Britain’s only way out of this mess is a shift to the centre

It has become controversial to say, although it is obviously true, that liberalism remains the finest political creed human beings have ever devised. It is a difficult point to press when Reform and the Green party, both of them self-advertising critics of liberalism, are leading the opinion polls and when the only party with Liberal in its name has a leader better known for silly dancing at conferences than he is for his political credo. But it still needs saying and Adrian Wooldridge has said it at book length in his paean to “the genius of liberalism”, Centrists of the World Unite!

It is a fine book, which stretches an essential truth over an impressive intellectual range, but there is a problem with the title. The main problem is not that “centrist” is a bad word for liberals to adopt, although it definitely is. To call oneself a “centrist” is to concede too much. The centre is always defined by the positions of the others to the left and the right and it thus suggests that the “centrist” has no fixed beliefs at all.

Liberalism is a very varied idea and there are large disputes between liberals, but this is still a better term than “centrist”. Still, that is not the main problem. The far bigger issue with Wooldridge’s title is that uniting is exactly what the centrists cannot do.

Let’s define the “centrists” as a tribe that runs from David Cameron’s Tories on the right, through most of the Liberal Democrats and then takes in the former Blairities in the Labour party. This is a scattered tribe, marooned in legacy parties that do not have the energy either to thrive or die. The era of binary politics, characterised by a Conservative party and a Labour party which each commanded a bedrock class vote, is over. In the 1950s about 70% of manual workers voted Labour and the same percentage of non-manual workers voted Conservative. Today, education and age both predict voting affiliation better than class.

From the first Labour government in 1924 to Sir Keir Starmer’s lukewarm landslide in 2024, the age of class voting lasted a century and everyone in politics today grew up in it. It was an arrangement that posed political strategists of the Tony Blair and Cameron vintage two simple questions. Task one was to win control of your own party. Task two was to entice people to vote for you who might previously have voted for the other side. It was, as Ronald Reagan said of all politics, simple and yet hard to do.

British politics is now complex and even harder to do. The latest YouGov poll of voting intentions splits five main ways. Reform are on 25%, the Greens on 19%, Labour and the Tories on 17% each and the Liberal Democrats on 14% (Smaller parties make up the remaining 8%.) Trying to map that set of numbers on to an electoral system devised for two-party politics is anyone’s guess. But these headline numbers conceal something much more interesting.

Two solid blocs are emerging and they give the centrist a major problem. At the 2024 general election, the left bloc – Labour, the Liberal Democrats and the Greens – won between them 52.6% of the vote. The right bloc – the Conservatives and Reform – won 38%. Today, the left bloc has 50% and the right bloc 42%. There has been a great deal of churn within each bloc – from Tory to Reform, from Labour to Green – but very little change between the two blocs.

This has a worrying implication for the committed centrist, one which struck me when Andy Street, the former mayor of the West Midlands and Ruth Davidson, once the Tory leader in Scotland, launched their ginger group Prosper in an attempt to reclaim a space for liberal conservatism.

The next government is likely to be a coalition and it will be either a consortium of the right bloc or a coming together of the left bloc. In other words, the only hope that Street and Davidson have of being in government would be in a coalition that included – and was probably led by – Nigel Farage. Having just waved Robert Jenrick and Suella Braverman goodbye, they would be thrown back together. By the same token, if the left bloc could arrange enough tactical voting to win the necessary seats, Wes Streeting and Pat McFadden would be making common cause with Zack Polanski.

There is no doubt that Street and Davidson, not to mention Jeremy Hunt and Amber Rudd, would rub along better with the right wing of the Labour party than they do with Reform. There are differences between these Tories and these Labour people, of course. But a coalition between those two groups would be less fractious than a coalition between Labour and the Greens or the Tories and Reform.

If we could turn British politics off and turn it back on again, there would be three new ventures. A rightwing party in which Kemi Badenoch was the most leftwing member, a leftwing party in which Ed Miliband would be the voice of the right, and a liberal party in which the Tory left and the Labour right learn to live both with one another and with Ed Davey’s dad dancing. On current polling, it is quite possible that there would be an even three-way split between these parties, with the centre group best placed to win votes from the other two.

This is all so simple to say but nigh on impossible to do. The current breed of politicians are too attached to their parties and do not accept that their position is terminal. In Centrists of the World, Unite! Wooldridge quotes the advice of John Maynard Keynes from 1925, the start of the era which is now gone: “We have to invent new wisdom for a new age.”

The Labour party and the Tory party, as they are today, stand in the way of that new wisdom.

Photograph by Alamy