Is the centre right doomed?
For this reason – plus the fact that other things in the world were happening over the weekend – Saturday's Ipsos poll, showing Reform on 34 per cent and the Conservatives on just 15 per cent, has created less excitement than it might. Caution here is sensible – it might turn out to be an outlier – but it does highlight the fact that even the less surprising, less remarkable polls – in which the Tories poll in the high teens and Reform polls in the high 20s – not to mention May's dismal local election results, still reveal a situation that is extraordinary. The Conservative Party appears to have been relegated from the top tier of British politics.
It is of no comfort to the Tories that this decline is not an isolated example for the mainstream centre right. As Sam Freedman recently pointed out, only two of the G20 countries are currently led by centre-right parties (US Republicans no longer count as mainstream centre right). Whereas once the centre right was the dominant political force in many countries, it is now in structural decline and, in some cases, close to extinction.
This theme is looked at in some detail in a report published last week by Bright Blue. It begins by trying to define and identify the centre right, and argues that, first, a centre-right party needs to be a centrist party, in that – unlike populist parties – it recognises the value of political institutions and seeks to develop policies based on evidence. Second, to distinguish the centre right from the centre left, a centre-right party will have at least two out of three attributes: a caution about change; what they describe as 'valuing the culture of the people local to it' (or 'non-cosmopolitanism'); and a belief in economic liberalism.
Looking specifically at the UK, Germany, France, Poland and the Republic of Ireland, the paper argues that the nature of the centre-right varies depending upon that nation's history and culture. Nor is the way in which the centre right is represented in the party political system always the same. Nonetheless, there are sufficient similarities for comparisons to be worthwhile.
In each case, with the exception of Ireland, the centre right has been diminished by the rise of the populist right – competing for an element of the centre right's traditional support. The response of the centre right has been either to try to delegitimise the populists (which has aggravated the anti-establishment feeling held by some voters), or imitate it (which alienates other parts of their electoral coalition and is often inconsistent with traditional beliefs).
The paper also argues that centre-right parties have often been unable to differentiate themselves from parties of the centre left on economic policy. This was a big problem for the centre right in the 1990s when the end of the Cold War and the emergence of a generation of moderate centre-left leaders meant that the centre right had nowhere to go. In recent years, however, political convergence has been driven more by the centre right moving leftwards on economic policy than the centre left moving rightwards. Economic statism, driven by the need to respond to the Covid-19 pandemic and a desire to appeal to both older and more economically left-wing populist voters, saw centre-right governments deliver higher levels of public spending which, in a period of low economic growth, inevitably resulted in higher taxes.
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The temptation in these circumstances is to try to change the subject and focus on cultural issues, such as opposing wokeness and multiculturalism. But, as the report dryly notes, for those most concerned about these issues, 'the centre right is not the obvious outlet for these sentiments'.
Does this leave the centre right doomed? The UK polling certainly suggests that it might be. But this may not so much reveal that the centre-right electorate no longer exists, rather that the Conservative Party is currently incapable of articulating a persuasive centre-right case. Tarnished by its recent history in office, it struggles to argue that it can deliver competent government and too often presents to the public an agenda that is indistinguishable from right-wing populism.
In France, the party of the centre right, the Republicans, has become something of an irrelevance, even though a poll in 2021 showed that 31 per cent of French people identified as centre right, compared to just 19 per cent as centre left, and 17 per cent as centrist. The risk for the Tories is that something similar might happen here.
What is needed, in contrast, is a confident assertion of centre-right values that distinguishes them from both the centre left and the populist right. Of course, there is plenty of criticism of the Labour government from the Tory frontbench, but it frequently lacks nuance or self-awareness. In response to the rise of the populist right, however, the approach is too often to give the impression that Conservatives think that Reform is right, but that people should not vote for them. That has started to change on the economy as Nigel Farage moves his party to the left economically, but a clear and forthright critique of right-wing populism is lacking.
There is little prospect of that happening. Within the Tory party, the fear is that criticism of the populists would only increase divisions on the right. Reform voters, it is argued, are like Conservative voters, only more so. This view is preventing the Tories from occupying unashamedly the territory that is neither centre left nor populist. Until it does so, the centre right will remain a diminished force in the UK.
[See more: Labour is heading for war over welfare cuts]
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