Illogical Positivism

Now that Keir Starmer has "saved" the Labour Party from the "disaster" of the Corbyn years, it is time for British centrism to reassert itself as the hegemonic project of the early twenty-first century. Unfortunately, the "radical centre" is struggling to do so against the background of a cost-of-living crisis, a summer of strikes and the promise of 50-year mortgages. Tony Blair's latest intervention, at his vainglorious "Future of Britain" conference, conformed to a now well-established pattern in which a shallow technological determinism fills the void of substantive economic and social policy. This has become increasingly ridiculous over the years, presumably because his exposure to technology is limited to conferences dominated by the technically-challenged politico-media caste and industry self-promoters. Hence the suggestion, in respect of Elon Musk, that "we need more mad entrepreneurs prepared to throw money at science" if we are to tackle climate change, which ignores that Musk isn't interested in saving this world but in colonising another.

Together with his tendency to suggest that he, and only he, can locate the British electorate's erogenous zones, Blair's latest 5-point plan reduces down to little more than the received wisdom of the 1990s. Thus, according to Blair's chief amanuensis, John Rentoul, "One of the themes of the conference was the need to work across party boundaries to seek solutions". At a time when the limits of bi-partisanship have been shown only too clearly in the US, this is remarkably tone-deaf. Equally obtuse is the insistence that failed Tories should be treated with respect, if only to benefit from the reassuring vibe that supposedly appeals to voters. "The purpose of the conference was essentially to try to push Starmer into a more Blairite position, even though Blair claimed to be offering ideas for any party to pick up. There were Conservatives (Ruth Davidson) and former Conservatives (Rory Stewart and David Gauke) there, but they were part of a classic New Labour big tent, rather than an attempt to create a new centrist formation." You can almost taste Rentoul's regret.

Blair is famous for his ability to combine a lack of self-reflection with the pretence of a struggle of conscience: a long, dark night of the soul that inevitably leads to him concluding that he was right all along. Far from questioning the premises and tenets of centrism, this has led him to conclude that the problem is not the ideas ("it is about persuading swing voters that you are reasonable and not beholden to party ideology") but the personnel. Blair's central conceit is that he has been succeeded on the national stage by political pygmies: "In both his interviews today, one at the start and one at the end of the conference, he said that the politics of the radical centre has “a supply problem not a demand problem”. In other words, it is what people want, but there are too few talented politicians available to offer it to them." The idea that the apparent dearth of talent may reflect a structural problem does not trouble his mind. Nor is there any recognition that a political party that expends most of its effort on expelling or disciplining members may not be an effective seed-bed of talent.

In contrast, Philip Collins, another of Blair's loyal media epigones, has at least tried to mount a defence of centrism in the New Statesman, but with little success. The nub of his argument is that centrists are good at politics. This talent leads to them being dismissed as either cynical triangulators or opportunists lacking convictions. For Collins: "The task of drawing the political spectrum correctly – so as to work out where the centre is – requires a deep understanding of how things have changed. And, given that politics in 2022 is indeed very different from politics in 1997, the subject matter and conclusions to which the centrist will be drawn must be constantly changing. This kind of centrist will inevitably change their mind, consistent with the fact that the world under observation is itself changing." This is banal, but it does highlight Collins's claim that centrists owe their success to an innate flexibility and openness to experience. That the evidence suggests the contrary is simply ignored. The reason he opens his piece with a dubious quote by the obscure Greek philospher Heraclitus is because he wishes to argue by deduction rather than induction - i.e. the establishment of first principles rather than empirical research.

As centrism has been historicised, its defenders have taken to burnishing its record, often to the point of outright fabrication. According to Collins, doing his best to be generous to centrism's critics, "It is a reasonable retort to the New Labour years to say that its rhetoric was all rather uncritical when it came to the effect of new technologies. It is true too that globalisation has had its detrimental effects as well as its benefits, though no smart centrist would actually disagree with that. It’s not true, though, and never has been true, that centrism is just revivalist Thatcherite economics. There is no need to rehearse the long list of wage regulations and trade union rights and windfall taxes of the New Labour years to clinch the point." There was a vogue for laboriously rehearsing the achievements of New Labour a while back, but the tendency soon dissipated as the modesty of those achievements, and the ease with which they were reversed by the Tories, became painfully clear. Now we are told there is "no need" to consider the record. We must just take as an article of faith that we lived through the good times.

The fundamental problem that centrism faces as a political philosophy is that it was historically contingent: the product of a particular moment that combined the epochal shift from social democracy to neoliberalism along with the reconfiguration of geopolitics after 1989. You cannot wish away its deep imbrication with Thatcherite economics and anti-union laws, any more than you can claim its liberal interventionism was a product of a commitment to "what works". The refusal to acknowledge this has led to a doubling-down on the commitment to the future and in particular to a vapid technophilia that ironically bears echoes of the early twentieth century. It has also led to an unwillingness to analyse the current moment, and in particular the fall-out of the last 15 years. The conceptual importance of the future to centrism is precisely that it avoids the need to address the present. At root, the philosophical genesis of centrism is to be found not in Greek philosophy, as Collins imagines, but in Comtean Positivism, a school of thought that ultimately became little more than a secular religious cult.