Deserting the Centre

A common theme in the commentary on the Tories' current troubles has been the search for parallels with previous occasions on which power changed hands between the two main parties. Inevitably, the end of a long period of Conservative government and the Blairite nostalgia of the commentariat has made 1997 the choice comparison, with the dominant narrative being that the Tories are headed for the electoral wilderness because of a lurch to the right, a prediction reinforced by the shortlist of potential party leaders being winnowed down to Kemi Badenoch and Robert Jenrick. There are two problems with this comparative analysis. The first is a tendency to misinterpret the history of past electoral shifts, the second is a tendency to ignore the contradictions of conservatism as this historic conjucture. Even what passes for the left-inclined newspaper commentariat has tended to treat the latter as a matter of personalities - e.g. "Bad Enoch v Sad Enoch", in Aditya Chakrabortty's phrase - which is no better than the sneery virtue-obsession of centrists such as John Crace or Marina Hyde.

To be fair to Chakrabortty, he does recognise the contradictions that arise in attempting to reconcile libertarian economics and social conservatism, but reducing this to "moron or bastard" personalises a more profound tension that is currently restructuring politics not only in the UK but across much of the world. Martin Kettle, perhaps suprisingly, does at least recognise the global context: "Across the developed world, the party politics of the 20th century have fractured. The once dominant centre-right parties of countries such as France, Germany, Italy and the Netherlands are either struggling to survive or have disappeared. In the US, the Republicans have turned into a populist cult. After the general election, the Conservative party hesitated to lurch down the same path. Now, though, it has done so anyway. It is a fateful moment and the consequences will not be pretty for any aspect of British politics." Of course, this is simply Kettle mourning the end of the political landscape he grew up in, but he does at least recognise that there is more at work here than the triumph of stupidity.

Simon Wren-Lewis has also taken to looking for parallels in watershed elections of the past. He too imagines that 1997 offers the best comparison, but along the way he makes some interesting comments about 1979: "Just as Labour then was deeply split between left and centre, you could say the Conservatives are split between the right and a One Nation centre. But whereas the split within Labour in 1979 onwards was both very evident and extended to the membership, if the Conservatives are split the centre is both remarkably quiet and appears largely absent from the membership." He is using "centre" here is the sense of a positioning on the wider political spectrum, and thus a synonym for liberal in the context of Labour. In fact, the split in the Labour Party was the longstanding one between the socialist left and the Old Labour right. The liberal strand, represented by Roy Jenkins and his allies, was a minority within the party, literally a gang of four at the outset, with only 28 MPs eventually defecting to the breakaway SDP, often for reasons of careerism. The dynamic that led to the formation of the new party was a squeeze between the left and right in Labour that marginalised liberalism, and it was this as much as the electoral arithmetic that led to its subsequent merger with the Liberal Party.

Wren-Lewis is concerned that by lurching to the right the Conservatives have rejected any attempt to appeal to the median voter, which he presumably imagines a One Nation centrist would be more sympathatic to. But this ignores two things. First, that the "nice Tories" of the centrist imaginary were always happy to support the economic libertarianism of Margaret Thatcher and the austerity of David Cameron and George Osborne (Ken Clarke, Dominic Grieve and David Gauke, for example). Second, insofar as these things can be judged from opinion polls, the median voter is already significantly to the left on economic policy of not only the Tory right and the One Nation centre but also Labour. It's also worth noting that voter's material preferences, on issues such as taxation and nationalisation, look a lot more stable than the polling and focus group claims that the median voter is positioned to the right on social and cultural issues, such as immigration and trans rights, not least because the latter tend to be topics with which most voters have little personal issue but which they assume are of concern nationally due to the salience and bias of media coverage.

What we see in these various analyses is the classic narrative of centrism in which the losing party in a pivotal general election lurches off into the political wilderness by deserting the centre ground. In fact, what characterised both 1979 and 1997 was that the winning party had very deliberately stated in advance of its victory that it saw itself as being to the right of the centre and engaged in a radical transformation: the Tories to defeat the unions and Labour to embrace globalisation. In both cases, there was a public belief that this was over-stated, that while meaningful change was needed, the party would prove less radical in office (there were obvious echoes of this in 2024 with the claim that Starmer and Reeves would redress the wrongs of austerity). Both elections shifted the "Overton Window" to the right, making the left appear ever more distant from the centre (which opened it up to the cynical anathematisation of recent years) and positioning the middle of the spectrum significantly to the right of the median voter.

