The Sad Death of the Centre-Right

The Sad Death of the Centre-Right

Sam Freedman — Read time: 9 minutes

The Sad Death of the Centre-Right

And a possible rebirth?

The Queen’s Speech earlier in the month was remarkable only for its lack of content. A Government with a substantial majority; sweeping executive powers; and most of the national press onside, produced a list of 38 bills that created barely a murmur. They are a mix of technocratic tweaks, minor gimmicks, and culture war noise. There's nothing that's remotely up to dealing with the huge challenges the country faces – whether around economic productivity, poverty, housing, public service improvement, climate change, or anything else.

This is not an opinion confined to natural opponents of the Tories. Robert Colvile, who co-wrote the Government’s manifesto, asked in the Sunday Times: “apart from Brexit, what else will the Tories have to show for their 80 seat majority?” Sam Ashworth-Hayes, a conservative commentator, found himself voting Labour in the local elections because:

“The Conservative vision for Britain is a care home with an army attached, and given current trends I wouldn’t bet on the second part standing 20 years from now. They offer nothing for young people…. Stuck between a Labour party that despises me and a Conservative party that actively wants to drain me of my money, I’ll vote for the former until a third way becomes viable.”

There are some prosaic reasons for the Government being in this mess. They’ve been in power for 12 years and all administrations run out of energy eventually. Boris Johnson is a good campaigner but a terrible Prime Minister with little interest in policy and chronically indecisive in the way only a true narcissist can be. By trying to agree with everyone he’s ended up in a place where the Government’s primary political narrative – levelling up economically disadvantaged parts of the country – is in total contradiction to their primary economic narrative of cutting tax. Which means they’re doing neither.

But the malaise goes deeper than personalities or weariness. A large part of the problem is a lack of intellectual firepower.

Thatcher, the last Tory leader with a comparable opportunity to change the country, surrounded herself with a phalanx of formal and informal advisers, centred around think-tanks like the IEA and CPS, who provided her with a genuinely transformational philosophy. Whether you see that transformation as being a net positive will depend on your politics but it happened. The country got a lot richer at the expense of much higher inequality and regional disparities.

Likewise, New Labour came to power with a clear set of priorities and a “third way” philosophy that is now often derided as lightweight but at the time seemed genuinely innovative. It was backed by serious thinkers like LSE professors Anthony Giddens and Julian Le Grand, and well-funded think-tanks like IPPR. Again the impact was substantial with dramatically increased funding for public services alongside standards reform; and a drop in the numbers living in poverty, albeit with inequality staying at much the same level it had been under Thatcher.

Even the Cameron Government engaged in some major reforms around education and welfare, though their topline narrative of the “big society” was largely fluff to cover-up brutal public spending cuts. When I worked at Policy Exchange think-tank in run up to the 2010 election there was still real reforming zeal, and serious people trying to solve actual problems.

But the Johnson Government has none of this. There is no intellectual philosophy. No serious programme of reform. Nor do there appear to be any alternative leaders in the party, surrounded by young intellectuals, desperate to take their chance. While some of the 2019 intake of MPs seem thoughtful, most are frankly an embarrassment to Parliament. There are a set of fundamental structural problems that mean this problem will last well beyond Johnson.

How the centre-right was hollowed out

Despite Conservatives successful control of political institutions over the past 12 years they have completely lost control of cultural institutions; a broad definition of which would include shareholder-owned businesses, as well as universities and voluntary organisations. Society has become a lot more socially liberal, especially under the age of 50, and the youngest age groups most of all. Cameron’s Conservatives tried to keep up with this shift: his Government legalised gay marriage and introduced a variety of new equality laws. He had the explicit aim, at least initially, of detoxifying the Tory party.

But Brexit changed everything. It reoriented Conservative strategists towards voters that had previously voted Labour, but were more socially conservative, which encouraged increasingly authoritarian rhetoric, while leading them to play down their economic liberalism and interest in public sector reform. It also drove out many of the smarter centre-right MPs like David Gauke, Rory Stewart, Nick Boles, and Sam Gyimah. This shift led to the intellectual incoherence we see today, where a party largely made up of tax cutters and deficit hawks is pretending to care about regional inequality. And because of the increased emphasis on authoritarian rhetoric (“lefty lawyers”; “enemies of the people”) it pushed cultural institutions even further away.  

In a recent piece about the bizarre fight between Florida’s Republican Governor and Disney, Derek Thompson wrote “Republicans, freaked out by what they see as cultural disempowerment, are yanking politics right; Democrats, freaked out by what they see as political disempowerment, are pulling institutions left.” A similar pattern has played out here. But because generally the UK population is more social liberal than in the States, and less polarised around race issues in particular, this trade-off is working out worse politically for the Tories than the Republicans.  

Cultural institutions are dominated by graduates and the graduate vote has bifurcated since Brexit. In 2015, 41% of graduates voted either for the Conservatives or UKIP/BXP; by 2019 it was just 30% (compared to 61% with GCSEs only or no qualifications). These numbers are much lower for younger graduates; and will have dropped again since as the Tory vote has fallen nationally. If the number of young graduates supporting the Conservatives is barely into double figures then that is inevitably going to reduce the number who might become centre-right thinkers. It has also created a strong incentive not to critique the dominant cultural narrative if you want to be successful within institutions.

