This week Jeremy Hunt, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, granted an interview to The Guardian. Asked whether the Conservatives should shift to the right to woo back voters from Reform UK, Hunt rejected the notion stating:
“The evidence of Britain is that elections are always won from the centre ground and I think in a two-party system that will always be the case.”
Really? It’s true that Labour has tended to do worse when pushing extreme socialist policies. But have the Conservatives won electoral advantage by shifting to the middle? Margaret Thatcher was not noted for abandoning Conservative principles for the cause of consensus and triangulation. Her predecessor, Edward Heath, was more keen on pursuing the “centre ground” – with bland appeals to “moderation” and for support from “men of goodwill”. The Conservatives lost three out of the four General Elections fought under his leadership.
Heath’s only victory was in 1970 – on a Manifesto that was strong and distinctively Conservative. It was a heady brew concocted at the Selsdon Park Hotel in Croydon. “We utterly reject the philosophy of compulsory wage control,” it said. Emphasis was put on personal freedom, free enterprise, lower tax, less bureaucracy and reducing trade union power. There would be “reductions in the weight of government spending” with “cost-reduction plans for every single Ministry in Whitehall.” There was the promise of “a great increase in home ownership so that the majority of our nation fulfil their wish to live in a home of their own” with a pledge to “abolish the Land Commission, and to get more land released for building.” None of this was split-the-difference stuff.
Sir Keith Joseph argued that we should seek the “common ground” rather than the centre ground (or middle ground as he called it.) At the Conservative Party Conference in Blackpool in 1975 he warned:
“The trouble with the middle ground is that we do not choose it or shape it. It is shaped for us by the extremists. The more extreme to the left, the more to the left is the middle ground. It is a will‐of-the‐wisp which we follow at our peril.”
Joseph followed up the theme a couple of months later, in a speech to the Oxford Union:
“The middle ground consensus is only the middle between politicians. It is an ephemeral political compromise. It has no link with achieving the aspirations of the people. The people were far closer to Conservative instincts on many issues. But because we ceased to fight the battle of ideas, and told the people what we thought they wanted to hear, we tended to hear what we were saying rather than what they were saying. In the absence of our dialogue with the people based on what all concerned really believed, our picture of the middle ground consensus all too easily became what the communications media were saying, rather than what the public felt. Its location came to be determined by reference to The Observer, The Times, The Guardian and Granada TV.”
The values of the common ground included a wish for greater prosperity and family life. There was a dislike of “dreary uniformity.” There was wide support for a “law-abiding society…emotionally-generated contempt for law and order rationalised in left-wing ideology is confined mainly to a small stratum of intellectuals, semi intellectuals and hooligans.”
Is all this out of date? Joseph’s remark that part of the common ground was that “we all read and see the same news” is rather less true. Multiculturalism has also caused the common ground to shrink. But the basic logic remains valid.
Some Conservatives are so traumatised by the Liz Truss premiership to refute this. Look what happened when there was an attempt to break with consensus, they argue. The mythology of her brief interregnum is that she “crashed the economy” due to “libertarian jihadism” of irresponsible tax cuts and was to blame for our increased mortgage payments. This narrative has been put forward by Labour – confident that it will not be refuted by the Conservative leadership, or by smug “centre ground” pundits in the media. But, of course, it is nonsense. The economy didn’t “crash”, growth was flat as it was before and has been since, here and abroad. The pound would lose a couple of cents against the US dollar – which would make an alarmist item leading the news bulletins. Then the next day it would gain a couple of cents – which had less impact on the airwaves. Interest rates had already been rising before Truss and continued to do so after her – due to the inflation that had resulted from “quantitative easing”, funny money created by the Bank of England to fund a splurge of state spending during lockdown.
It is true that Truss proposed more Government borrowing. It is the case that Governments (like the rest of us) on the verge of going broke find markets sniffy about lending any more money and so charge more for doing so. Like those with a poor credit rating who rely on pay day lenders get stung with a high cost. But the cause of the strain on the public finances was extra spending – the energy price guarantee, a thoroughly “centre ground” policy with a great consensus of political and media support. Along with an equivalent scheme for businesses the subsidies to energy bills were estimated to total annual cost to the taxpayer of £67 billion. It ended costing much less but the markets weren’t to know that.
The tax cuts were pretty footling by comparison. Corporation Tax was not actually cut – but a planned further increase was to be cancelled. The top rate of income tax was to be cut to 40p – back to the level it was under Tony Blair. On “static modelling” it would lose a couple of billion of revenue a year. Some predicted that with the Laffer Curve it would actually raise revenue. But even if there had been no such “dynamic” impact of behavioural change the amount involved was still peanuts compared to the energy subsidies. If Truss had really been a “libertarian jihadist” she would have cut state spending rather than increased it yet further. But she wasn’t so she didn’t.
Yet due to a misreading of the Truss premiership the traumatised Conservatives are too timid to offer bold Conservative policies but instead propose more technocratic tinkering as the mirage of the centre ground is pursued.
The response of Sir Malcolm Walker, founder of Iceland Foods, illustrates the absurd position we have got into. Last week he joined other businessmen endorsing Labour in a letter to The Times.
But this week in an article for that paper he suggested he might vote for Reform UK:
“I well remember living under Labour governments with punitive tax rates, driven by the politics of envy, that left little incentive to work hard and succeed in Britain. Margaret Thatcher turned things around but is now reviled by kids who weren’t even born when she was in power…
“Given that taxes are at a record high, I can only conclude that government is spending the money on the wrong things. The welfare budget is totally out of control and no one in power has the guts to deal with it…
“For 14 years “woke” ideology — which the Conservatives theoretically oppose — has been allowed to spread like wildfire through universities and the public sector…
“Although I haven’t yet firmly decided who will get my vote, for the first time in 54 years of taking part in general elections it really might be Labour. However, now Nigel Farage is standing for Reform, I might have a choice to make.”
Perhaps some of the Conservative politicians pushing the “centre ground” know it isn’t winning votes but are more concerned with their personal brand. They want to be “high status” and consider their careers after politics to be jet setters, in with the in crowd, schmoozing with the big shots, etc. I fear Lord Cameron may be “on a journey” in this respect. But in 2013, Cameron declared:
“The battle for Britain’s future will not be won in lurching to the right, nor by some cynical attempt to calculate the middle distance between your political opponents and then planting yourself somewhere between them. That is lowest common denominator politics – and it gets you nowhere. The right thing to do is to address the things people care about; to fix yourself firmly in what Keith Joseph called the ‘common ground’ of politics.”
Only by reclaiming the common ground can the Conservatives win and deserve to win.