Neoliberal Centrist Dad, episode 3

Five things that a decent centre-right in Britain would do, part 1

Near the end of 2022, I wrote the following about where I thought the Tories were, using an analogy:

“The Conservative party at present is like a friend of yours that has had a severe mental breakdown, leading them to drink two large bottles of vodka, afterwards donning circus clown makeup, and then deciding to drop three tabs of acid. They are currently driving a stolen car that is hurtling down the M25 at 95 miles an hour, all while leaning out the drivers’ side window and shooting out the tires of passing vehicles with their father’s shotgun. For the sake of your friend and more to the point, the general public, this clown car needs to be stopped at all costs. The clown who has had a breakdown needs to be put in the drunk tank and sobered up so that the process of healing can begin. Who knows, perhaps after a stint in prison, the clown can be reformed.”

To update this story for late 2024, it’s like this friend has now got out of prison after a few weeks inside and has decided to retreat to their flat where they intend to smoke crystal meth until they are dead. You try and convince them not to do this - that there is a way for life to get better, if only they stop believing in poisonous things and hanging out with all the wrong people - but it’s clear they are on a suicide mission. They have decided what they want to do and for now at least, they will not listen.

This state of affairs doesn’t need to last forever. Some of you have asked me what a decent, British centre-right should do in positive terms, pointing out that often centrism simply defines itself in negatives, ie, what it is against, not what it is for. That it is simply squishing fence sitting, with no positive vision to lay out for the country.

This implies that the only positions that make sense are either reverting to a socialist model disproven to work across most of the 20th century, or some sort of nationalism (which is in fact itself very non-functional in practice, one of the reasons it hasn’t worked when in power - for instance, the brief premiership of Liz Truss). When the reality is this: grown up policies that avoid utopianism are the only ones that work. Policies that accept that this is an imperfect world filled with imperfect people, and the only way to navigate that is through policies that take these facts into account, are the only ones that function in reality. That there is no grand design to history, only our trying to make our way as best we can as a species.

In fact, there used to be a word for this worldview I’ve just espoused: conservatism. Only that word, like “woke”, “socialist”, “woman”, “normie”, “neoliberal”, hell the word “liberal” itself, have been stripped of almost all meaning and are simply used to mean absolutely whatever the user wants them to mean in whatever context they want to shoehorn them into.

I will do my best here to lay out what what I think a decent, British centre-right would do, in as positive and pro-active terms as I can manage (in other words, I will attempt at all stages below to lay out what a decent centre-right should be for as opposed to against, although the latter will inevitable appear here and there). I’ve labelled this part one because in the writing of this, I realised there was so much to say, in order to make this readable, I’m going to have to break it up into parts. So, more to come on this:

1. A decent British centre-right should be pro-EU - and in fact should look to rejoin the European Union as soon as possible

This is the one that will be the most controversial, which is why I’ve put it at the top. Being pro-Brexit has come to be synonymous with being on the right in Britain (the flip-side being, if you are anti-Brexit, you are automatically perceived as being on the left, regardless of your positions on literally anything else). Yet when you strip out the cultural baggage, the arguments for the centre-right to lead Britain’s charge back into the EU are pretty much irrefutable.

One, it hasn’t worked out the way the Brexiters said it would - most importantly for this discussion, in terms of trade and business. We never got the trade deal with the US as promised, all while leaving the single market entirely. Businesses in general dislike it - the views basically range from “didn’t do me any real harm, didn’t do me any real good” to “it’s been a total disaster for us”, depending on the business and the sector. This is the thing a decent centre-right should look at first and foremost - if business as a whole is against Brexit, that in and of itself defines it as a failure.

We would lose pretty much nothing by going back in, except this abstract idea of “sovereignty”, which is meaningless in practice - the fact that we had a Conservative government that was hell-bent on repealing as much EU-derived regulation as they could and came up with virtually nothing was real-world proof of how little sacrifice to Britain’s sovereignty in real terms being an EU member entailed.

More than any practical argument I could make, however, the real reason a decent, British centre-right should campaign to rejoin the EU in unambiguous terms is because Brexit is the precise point where everything started to go wrong for the British centre-right. When the ground was given to the hard-right, still yet to be relinquished. It is the source, whether any figures on the British centre-right understand this or not, of the public’s distrust of the Conservative party. Brexit was the promise of a better world - and it has not been delivered. By owning up to this mistake and promising to correct it, the Tories could start to rebuild trust. In fact, without doing so, I don’t see how this happens.

Keir Starmer has done the Conservative party a huge favour on this front by vowing to “make Brexit work”. Starmer has unwisely taken over responsibility for Brexit, which should allow an intelligent Conservative party the ability to now hold him account for that - to make him own Brexit and likewise, to be free of it themselves.

2. Become visibly, unmistakably pro-business again

One of the hangovers of Brexit was that the Conservative party is seen as anti-business by a huge number of enterprises across the country. I’ve spent most of 2024 speaking to hundreds of businesses first-hand, and whenever you get onto politics, you hear some variation of this statement: “The Tories don’t care about people like me any more, those of us getting up every day, running a business.” The Boris Johnson “Fuck business” line cut through far more than I think any Tory strategist has clocked onto.

This is massive - the business community’s widespread approval is absolutely vital to any centre-right party that seeks to govern. Losing this cohort is so much bigger a part of the Conservatives being destroyed in the 2024 general election than anyone is talking about.

This will be partly policy driven - lower corporation tax, a promise to keep workers rights in a place that helps employers and encourages them to hire more people - but more than that, it will be vibes related. Tory politicians should sound like they like business - and not just substitute “hedge fund manager” for business, but actual businesses that sell goods or services. Sound like you care about the people who create and do things in Britain again. The way this has been absent from the Tory leadership contest has been staggering.

Conservative strategists need to come to terms with the level of extreme damage that was done in the last decade in terms of the way the party is perceived by businesspeople - particularly between 2016 and 2021, when any concerns businesses had about Brexit were angrily swiped away by Tory politicians and commentators. Surprisingly enough, businesspeople didn’t like being told that they knew less about their own sector than people who had never run in a business in their lives. STOP DOING THIS, PLEASE. Embrace business once again. They know more about this than you do, trust me.

3. Farmers are an important part of your coalition - listen to them again for the first time in years

I hate to bring everything back to Brexit, but it’s hard not to when creating this list. Brexit created a schism between not only the Conservative party and the agricultural sector, but the British centre-right as a whole and rural communities. The biggest plus side of Brexit that was sold to farmers was departing from the European Common Agricultural Policy (CAP). They had been told for decades that CAP was the thing that was holding British agriculture back and once they were out, a new dawn would break.

Instead, what has happened post-CAP is seen by the vast majority of farmers as much, much worse. You could run a rejoin campaign in Wales that would be highly successful just off the back of repealing pretty much every bit of post-Brexit legislation related to farming there. They have been hit with onerous and at times nonsensical regulation and expectations - all while they have lost privileged access to the largest single market in the world, one which comprises every neighbouring country. Brexit has been lose-lose for British farmers.

A decent, British centre-right needs to address this and reconnect with rural communities. I don’t see how the Tories or any centre-right party could win again without doing so.

As I say, more to say on this topic. In the meantime, if you haven’t subscribed, please do and I’ll be back soon.