This is very apparent when you look at twitter, which has become the public square for policy debates. Again it skews strongly liberal which means you have to be highly motivated to swim against the tide. I know that if I tweet something that fits with liberal orthodoxies I will be rewarded with many RTs and likes, and minimal challenge. Conversely even a mild comment in the other direction will get much less engagement and a lot more criticism.

Now I don’t think this is something you can blame left/liberals for. There was no conscious decision to collectively squash the institutional space for the centre-right. It’s an entirely understandable reaction to the domination of political machinery by an increasingly reactionary right. Moreover, you may well be wondering, if you broadly identify as left/liberal, what is the problem here exactly? Surely it’s a good thing if young people are overwhelmingly rejecting conservative ideas in favour of a more empathic worldview focused on equality. But it’s bad for liberals too for two reasons.

First, because ideas get better through challenge. Dominant ideologies ossify and become slogans rather than thoughts. Lack of access to alternative ideas harms your ability to sharpen your own. We can see this happening with the Labour party. While their philosophy is more coherent – broadly social liberal and redistributive – they are sorely lacking in imaginative solutions. And, both here and in the US, the concept of equality has become increasingly narrowly focused on income and identity. As James Plunkett noted in this thread  “one consequence [of this] is that it means the left has given up a whole bunch of quite powerful arguments against inequality.” This includes buying into a meritocratic model of “equality of opportunity” that has in fact ended up reinforcing various regional and social inequalities. There is a lot of space for interesting ideas here – some of which James explores in his book “End State”; but it’s a lot easier just to point to bad faith actors on the right promoting various outdated prejudices.

And this proliferation of bad faith garbage is the second reason the death of the centre-right intellectual is so bad for the left - it’s pushed the centre of gravity on the right away from serious thinkers towards provocateurs and chancers. And they are far more dangerous because their motivation is primarily attention-seeking. They’re not even trying to improve anything.

Look at the deterioration in the quality of “serious” right wing press in the UK. The Spectator has gone from being an important contributor of ideas to a haven for fringe racists; professional contrarians; and covid kooks. They still have some good journalists writing for them but most of the interesting ideas have disappeared in favour of cheap clickbait. The Telegraph is the same; relying on endlessly recycled culture war ephemera for its comment section. Rob Colvile in the Sunday Times and Danny Finkelstein in the Times are the last remaining intelligent and thoughtful centre-right columnists for mainstream publications.

This is becoming a vicious cycle. If students’ conception of “the right” is Douglas Murray and Rod Liddle well then of course the vast majority of them are going to find themselves aligned with liberals. And that leaves a hollow void to be filled by the handful of that generation prepared to endorse the populist right worldview.

The centre-right reborn?

So how do we break this cycle? I think we are seeing the green shoots of a new centre-right that could populate a future serious iteration of the Conservative Party (I’m less sure about the GOP – simply because their current positioning is working so well politically even if it’s disastrous for the country.)

The Progress Studies movement emerged from a 2019 article by Tyler Cowen, an economist, and Patrick Collinson, an unacceptably young Irish billionaire who co-founded the online payment company Stripe. It is adjacent to other movements that are popular in Silicon Valley like Effective Altruism, a data-driven approach to philanthropy, and Rationalism, which was explored brilliantly by Tom Chivers in his book on the topic. And it attracts many of the same people.

But it is more politically oriented. The basic idea is that we’re not thinking enough about how to generate the kind of rapid economic growth and scientific progress that we've seen in previous generations. (Which led to much grumbling from academics in various fields who thought they were already doing this.) Most of the key players are broadly socially liberal but market oriented when it comes to economics, and prepared to take on liberal over-reach, for instance with the terrible proposed changes to the maths curriculum in California. They are typically deregulatory and pro-tax breaks for business investment. The “super-deduction” implemented by the UK Treasury was heavily advocated by this group.

As such they are clearly identifiable as being on the right. The UK wing of the movement is perhaps best represented by “Works in Progress”, an online publication funded by Stripe. Two of its four founding editors were previously at right-leaning think-tanks. But they are very careful to stay away from left/right language. Indeed the word “Progress” is more typically associated with the left. They don’t focus on culture wars; they are heavily quant-focused and cite plenty of evidence, (even if in cherry-picked ways, but then we all do that.) Reading “Works in Progress” is a very different experience from reading the Spectator.

As a movement it’s still young, and in the UK at least, not well known even amongst people who spend time thinking about politics and policy. Nor is it without branding problems. It can drift into tedious tech bro posturing. The public profile of Dominic Cummings, who is very much attracted to a lot of these ideas, and regularly retweets people associated with Progress Studies, highlights this danger. Aggressively yelling about how science-y you are while happily ignoring evidence when it suits you is pretty annoying.

But nevertheless it feels like a flicker of light in an otherwise barren landscape. At its best it’s thoughtful and genuinely challenging to liberals like me. It’s so good to find some ideas on the right that are engaging, that the tics and eccentricities (which arise with any new movement) are definitely worth forgiving.

It is absolutely in the interest of left/liberals for “progress studies” to become the new intellectual core of the centre-right. It would wrest attention away from the professional attention-seekers who are filling the empty space at the moment and wasting all our time. And it would provide some real pushback to liberal orthodoxies, which, in turn, should lead to renewed thinking on the centre-left. It could turn politics into a battle of real ideas again.