The death of the British centre
The demagogue rises to the stage. To his crowd of devoted fans, he is their only option, their one true leader. With his jaw hanging and spittle flying, the orator begins his prattling. He denounces those insidious elements, those traitors in our midst, and condemns them for destroying the nation as we know it. The crowd roars in approval, although all of them knew they would and it’s unlikely that the wider public’s opinion of him will change — not from this speech alone, certainly. This man may be labelled a bigot, a hate figure, and a criminal, but it doesn’t matter — he’ll be Prime Minister soon.
Depending on political inclination, you may have read this a few weeks ago as either Jeremy Corbyn or as Boris Johnson. Not only that, you’d have had articles, videos, tweets, and other sources on hand ready to not only justify but prove that this was the case. Don’t worry — this will not be an article of some smug centrism for me to smirk about how actually both sides are bad which I can pretend is somehow a useful point to make. Instead, I’ll say the real problem is Ed Miliband announcing his candidacy for Labour leadership in the coming weeks.
Let’s clarify — it’s unlikely he will run again, even if there are rumours of him doing a lot more networking than would be normal at the present time. No, Miliband is a specific form of British centrist. He’s not a Liberal Democrat, he’s not a One Nation Tory, and he’s not even most centrists within the Labour party. No, Miliband is a sort of New Reaction that is highly specific. It is left wing — sort of — not right. It is progressive, broadly speaking. Miliband specifically appeals to often centre-left white cis men, but it does have its share of minority and women supporters. Miliband is a memory, a dead ideal with those in grieving still yet to accept that the death has passed and it isn’t coming back.
The UK is in a complex state currently, unparalleled in the depth of its constitutional crisis that hasn’t been seen since the Second World War. The monarchy has had to intervene on democratic procedure based on lies given by a Prime Minister elected by a slim 60 thousand people in a population of over 66 million, the economy is set to collapse in the near future from withdrawal from the single largest trading bloc in the world based on “we’ll get good deals” with all 1.8% of the world’s FDI. Scotland, just five years on from an independence referendum, is vying for independence and could take a third of British territory and a good 10% of its GDP if it succeeds in this endeavour. A racist homophobe from Eton is in charge, however, so things may be somewhat more normal than they seem.
The underlying cause for a lot of these is sourced directly from the results of the 2016 Brexit referendum. I could talk here about the dangerous tendency that the Tories have had since Thatcher, drifting further and further to the right until their current point where fascists are actively recruited into the party and every electoral success of theirs sees a surge in hate crimes, and indeed, I could also talk about the sudden rise to prominence of the post-Thatcher Corbyn whose base launched to the national stage to give them something new, refreshed, and better than what had been seen before with the two largest mandates ever given to a Labour leader. However, the centre has been critically ignored by current analysis, so I will focus on them: the Liberal Democrats, the “moderate” Tories, and Miliband.
The Lib Dems, facing electoral disaster after their catastrophic and backstabbing coalition with David Cameron in 2010, found a light at the end of the tunnel in 2016 — an avowedly liberal party, the opportunity to present a new case for remaining in the EU and doubling down on neoliberal institutions would give them a monopoly for defending centre-progressivism and noughties-style gradual social reforms, perceived as abandoned by the ever-rightwards Tories and the “Stalinist zeal” of Labour. Unfortunately, this dream proved to be hopeless as it turns out that there was a reason people didn’t want to support those institutions in the first place. While a great deal of press attention was certainly devoted to the “politically homeless”, the middle class who dedicated themselves to the “socially progressive, fiscally conservative” label that felt abandoned by both parties rather than realising the oxymoronic nature of their own views. With all three of their past leaders having to resign in the last three elections, none are notable with no point in really giving any attention to this party in terminal decline. Centrism, as a position in its own right, is a death sentence in the modern climate of the UK — “balance” isn’t a policy, “compromise” mandates your party not even being in control.
In the seeming death of independent centrists, initially there was hope of moderate Tories coming to the rescue of institutions threatened by autocrats within the Tories and the progression of history by Labour. It was often pointed out, shortly after the Brexit referendum result became apparent, that “Remain Tories outnumber Leave Tories in Westminster”. This was, once again, not to be. Angry local party members took to their party offices to summarily vote their own MPs out on grounds of no confidence for defying what they perceived as the will of the people. Yet more of these Remainers would soon be lost as the party’s continual right drift continued as they defected to the Liberal Democrats, such as Sam Gyimah from East Surrey who was once held as a potential future Prime Minister, or to form doomed new parties in the name of Change UK. None of these have survived — Gyimah and the entirety of Change UK lost their seats in the 2019 election. With the influx of new Tory seats, the centre or “One Nation” faction of the Tories has been destroyed and a rigidly far-right party remains in its place. While some have claimed that the sheer size of the Tory majority may give Boris Johnson the ability to pass relatively centrist legislation, the question one must ask is why? Centrism, in the modern day, is defined by compromise — balance, process, crossing the aisle — which the very majority that supposedly will cause this centrist surge renders unnecessary. The only way this might happen is if Johnson is himself a closet-centrist — I invite people who believe this to read the things he has said while relatively isolated from power. No, it is highly unlikely that we will see a renewal of centrist or even centre-right sentiments within the Tories — it’s all Right from here on.
