Is the centre right doomed?

 

This post is not about whether the UK Conservative party will be replaced by Farage’s Reform as the main opposition to Labour. As long as the Conservative party sees its future in emulating Farage’s politics, then the Conservative party is no longer centre right, but a right wing populist party. Which of these two right wing populist parties will win out mainly depends on how good a politician and leader Farage turns out to be. If he plays his hand well, then it is quite possible that after the next election Reform will be Labour’s main opposition, but I have no idea if he will play it well. [1] Alternatively a merger is possible, because as Tim Bale, the UK’s leading academic expert on the Conservative party, has shown the membership of the two parties is pretty similar.

Instead I want to discuss why so many parties of the centre right across the West seem either to have been squeezed out by populist right wing parties (as in France for example), or have transformed into populist right wing parties (as the Republicans have in the US), or have done both (as in the UK). This is the topic addressed in this article by (in my view) one of the best political and policy analysts in the UK right now, Sam Freedman. It is also something I have written about myself, sometimes under the label of neoliberal overreach or plutocracy, most recently here.

At first sight the story Freedman tells is rather different to mine. He first talks about a middle class, then managerial class and finally (following Badenoch) bureaucratic class, that includes “civil servants, psychiatrists, compliance officers and risk managers, most lawyers, and everyone working in HR”. Once, alongside the capitalist class, this group was the bedrock of Conservative support, while the centre/left represented the working class. The political affiliation of this class became more contested as the centre left looked beyond the working class for support (e.g. under Blair in the UK), but initially the centre right still competed for their votes.

However, Freedman argues, a strand of thinking that saw this class as the enemy began to emerge on the right. The capitalist class saw the bureaucratic class as frustrating enterprise and profit, while older socially conservative voters became resentful of the social liberal ideas prominent within the middle/managerial/bureaucratic class. This coalition is exactly what you see behind Trump’s presidency today. (These two paragraphs cannot do justice to Freedman’s account, and I strongly recommend reading the article, particularly if you are interested in some of the thinkers behind this movement.)

My own account lays much more stress on the role of neoliberalism, and its capture of the centre right in the 1970s/80s. After an initial honeymoon period under Thatcher and Reagan, neoliberalism became much more problematic for voters. While politicians on the right wanted to go further in reducing the role of the state, voters clearly didn’t. Rather than compromise their neoliberal beliefs, right wing politicians and the media that supported them turned to culture wars (particularly immigration outside the US), as a vote winning tool.

This shift to social conservatism was largely instrumental: it was a means of keeping or obtaining power rather than a matter of principle or conviction. In areas like immigration and trade when it came to a conflict between neoliberalism and social conservatism, centre right governments when in power chose the former. That in turn led to a revolt by social conservatives (financed by particular members of the capitalist class), leading to either a take over of the centre right party (the US) or the emergence of a competitor party (the UK). Once competition or division emerged on the right, plutocratic elements (including media owners) could gain power and influence by playing one side against the other, and a neoliberal ideology could be subverted (but not completely overturned) with the help of particular monied interests (think Dyson over Brexit, who clearly didn’t speak for business as a whole.)

Although these two accounts sound different, I think there is a lot of common ground. Both involve the radicalisation of social conservatives. The centre right has always been a coalition between social conservatives and a more socially liberal but economically right wing middle class. But Tory MPs were typically much more socially liberal than the party’s members, and partly for that reason in the UK and elsewhere social liberalism has made great advances. Although there may also be specific national reasons, this is one common factor behind the radicalisation of social conservatives in many countries. However I would argue this radicalisation also reflects campaigning choices by neoliberal politicians on the centre right. (In the UK, contrast Edward Heath’s sacking of Enoch Powell with the Conservative party and its press after 1997.) But as my recent piece admits (see ‘critique’) it remains unclear to me how important these campaigning choices were, and whether the advance of social liberalism alone was sufficient to create social conservative radicalisation.

Indeed it could be argued that the transformation of centre left parties from being made up largely of working class voters to containing more middle class, typically university educated voters (what Piketty calls the Brahmin Left) is part of the same dynamic as growing social liberalism. While until recently centre right parties didn’t try to reverse this trend because their leaders were relatively socially liberal compared to their voters, it is still clear to social liberals that the party of the centre left is the one implementing socially liberal reforms, so it will attract their votes. The advance of social liberalism causes increasing middle class support for the centre left, which in turn facilitates further social liberalism.

In addition, the members of the capitalist class wanting a smaller state emphasised by Freedman (eg Musk) and the politicians pushing for a smaller state that I sometimes focus on (eg Osborne) have similar effects. As I argue, the move of the centre right to become more populist follows naturally from the emphasis on social conservative (sometimes called authoritarian) ideas.

We also agree that, to use Freedman’s words, their current strategy is

“hopeless for the Conservatives, many of whom were either in or adjacent to this bureaucratic class before becoming MPs themselves. For those who wish to rebel against the establishment, Reform is a much more attractive choice. Meanwhile the Tories are gifting professional graduate voters to parties of the left and centre, as demonstrated by the ongoing destruction of the Tory party by the Liberal Democrats in long-held heartlands like Oxfordshire and Hertfordshire.”

In my view they would be much better advised to fight on this second flank where they have more chance of winning, but whether their membership and their press will allow them to do this is doubtful. I also agree with Robert Saunders who in 2019 argued that Brexit had helped rot the party’s strategic mind. He shows that before 1997 the party was always receptive to new ideas and thinking and this helped it become such a dominant force, but it no longer has that ability unless those ideas come from Nigel Farage. To quote:

“As John Stuart Mill well knew, the Conservative Party was never truly “the stupid party”. Yet what was once an insult has become an aspiration. It may yet prove the party’s epitaph.”

The parties of the centre right that survive best may be those that don't put all their focus into trying to copy populist right wing politics, and instead fight these populists head on. 

[1] That does not necessarily mean the death of the Conservative party, particularly if Reform does so well that it forms the next government and that proves to be predictably bad for the UK economy.