Who would want to be in the centre party?

Hugo Rifkind makes a similar point to the one in a Vice article I linked to before, i.e. that the potential new centrist/anti-Brexit party is an endeavour motivated by a feeling that all is basically right with Britain at the moment, or that this is as good as it gets, or at least better-the-Devil you know. That is to say, it is an inherently conservative project. For reasons I explore below, I think that will doom it.


A lot of the people who are attracted to the centrist/anti-Brexit new party idea would not describe themselves as conservative. They think of themselves as left of centre, or social democrats, or liberals, or something of that kind. But the Brexit vote has in fact made them conservatives: they now wish to stand athwart history and yell stop. (And if they want to reverse Brexit after it has happened, then I see no reason not to describe them as reactionaries.) That's quite a shock to one's self-image.

And there's another shock they have suffered too. In addition to finding themselves to be conservatives, worried about an unknown future and clinging on to a known and (suddenly) halcyon past, they find that they were the sort of people who used to run the country.

Back in the long-forgotten days of the Coalition Government, or even the Cameron regime before the Brexit vote, it was possible for people on the mainstream right and left to consider themselves opponents. Their divisions were not exciting, but they were real: should the state spend a little more or a little less than 40% of GDP?, for example, or how many SureStart centres should there be? and what kind of market-based NHS reforms would be most effective?.

The differences were certainly real enough for the left of centre Remainers of this world to believe that they were the opposition to the Establishment - that they were the alternative to the status quo. They could happily tell themselves stories about how the country was really run by people Not Like Them, people who worked in the City, perhaps, or who played golf, or who lived in the stockbroker belt or near Chipping Norton, or who had "Murdoch" as their surname.

But Brexit has surely shattered that illusion. It has shown them that, in the grand scheme of things, they were part of the set who ran the country. When the likes of David Cameron, the Governor of the Bank of England, Goldman Sachs, the heads of universities, the CBI and so on line up with you on a big issue - and you find yourself an outnumbered minority - you have to realise that you were in the Establishment all along. The country really is run by a subset of the people who populated and headed the Remain side, and whether you were a member of the Milliband family or an habitué of Chipping Norton then you were part the same group of people. It turns out that there was some truth in that old refrain from the great unwashed: They're All the Same, Aren't They?

It must be quite a jolt to go from thinking that, come the revolution, you will be in charge, to realising that, come the revolution, you will be first up against the wall. The likes of Cameron and Osborne have always known where they would be after the revolution; it's more of a shock for the likes of Yvette Cooper to find herself comfortably ensconced in the Winter Palace when the revolutionaries broke in.

How does one deal with that kind of cognitive dissonance? One way would be to follow the logic of the argument and undergo a conversion experience. But that would entail embracing a new identity as a conservative, someone who wants to turn the clock back; it would entail becoming a friend of George Osborne and an ally of the likes of Nicholas Soames. That is too much to ask of most left of centre politicians or their supporters. They will continue to want to see themselves as part of the opposition to the Establishment, people who still have metaphorical Che Guevara posters on their walls. They know, deep down, that they are not Tories.

Which is why this centre party can't exist as a party. There's already a party for people who know they aren't revolutionaries, who don't mind being descended from the grander sort of ducal family and who don't hate Tories but just disagree with them a fair bit: it's the LibDems. But a party devoted to a conservative (or even reactionary) cause but 50% populated by people whose hearts beat on the Left makes no emotional sense.

What these people yearn for is a return to the good old days before 2015, i.e. when all people who would make up this imaginary centre party really did run the country, but were divided into two tribes each living happily in the knowledge that it was different from the other. That way they can feel like the alternative to the Establishment again.

Perhaps they will get their wish. But in the meantime, Jeremy Corbyn was sufficiently successful at the last election for his brand of genuinely alternative thinking to become attractive to people on the cultural centre-left. My guess is that when some future Tony Blair steers the post-Corbyn Labour Party back to the "centre ground" and electoral success, re-joining the EU will be no more thought of than re-opening the coal mines or buying back the council houses were after Thatcher.