Having discussed the death of the “pure” centrists and the centre-right, what of the centre-left? Here, we return to Miliband. Ed Miliband was the Labour leader for the 2015 general election which was, after five years of relative failure by David Cameron, set to be a tight race with a narrow Labour majority. Confidence was so high in the Labour camp that Miliband actually unveiled, weeks before polling day, a giant stone column signed by him as prime minister commemorating his inevitable victory and successes in government. Come election day, Labour actually lost seats compared to the last election — which itself had seen a drop of almost 100 after Blair’s successor, Gordon Brown, had failed to revive the centre-right image of the party that had been so carefully cultivated during the late 90s. Miliband was supposed to fix this, Miliband was to be the way forward. It was the clear successor of history, as far as the British left could see: Thatcherism had long been established as the political order of the day as of the 1980s. After 20 years of failed attempts from “conventional” left viewpoints trying to overturn this, Blairism emerged, a significant capitulation wherein ideas of the left were to be merged with Thatcherist ideals of government and economy as part of a new centrism, a New Labour. Having surged to power in 1997 and only being eventually ousted a good decade later, Tony Blair’s successor Gordon Brown attempted to keep this ideal going with some leftward steps amidst an increasingly bold Conservative party who were keen to return to more orthodox neoliberalism, to rewind to a digitised orthodoxy of Thatcher. This failed with almost 100 seats lost and the beginning of the disastrous Tory coalition. Enter Miliband — the reform wing of Blairism. Miliband was to be the solution to Thatcherism’s tendency to crisis, to bust-boom, and not only should but was guaranteed to win for it was the future and thus could grasp at possibilities that were off-limits to the orthodox Blairists and the Tories, intent on ruling over a decaying domain of 1980s Britain well into the 2010s. So Miliband thrived, as at last the future was here — just one pesky election to get out of the way first.
Of course, we know what happened. Miliband lost yet more seats, resigned the leadership in disgrace, and the election of Jeremy Corbyn — the first declaration of post-Thatcherism in the UK, a slash-and-burn rejection of the old order — has left what conventional analysis would name the centre-left in disarray ever since. They have shuffled around between the failed Tory project of Change UK, the Liberal Democrats, and once even a failed leadership bid with a piece of blank paper which has somehow been named “Owen Smith”.
While Neverland isn’t real, the power of its idyllic image is not to be shrugged at — thus, the Thatcherists, staring dreamily into their dusted out cupboard of 80s Britain and reminiscing of the imperial glory in the past when they could starve millions of Indians at their hearts content, have won yet another election. Corbyn is set to resign, and with the party institutionally captured by the activist left components, it is likely that his successor will be somewhat similar in policies rather than the significant departures that the last four leadership elections have all signalled for the party. Ed Miliband is unlikely to run (despite some rumours), but it is likely that Miliband will emerge as a loud, now ignorant, strain.
Let us be clear — Miliband is dead. Miliband harks from an era where the most significant things to discuss in Britain were train infrastructure, public spending, and what this newfangled ‘3G’ could mean for the still relatively new ‘Internet’ on these ‘smartphones’ that Apple seems to be making. The UK today has discussions such as what it means to be British and what the role of history plays in that, the value of its own institutions, and whether it is better to be weak yet independent in hatred while clinging to a dead ideal of imperial glory, or a cog in a machine designed to grind profits out of a populace who can then blame their suffering on brown people and PC gone mad. Miliband doesn’t answer these questions — it was never designed to. Miliband will answer questions like “how can we improve public transportation such that the current rail contract distribution may be more efficient?”, “how can we cultivate an image of Britain as a digital global hub?”, or even “what electoral system might be best such that citizens’ votes are properly reflected in government?”, but it cannot answer any of these questions without the axioms of a British identity that is stable, a faith in institutions that is relatively unquestioned, and an acceptance of neoliberal capitalist hegemony in the post-Soviet world that can be simply cosied up at the edges. As 2020 approaches, none of these things are really acceptable to just take for granted any more.
The reason that this writer suspects Miliband will only grow stronger, not finally die, from this fundamental error at the very root of its ideas, its methods and its conflicts, is precisely because if you accept them, you don’t have to realise a problem. If British identity is stable can be taken as axiomatic, then we don’t need to worry or even think about the surge of hate crimes in recent years or the active courting of fascists by the party that has been in power for the past decade and set to continue likely for another decade. If British institutions are held in strong faith as axiomatic, then we don’t need to question the inevitable economic and political fallout that comes from slicing off the past 50 years of economic integration nor the clear demands from young people for a set of new institutions that can resolve concerns regarding the climate, their careers, and housing, that no party even wants to consider solving for it being “too unrealistic”. If neoliberal capitalism is hegemonic and that’s just the way of the world, then there is no future to grapple for, there is no better state that we can strive for — there are only modifications, alterations and bug fixes upon a fundamentally Tory society.
Miliband is reassuring because if you can just ignore these crises that rock the UK’s political foundations to their very core and threaten to actively destroy the United Kingdom as both United or as Kingdom, then you are spared from the anxiety of realising firstly that Miliband is dead, and secondly, the future is struggling to be born and the powerful are willing for it to be stillborn. Rather than praise the birth of new life and herald the coming of change, Miliband praises an ideal of change that the corpse it holds once promised them and spits in the face of the future trying to formulate in front of it.
It is unclear if the crises of UK identity will result in actual fallout or, like some modern Crisis of the Third Century, Westminster will drag itself on until someone finally puts it out of its misery. Regardless, until that day happens, Miliband will be there the entire way promising change to the homeless and then asking them for change for a fiver, promising it’ll sort this climate mess out in a year or two when the timing’s right. Miliband will fix everything, but not too fast or too dramatic — that would be far too much. Miliband will kill you for its own idea of the greater good but it will send you a polite note of apology for the inconvenience beforehand. If you want any more than that, well, you just don’t understand how the real world works, do you?
