Why a new "centrist" party would probably fail

It's been heartening to see that the softening of Labour's Brexit position over the summer has not led to a decline in its polling figures, and may even be driving them up a little. Labour's change was apparently motivated at least in part by the fear that a new "centrist" party would emerge that would hurt them more than the Tories. Certainly, there's been much talk recently of such a party, despite or perhaps because of the lacklustre performance of the existing centrist party, the Lib Dems, in the snap election.

The belief that a new centrist party would sweep all before it is based on the idea that if Labour moves left while the Tories move right, a great yawning gap of homeless voters will appear in the middle. Assuming voters are normally distributed across the political spectrum, the picture looks something like this:


Which is fine as far as it goes, but the label "centrist" bugs me, both as a tag for the potential new party and in its other fashionable role as a Twitter insult favoured by lefties. As far as I understand the term, it is essentially a relabelling of "Blairite" for a post-Blair age (just as the more ungainly "neoliberal" refers to Thatcherites post-Thatcher), taking in Lib Dems and perhaps the liberal end of the Tory party as well.

What groups these tribes together is pro-Europeanism; they are the classic Remainers. And your classic Remainer is far from centrist, as a more appropriate 2D view of politics shows:

(The "open" axis here represents liberal, Remainer opinion, while "closed" voters were for Leave.)

As "centrists" are firmly Remain, they are well away from the centre ground on this axis. The centrist label is valid, but only if you project their 2D position onto the one-dimensional left-right spectrum.

It's worse than that, though, because pro-European liberalism is the reason for setting up the new centrist party in this first place: they want to fight on the open-closed "Brexit" axis, not the left-right economic axis. If you project the parties on to the centrists' preferred battleground, the picture looks completely different:


In this picture the "centrists" are in no way centrist at all, in fact espousing a radical liberal position. Which is not to say that they couldn't win from there, but it would clearly be an uphill battle for voters, not the walkover they fondly imagine.

The irony here is that it is in fact Labour who have neatly positioned themselves as the centrists on Brexit, triangulating their hearts out in the best traditions of Blairism, in order to focus their energies on the other axis. And what's more, it's working.

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