‘Where, oh where, is the new centre party?’

7 min readAug 7, 2017

Imagine that you live in a world where you feel comfortable calling yourself a centrist. In a vast, complex world ranging from beautiful acts of empathy to devastating atrocities, where millennia of human history have culminated in the difficult decisions made today by powerful, suited individuals which decide whether some people live or die. Through thousands of years of human development and endless shades of grey, you alone have the knowledge and life experience to describe yourself as being in the absolute centre ground of Politics, which is obviously the most Sensible and Common Sense position because being in the middle of two ‘extremes’ is literally always good.

So why aren’t you in the Lib Dems?

People who call themselves centrists — and who aren’t just masking an extreme ideology by claiming to be ‘in the ‘centre’’, which is another problem entirely — aren’t having the best time in the 2010s. Between the popularity of the ‘radical’ left in Spain, Greece, and the UK, and the rise of right-populists in the guise of UKIP, Trump, and the Front National, everything might be feeling like it’s all moving all a bit too fast for someone sitting in the centre. Jeremy Corbyn goes on stage at Glastonbury to talk about income inequality to a swarm of festival goers, while Trump goes to Poland to let bussed-in Law and Justice goons¹ know that ‘Western Civilisation’ is under attack. These two events are basically the same and equally bad because they’re not in the centre — which, as explained above, is always the best place to be.

To a centrist in a country like the UK or US in 2017, you might find solace in the popularity of some charismatic leaders such as Emmanuel Macron, Justin Trudeau, or Angela Merkel. Macron certainly won some hearts and minds with his daring ‘I am not a fascist’ campaign against Marine Le Pen; Trudeau’s boyish charm continues to be held up like a mirror into opposite land against the actions of the Trump administration; Merkel continues to stand like a monolith as political leaders crumble and fall around her. All of these leaders, apparently, demonstrate that there is some level of Sensible, Reasonable, Centrist sanity in the world which can be aspired to. The rise of En Marche!, especially, invigorated centrists — a brand new political party, ‘abandoning left and right’ and putting to bed the old two party system suggested that even in the UK, a country with an electoral system abnormally harsh towards smaller parties, the same could happen.

But, as mentioned, that party already existed: the Lib Dems. If the centrist, Moderate, Sensible masses existed and were bursting to leave the nasty ‘far-left’ and ‘far-right’ of Labour and the Conservatives respectively, why did the Lib Dems lose an additional ~100,000 votes in the election this year?

I don’t think it’s fair to lay the blame for this solely at the feet of Tim Farron — parties are not their leadership, despite how prevalent the thought seems to be. It doesn’t help that he wasn’t, uh, the most charismatic leader the Lib Dems have ever had. Rather, I think the problem with the Lib Dems is far more systemic.

In the 2015 general election, Nick Clegg had a soundbite: ‘we will be a heart for a Tory government, and a brain for a Labour government’. During the leadership Question Time special, he warned against ‘lurching to the Right with ideological, hardline cuts, or lurching to the Left by borrowing pots of money that we can’t afford’, instead saying that we need to be ‘anchored to the centre ground — balancing the books, but doing it fairly’². This dogmatic centrism, ironically, lost them 15 percentage points and 49 seats. Well, that and the whole ‘going back on a major campaign promise’ thing, too.

Tim Farron, upon assuming the mantle, immediately declared at the Lib Dem conference that not only was the coalition the correct thing to do, but that he’d do it again. He also stated that there is ‘nothing grubby or unprincipled about wanting to win’³ — which was slightly defeated that nobody really knew what the Lib Dems stood for, besides being somewhere in the arbitrary middle ground between Labour and the Conservatives, hence making ‘wanting to win’ just appear more like a power fantasy than a means to an end. Sadly for Tim, he didn’t have the excuse of crossing any red lines to explain the defeat of the party under his leadership.

The fact is that the Lib Dems have learned nothing since 2010. Nobody cares if, when their wages are squeezed by austerity, that the government looks a bit sad about it. Nobody is inspired by Some Guy saying ‘we’re in-between these guys and these guys, but have no original thoughts of our own’ (a shame, considering the rich Liberal/Radical history within the Lib Dems). This is exemplified by Vince Cable, who was coronated after it turned out that none of the other Lib Dems could stomach the idea of becoming head of the Lib Dems. As Secretary of State for Business, Innovation, and Skills, Cable oversaw a staggeringly dogmatic deregulation campaign (calling for a ‘bonfire of regulations’⁴), a wave of privatisations (such as the fire sale of the Royal Mail, where the share price increased 38% within a day), and bore the brunt of the backlash against the Lib Dems for increased tuition fees when he described voting for the increase as ‘his duty as a minister’⁵.

Neither of these actions have resulted in any form of remorse or reconsideration from Cable — who, a couple of weeks before the leadership election, went on TV to denounce the policy that the Lib Dems had championed in 2010 — and lost millions of votes after u-turning on — as ‘a cheap populist gesture’.⁶

This, then, is perhaps the reason why UK centrists both claim to want a centrist government, while at the same time shy away from actually supporting the centrist parties — the UK has seen what happens when centrism becomes the guiding ideology. That is to say, it’s more of the same: the rich get richer, the rest of us can suck it, and all the while the Earth gets closer and closer to the point of no return.

Perhaps UK centrists simply want to return to ‘how it was before’: the heady days of the late 90s/early 00s, of Cool Britannia, and ‘the end of boom and bust’. The actual positive effects of the Blair government, and of the New Labour project as a whole, could be argued about forever (on social media, it is being argued about forever); but the glaring issue at the heart of this ideology — and it is an ideology, although that isn’t a derogatory term for anyone who doesn’t claim to be a centrist — is that it’s been a dead idea for almost a decade, killed off by the Great Recession and its aftermath. Boom and bust didn’t go anywhere, we haven’t fixed any of the ‘radical problems’ in society, and we might be in for a world of low growth and the rapidly rising inequality which accompanies it.⁷

In a twisted sense, self-described centrists are almost conservative in nature — desperately trying to return to a rose-tinted, pre-lapsarian time where you didn’t have to care about politics, because you can trust your leaders not to continue the dogmatic insistence drag you into illegal wars, deregulate the global economy, or infringe upon your basic rights, or the basic rights of marginalised groups such as LGBTQ/GSM⁸, indigenous peoples, or people of colour.

Radical problems — such as climate change, global poverty, rising income and wealth inequality, and international instability — require radical solutions. It’s nice that we have treaties such as the Paris agreement on climate change — it’s less wonderful that all the work which went into the entirely voluntary agreement is now at risk, because the man who hired the CEO of Exxon to his cabinet decided that the entirely voluntary agreement is impinging on the growth of the global hegemon, and also it’s all a conspiracy by China anyway. You don’t have to wave the red flag and be a former Militant member either — there are plenty of options which may even be considered relatively moderate (such as the social democratic ‘Nordic Model’) which would be more intellectually honest, and more likely to at least help (if not fix), the issues we face than this bland, backwards-looking centrism which continues to help only the privileged strata of society. In short, backing people who promise to bring back a period of time which never really existed, in order to solve problems which are patently not being solved using the same methods, is much like screaming into the void.

Which is probably also the best way to describe voting for the Lib Dems.