The tension at the heart of conservatism between libertarian economics and social reaction has not resided exclusively within the Tory Party for decades. It has become hegemonic. It was central to the makeup of New Labour and continued in subterranean form throughout the post-Blair years. Ed Miliband's desire to make the economy more socially responsible and to dial down the reactionary impulses around welfare and immigration simply produced an alliance between the neoliberals and the old right to hamstring him. Jeremy Corbyn's outright rejection of both neoliberalism and reaction simply turned the dial of opposition within the party up to 11. Keir Starmer's attempt to reconcile the two has led to the fiscal orthodoxy of Rachel Reeves, the neoliberal revivalism of Wes Streeting and his own bleak authoritarianism, now lapsing into the parody of a patriotic reactionary. The apparent triviality of the Conservative Party leadership contest simply reflects the fact that the struggle for the soul of conservatism is currently underway in the Labour Party. 

Those Labour Party supporters who think a Conservative Party led by either Badenoch or Jenrick would be a godsend, guaranteeing a further 5 years in power, acknowledge their fear that James Cleverly would have pitched for the same centre-right ground that they now occupy (indeed, it requires no struggle to imagine Cleverly as a minister in the current government). What they perhaps don't want to acknowledge is that a further shift to the right by the Conservatives will encourage Labour to move further right as well, to ensure they are fully Tory-adjacent and so close up the space for any further incursions by the Liberal Democrats. The truth of the matter is that the conservative party is in rude health, it just doesn't go by that name any more. The more troubling truth is that conservatism is no closer to resolving the contradictions between its economics and its social instincts. The rise of the far-right is an opportunistic attempt to exploit the latter to obscure the former, but it offers no coherent solution. Nationalism retains a strong appeal, but the commitment to a comprehensive reordering of society that was foundational to Fascism is simply inconceivable in our individualistic world.

We are living in the early days of a one-party state, or a single state party, if you prefer. The curious reluctance of Labour to fight the Tories over the need for austerity in 2010 and then again in 2015 were the warning signs. The brief resurgence of a mildly left of centre opposition in 2017 was perhaps the last chance to preserve a genuine electoral choice, hence the notable increase in turnout and the high percentage share of the two main parties. People knew the election mattered, in a way that 2024 didn't. 2019 was the great consequential election, not so much in confirming the UK's exit from the European Union (that was always likely to happen in some form, the promise of a second referendum notwithstanding) but in finally entombing the left. The so-called "Soft Left" of Labour have taken junior ministerial jobs or voiced timid dissent from the backbenches, but their opposition to hegemonic conservatism is no more substantial or likely to make a difference than that of the Tory "Wets" in the early-1980s. The dominant political question of the moment is this: Who is best suited to manage the contradictions of conservatism - the Labour right or the Tory right?

What Is Left of Neoliberalism and Conservatism?

If there is a fundamental difference between liberalism and conservatism, both in theory and practice, it is that the former is universal while the latter is particular. From the Kantian imperative to modern human rights law, liberalism sees its scope as all of humanity. In contrast, conservatism believes in minding one's own business. Of course, as historians like Domenico Losurdo have long pointed out, liberalism in practice operates a very clear hierarchy of regard, from its involvement in slavery and colonialism to today's discrimination in its sympathies towards Israelis and Palestinians. This is because at root it is about the defence of private property, from which arises an entire global order. In reality, liberalism and conservatism are simply two strategies with the same goal - their historic friction and entanglement reflecting evolving class power and the underlying changes in the material base. But the distinction between the universal and the particular remains a useful guide to understanding liberal and conservative thought and the way it is expressed politically.

Though both the recent Labour and Conservative party conferences were crashingly dull, with little of substance to report and much trivia served up to an ungrateful press, both followed the script to the letter. Labour avoided the particular by eschewing policy announcements beyond "more of the same", while the Tories indulged the particular by ill-considered asides on maternity pay and extra-judicial killing. The liberal media pleaded with Labour to offer the nation some "hope", albeit in the form of rhetorical bromides rather than anything that might inflame the passions, while the conservative media, faced with four underwhelming candidates for leader, has started to read the last rites for the party. The Labour conference prompts the question: What is left of neoliberalism? Though many commentators have seen the new government in terms of continuity with the Blair era, there is clearly a lot less on offer this time round. Likewise, the Conservative conference prompts the question: What is left of conservatism? While a leadership contest inevitably means speakers pitching to an audience far to the right of public opinion, the fact that so much on offer was little more than hobby horses points to an obvious void.

The turn to a more activist state in pursuit of a more national economy, which began after 2008, has not seen a return to the social democratic state of old. Rather it has accentuated the disciplinary features of the neoliberal state. Thus Bidenomics has been more about maintaining US energy security, with all its geopolitical ramifications in Ukraine and the Middle East, than near-shoring manufacturing jobs, while the EU's shift towards the reimposition of internal as well as external borders is clearly not intended to reduce the mobility of capital. In the UK, the prime current example, heavily-freighted with symbolism after the recent riots, is the Labour government's commitment to build new prisons. While this has been offered up as justification for wider-ranging planning reform in the face of "NIMBYism", it is clear that the Prime Minister in particular finds his comfort zone within the carceral state rather than amidst the blueprints of new public infrastructure. Perhaps the most telling example has been France, where the permanent state of exception in support of "stability" has now dropped the pretence of democracy.

