In the “battle for sanity”, the left have won. For a long time that didn’t seem at all likely. Here’s how it happened
Five years ago, things looked bleak for the centre-left. We’d had years of hearing about how the Pasokification of the left half of politics, at least in the west, was inevitable. This was so named after Pasok, the traditional centre-left, social democrat party in Greece that had been overtaken by a far left party, Syriza, at the 2015 general election there, never to recover, even after Syriza’s moment in the sun had come and gone. This was the idea that there was simply no place for the usual centre-left politics inspired by New Labour and Bill Clinton in the 1990s. The future of the left could only be through a more hardline, much more left-wing direction. Either the traditional parties of the left moved way further to the left, or they would find themselves overtaken by hard left competitors.
By 2019, there were signs that this was not necessarily going to be the case. Emmanuel Macron had become president of France in 2017, running on a centrist agenda. But to be fair, that seemed like an outrider. Trump was president of the United States, with the Democrats floundering in response; Jeremy Corbyn was leader of the Labour Party. It felt like the left side of politics was locked in a death loop, destined to be crushed by the centre-right for years to come.
When Boris Johnson got a huge majority in December 2019, that seemed to cement this idea for many. In the “battle for sanity”, the left had lost. The right had captured the centre ground. Throughout the western world, we saw a movement that embraced post-modernism in a way that was off-putting to at least 80% of the population, leading to the idea that biological sex isn’t real, maybe Stalin wasn’t so bad after all, amongst other oddities. There seemed no way out of this fate. The left had collectively lost its marbles.
Then, something strange began to happen. The centre-left asserted itself and it slowly but surely began to pay off. Biden won the Democratic nomination over Sanders and the left of the party, leading to victory over Trump. Boris Johnson’s fall from grace, to be replaced by Truss and then Sunak in quick succession, led to the ascendancy of Starmer in a way almost no one in Westminster thought possible in 2020. Along the way, the left slowly got less mad. Most of the left of politics throughout the west began to understand once again that elections are won from the centre. That you need to convince some people that didn’t vote for you last time to vote for you the next time.
Allied to this, the right began to slide into insanity. Covid drove everyone nuts, with parts of the left screaming about “Zero Covid”; you know, that we should lockdown society until Covid was entirely irradiated, even if that took 20 years. But in the end, it drove the right more nuts. The left quickly left Covid behind, but for the right, it lingers like a bad smell across all of their politics. Covid was either a hoax, or the vaccine was a scheme to slowly kill us, or whatever, just choose your conspiracy theory and perhaps mix and match a few of them. It’s all insane drivel, and it’s eaten the western right whole to a large extent.
This appears to be the current trend: the far left losing any influence as the centre-left takes over left-wing politics again, with a lot of the looniest bits of what the far left supremacy brought with it being slowly and quietly shelved, replaced with sensible centre-left ideas and concepts once again. All while the right looks set to roll further and further into lunacy.
This isn’t to say there aren’t still a lot of insane ideas flowing through the left still (just look at the way Middle East issues are handled as a prime example) - it’s that the ones who propagate the crazy stuff aren’t in charge of anything now. It is kept to the fringe. Whereas on the right, the maniacs are either in charge still (Trump as the Republican nominee and de facto leader of the party), on the up (every frontrunner for the next Tory leader is from the nutty wing), or anyone even vaguely sane still needing to kowtow to the fruitcakes (Sunak and his meat tax, seven bins, Rwanda stuff is the perfect example of this).
Imagine Biden winning the presidency and Labour ending up with 400+ seats. This isn’t a difficult scenario to envision - it’s basically what the polls are currently telling us will happen. In America, yes, enough Republicans could realise in the wake of a second straight defeat that they have abandoned their party to Trump and his Leninist loons, but even if they do, unwinding that will take years. Meanwhile, how many conspiracy theories will we get about the 2024 US presidential election from the American right?
In Britain, it isn’t unreasonable to think Liz Truss could become Tory leader again. If she was put to the membership as one of the final two, do you really feel confident they wouldn’t pick her again? Even if Truss doesn’t make it, who are the other frontrunners? Priti Patel, Suella Braverman - people who clearly want to go further down the National Conservative road into madness.
How did this happen? I think it’s fairly straightforward. Even at the lowest point for left of centre politics, the centre-left always fought back. Perhaps not as hard as they needed to at times, but the fight was always present. There was a never a sense of people just going along with Corbyn - we always knew the right of the Labour Party was thinking beyond him. And that ultimately paid off for them.
Meanwhile, the centre-right are just nowhere at all, at least in Britain and America. Mostly too timid to go against the grain and abandon their parties, they hope the fallout from the hard right’s ascendancy will not be too severe - that somehow, sense will magically reassert itself at some point, once the hard right have run out of beans. However, I think those beans could keep running for a long time. The centre-right have let themselves be overrun and it might even be too late for them to save the Conservative party at all.
It will be interesting to see how the centre-right in American and Britain react to the elections that are coming, should the centre-left prevail in both contests. It isn’t tricky to see centre-left politics ruling the west for some time to come, but perhaps that won’t turn out to be the case. Like I say, I didn’t see the centre-left turning the ship around as quickly and as effectively as they have done over the past five years - perhaps the centre-right can pull off the same trick. But if they are going to do it, they’d better get started soon.
Thanks for reading. If you haven’t subscribed yet, please do, and I’ll be back next week with the worst from Brexitland.
It's too early to say, but it is possible that, with an electorally shattered post-Sunak Conservative party rolling around in the dust and turning a) right and b) on each other, a neo-centrist Starmer party will start to resemble the 19th century Whigs (the Liberal predecessor).
