Neoliberal Centrist Dad, episode 1

Welcome to my new world - I hope to convince you to stick around

This is the first newsletter from my new Substack. Since this is going out to all of the subscribers of my last Substack, This Week in Brexitland, I hope to convince the vast majority of you to stay with me.

To start with, I still believe that Brexit was the worst mistake the UK has ever made and I vow to continue to fight against it. I will not accept it as “done” or as something we just have to live with - to turn the sovereignty argument around on the Brexiters, Great Britain has the ability to do what its people want done. And if that means rejoining the European Union at some point in the near to medium future, then calling “Brexit” done is strangely anti-democratic.

However, I stopped my last Substack because I couldn’t just talk about Brexit alone. There are too many other things going on in the world to focus solely on that. In some ways, while Brexit obviously made everything about British politics much worse, it is more a symptom of things going wrong than the cause. In other words, there was a reason that Brexit happened and that is more pertinent than ever now.

One of things I will be exploring a lot in this new Substack is what a decent, reasonable centre-right would look like in Britain. Now, I know a lot of my subscribers will either be firmly or loosely on the centre-left. For a start, I think there is some degree of crossover on what a decent centre-left and a decent centre-right look like (both of them are decent, for a start), but beyond that, I urge you to stay with me because a decent centre-right, even it is something that wouldn’t be for you politically, is key to a lot of what you want to see happen anyhow. For a start, a decent centre-right would embrace being in the European single market again at the very least, paving the way for rejoining the EU. In fact, without the centre-right making this turn, it is difficult to see how rejoin could possibly ever happen, meaning it is absolutely vital to pro-Europeanism.

But it’s about a lot more than Europe. A decent centre-right would banish not only Nigel Farage to the dustbin of history, but his ideas as well. They would be shunted to the extremes, where they belong. This would mean that even if the Tories got into government again as a decent centre-right force, you would merely disagree with them, instead of feeling like they were going to destroy the country. Policies like leaving the ECHR or the Rwanda scam would be seen as insane, by everyone across the majority of the political spectrum, if a decent centre-right could take hold again.

I won’t write this newsletter every week - some weeks I might write more than once. I will try and keep you on your toes, in every sense. I got tired of writing This Week in Brexitland, jaded by what I expected to crystallise out of it. That won’t happen with this one, because I’m just going to write about whatever I see as being important at that given moment. To some extent, I’m just writing to write again, about what I think is vital at any given time.

I will also talk about other things happening in politics, in Britain and sometimes other parts of the world. Sometimes it might even have something to do with the arts or even deal with something lightly amusing. I will try at all times to keep it challenging and engaging. As to the name? “Neoliberal” reminds me a lot of the word “woke” these days - misused and abused so badly, it has lot any real meaning. It simply means whatever the person using it wants it to mean at any given moment. Therefore, I am reclaiming it, making it mean what it literally means, ie, “New Liberal” - a fresh way of trying to think about liberalism that attempts to get to the centre of that ideology’s soul. How do we make life better for the individual in society? Knowing that the answer isn’t the libertarian one (less government = freer people, always and forever) or the mush that liberalism has become in many ways (a sort of watered down, squishy democratic socialism) but is much harder to find - and all the more rewarding therefore, if we can get there.

“Centrist dad” I wish to reclaim because I don’t think there is anything in any way pejorative about either word. Being a centrist is to be applauded - all it really means is that you don’t feel the need to hide behind extremes or go along with the crowd for attention. You don’t feel that either English Nationalism or full-fat socialism are the answers to the problems we face. Most people in the country are in the centre - that is what defines the centre in the first place. Being reasonable and wanting to think about what you believe as opposed to knee jerk agreeing with “your team” is a good thing we need more of. As for being a dad, well, I would say this as the father of three but being a parent has helped give me a massive amount of perspective that I would not have had otherwise. Perspective on the world, on other people (particularly those with whom I do not agree), on the country, on politics. I am not saying that you have to have a child to gain perspective - I’m simply saying that talking about being a “dad” as if were a bad thing is well, not good.

I want to try and help make British politics sane, if that isn’t too crazy to thing to do. Who’s with me?

Thank you for reading. If you haven’t subscribed, please do and stayed tuned for more in the coming weeks.