went through this in 1983 and look what happened and the same is happening now. In contrast, when we did move to the right and occupy the centre ground, we then won 3 elections with substantial majorities even despite a very unpopular war.
At the end of the day, I want a Labour Govt just like you. i don’t agree that we get one by sitting around waiting for the Conservatives to lose their economic mantle. We have to look like a Govt in waiting rather than an extremist pressure group. Personally, I am not bothered about who leads or controls the party as long as we maximise our votes and thereby influence. Since the last leadership contest, our polling has taken even more and it seems has yet to reach the bottom.
I agree with Elizabeth again. But genuine thanks to Rodney for an honest effort.