What I mean by that is, from 1830 to the 1870s (roughly speaking), the Whig-Liberal party - as the English 'left' party - was largely dominant, facing divided opponents, and led by its rightwing, a centrist clique that were:
highly-educated;
ruthless;
well-networked with the elite;
obsessed in their own moral rectitude even in the face of manifest hypocrisy;
in position to control public and civil service appointments to many officially 'neutral' posts;
well-financed;
effective in letting their radical left partners campaign for them and feed them ideas on single-issue campaigns without letting them drive;
associated both with liberal progress and national pride;
able to effectively court talent from the centre-right and woo it into their own network, preventing an effective opposition forming;
the only hope for the lower classes to improve their lot, but not representative of them.
In Britain, deep analysis from Yougov, our most accurate pollsters, broke the electorate into 5 components, the right, the centre right, the centre , the centre left and the left. By far the largest group was the centre, but the centre right plus right was bigger than the centre left plus left. As we know, the broad right, mainly the Tory Party, has been winning around twice as many elections as the broad Left, centred on Labour.
The key reason for the roughly 2-1 advantage of the Tories over Labour being that the right has usually been more successful at winning often reluctant centrist voters than the left. According to conventional wisdom, the Tories had a better story on the economy, law and order, immigration and usually more credible leadership. Labour were left with the NHS and more minor electoral priorities. You can put much of this down to the right wing press rather than reality. If you measure growth rates for each government since 1945, it surprises most people that the highest average is not our supposed economically competent Tories, but Labour. You might suppose Labour have been luckier as to when they were in office, but that is a long period to average out and there is a reason.
Labour have had higher average growth rates because they followed more keynesian based expansionary economics rather than the Tories who are much more monetarist. Some examples. In the early 80's Thatcher handed monetary policy to Prof Patrick Minford in a crackpot monetarist experiment on the whole country, only replicated by the millitary dictatorship in Chile, where it was even more of a disaster. We were expected to believe that if monetary expansion was controlled and limited, some kind of equilibrium based on "Sound money" would result in prosperity, although never explained. Instead, every attempt to control one definition of money and credit money, resulted in other definitions going absolutely through the roof. On the ground it was far more serious. Firms could no longer finance their business cycle. Even 100 year old companies with full order books went to the wall because they could no longer finance the next months wages and input costs. 20% of industry closed forever, many towns and small cities in industrial areas of the midlands and north of England, S.Wales and central belt Scotland were blighted, some to this day. Thatcher in this early period was the most unpopular leader in recorded history. So, the most cunning plan was hatched to harness nationalism to the Tory wagon.
The Foreign Office in Argentina was very aware of regular nationalist demos and campaigning there for the country to take back, as they saw it, Las Malvinas. The bleak, windswept Islands of the south Atlantic, about 400 miles away, where only a few hundred, basically Scottish hill farmers were able to scratch a living, where 13 acres were needed to support a single sheep. The FCO pulled the one Royal Navy ship patrolling the islands and this signalled the UK's loss of interest in the Islands. History was primed up with a little war it was reasonable to believe that the world's 5th or 6th greatest millitary power ought to be able to comfortably win, still at the time able to call on a large number of commercial vessels that have since chosen flags of convenience to cut costs.
To cut a long story short, Thatcher's task force won back Port Stanley and the polls transformed virtually overnight, She went to the '83 General Election on the anniversary of it's victory and saw off the hard left's Michael Foot's Labour on 28% as well as the new Social Democratic Party in league with the Liberal Party, which had seen some spectacular by election wins, but here were on 27%.
The Tories had their home grown terrible recession in 81-2 with a real 5m unemployed, massaged to 3.5m It had another recession deeper and longer than on the continent in 1990. Major/Lamont's Exchange Rate mechanism with the D'Mark crashed badly in '93. The next crash was worldwide on Brown's watch in 2007-8. Brown's actions arguably saved the world from a 1930's depression and he managed to get the economy growing again. It was passed to Cameron/Osborne who immediately turned it into recession from shock cuts. That austerity carried on to this day and as keynesian economists forecast in 2010, would end in flat lining and recession. Since 2007, this has been the longest period of zero growth in wages since Napoleonic times. Add to that brexit, appalling productivity, the loss of inward investment to France and others, continued miserable domestic investment, a crash on the pound, much higher interest rates and our continued milking by a variety of inadequate privatised industries.
Starmer is running the Blair 1990's playbook exactly and has taken Labour so far into the centre, it's more like centre right ground too. Needless to say, while hard left Corbyn ended in the 20's percent, Starmer's support is in the early to mid 40's.
This dreadful two party cycle has to be stopped. The SDP/Liberal Alliance and the subsequent LibDems were unable to "break the mould". It has to come from Labour waking up to the disaster that is Britain's awful decline, conducted by the Tories with brexit, deregulation, vulture capitalism, privatisation, corruption, fantasy empire exceptionalism and global market incompetence.
Labour need to realise that they will not remain in power forever, that anything they do that the Tories don't agree with, will be reversed within 1-2 years of an incoming Tory administration. Indeed, anything in public ownership would represent a honeypot to flog off and offer tax cuts. Or that with the exception of Heath's single term, the past 3 Tory governments lasted four terms each. Unless I consume a Japanese diet and eschew alcohol ( I won't), I won't live to see the end of the next one. Labour must change the electoral system to reflect how voters vote, proportionally, rather than where artificially coralled groups of voters live. We need to be deeply into the European & EU mainstream. To get rid of the House of Lords for something elected, to devolve power deeply to a federal system, to have a codified written constitution, citizens assemblies and to make the commons into a more co-operative, less confrontational, horse shoe shape.