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?