Nigel Doggett on a battle lost
The Case for the Centre Right Ed. David Gauke published by Polity
With the Tory leadership now won by the hard right, what role remains for the centre-right in the Conservative party? And should we care? After the tumultuous past five years it is tempting to look back with rose tinted glasses at those who try to offer a nuanced, realistic assessment of 2024 Britain.
Contributors to this volume include ex-MPs ousted by the Johnson regime over Brexit – David Gauke, Dominic Grieve, Sam Gyimah, Anne Milton, Amber Rudd and Rory Stewart, all now on or beyond the fringe outside Parliament, plus peers: ex-deputy PM Michael Heseltine and ex-SDP Danny Finkelstein.
Right-wing Populism is identified as the malign influence chasing a declining class/age/cultural demographic; Stewart is predictably scathing on Johnson’s Populism.
Much of this is acceptable, despite some dubious unexplained proposals. The health chapter proposes local pay rates, with no reference to macro-economic effects on poorer regions. So much for levelling up! Local government scarcely features, and contributors seem to occupy a benign zone of narrow “politics” where gross deprivation never intrudes. All former MPs except Rudd and Stewart represented prosperous home counties seats.
The economics is also predictably over-reliant on private investment and silent on state funding to “pump-prime” and “crowd in”, ideas featured in the Green New Deal, Great British Energy and National Wealth Fund.
Finkelstein concludes by exploring the concepts of centre-left and centre-right, seeing “centrism” versus populism as the key divide rather than left and right. He ignores divides such as authoritarianism/libertarianism, carbon economy/environmentalism and nationalism/internationalism, which don’t neatly fall on the left-right spectrum. He lists as essential principles the rule of law, protecting individual rights, open trading, centrality of science and technology and the importance of facts that the mainstream left share, but with caveats over trade. The left is represented by various straw men, with Jeremy Corbyn in familiar bogeyman role. Tellingly, he fails to identify a British instance of “extremism” in action, citing only New York City, supposedly captured by trade unions and other interest groups in the 1970s.
He claims the Cameron government as centre-right, glossing over the disastrous austerity and disruptions of the NHS and education. In fact a blind spot throughout is 45 years of neo-liberalism, hollowing out the public sector and surrendering to the hegemony of private corporations regarded as too big to challenge, let alone fail, as with Fujitsu’s Horizon Post Office contract and previously the banks.
Finkelstein says the urgent but hard task is to defend the centre-right within the right, but fails to develop this. Can they really coexist with Badenoch and Jenrick, let alone Braverman, Priti Patel, Truss and Rees-Mogg? It appears this battle has been lost.
We may need to work with such people in democratic institutions but without illusions about their pedigree or political misconceptions. This book won’t be read by the far right and by now its target audience may have given up or joined the Liberal Democrats, or even Labour, whose “big tent” is wide open on the right but is “exit-only” on the left.