The original claim of the Third Way was not simply that it was pragmatic ("what works"), or inclusive after the divisiveness of the 1980s (the communitarian and dialogic vogues), but that it was post-ideological. In other words, it was postmodern in rejecting the grand narratives of the past, specifically the nationalism and socialism that dominated from 1848 to 1989. If there is an intellectual substrate to Starmerism it is a belief in the state, arguably the grandest and oldest narrative of them all, which goes back to the 17th century and Hobbes' Leviathan. This means that not only is it not postmodern, but that it largely rejects modernism and structuralism too, hence the strong whiff of cultural conservatism and unapologetic anti-intellectualism that Starmer and his chief lieutenants give off. Liberal newspaper columnists bemoaning the lack of substance would strike traditional conservative thinkers like Michael Oakeshott as ironic. Starmer is saying that he is an echt conservative and his lack of fancy foreign ideas, as much as the looming Union Jack flags that provide the background to his speeches, is the proof of that. 

The Conservative Party leadership candidates have predictably all commited to lower taxes, a smaller state and a larger military, which might suggest a consensus as to what is left of conservatism. But this is mostly shibboleths and ancestor-worship. The inescapable trend is towards higher taxes because of demographics, i.e. more dependents and a shrinking working-age population, something that should be obvious when you survey the attendees at the party conference. The state has never meaningfully shrunk, even on the Tories' watch, both because of those demographic trends and because of rising expectations of the state to provide greater security (pretty much every public inquiry results in a demand for it to do more). It's also worth noting the self-interest of the politico-media class in expanding the state's activities, which in turn expands the scope for private interests to seek influence through lobbying and donations. Military spending will continue to decline, if only because the alternative is even higher taxes, and because the salience of conflict in Ukraine and Lebanon cannot detract from the secular trend towards less war. 

It's a professional failing for politicians to ignore material and social forces and imagine that they can affect the course of history, but it's also an expression of contemporary conservativism: that things will only get worse unless we intervene against the "woke mind virus", or whatever bizarre form the justification for reaction has now taken. Paradoxically, this is the exact opposite of traditional conservatism's belief in making no unnecessary change. From Edmund Burke through Michael Oakeshott to Roger Scruton the fundamental principle has been the precautionary: "first, do no harm". English conservatism since the millennium has lost its bearings, largely due to American influence (Scruton's claim that the left lost its bearings due to French influence now appears quaint in comparison). The transatlantic variety has always been more concerned with the preservation of what it see as innate hierarchies of power, from the family (anti-abortion) to society more generally (a militarised polity enforcing racial discrimination). This gives rise to such morbid symptoms as the trad wife and the prepper. In contrast, English conservatism (for it is particularly English, not British) has been relaxed about changes in personnel so long as the structure of hierarchy remains in place (the House of Lords). It has, in a word, been pragmatic. That is not an adjective that could be used to describe the Conservative Party in recent years.

Amusingly, it is liberals who have fretted most over the decline of English conservatism while the Tories have sought refuge in the consolations of pessimism or simply thrown themselves into unhinged mania. A recent example was Kenan Malik in The Observer telling us (in the words of Roger Scruton, no less) that conservatives believe in the free market and choice, when they very obviously don't. Within recent memory we had a Tory government looting the public treasury to shovel money towards "VIP" mates. Malik suggests that Tories were actually ambivalent towards Margaret Thatcher because she combined a Hayekian liberalism destructive of the tried and tested with an ostensible conservatism, but this ignores that her advocacy of the free market was in support of a reactionary social order, not unlike that other Hayek fan, Augusto Pinochet, which tells you what classical liberalism is really about. She didn't create a nation of entrepreneurs but one of rentiers, spivs & petty authoritarians (a legacy that lives on in the Labour Party as much as elsewhere). To be fair, Malik also admits (again quoting Scruton) that what really motivates conservatives is obedience, i.e. the obedience of others towards themselves, which is closer to the truth. 

The meta-narrative of modern political science is the idea that we are witnessing a realignment of voter loyalties. This tends to follow two well-worn tracks: the rise of populism in response to the discontents of globalisation; and the claim that party affiliations are now more determined by values than material interests. The common factor is the rejection of class as both an analytical category and as an organising principle for political action. In conjunction, they also serve to justify the demand that centrist politicians ease up on the neoliberal teleology and show sympathy for conservative values: the petit bourgeois and the working class must be kept onside by pandering to social reaction. With liberalism less universal in its aspirations and conservatism even more obsessively particular, the result has been a gradual merging of the two in a common "party of order" (most obviously in France) whose chief purpose is to protect society from the "chaos" of the left and various alien malcontents. Putting up Stars of David at every entry-point into the UK, as suggested by Robert Jenrick, might appear both mad and deeply trivial, but you wouldn't be surprised if the current Labour government adopted the policy.