Is the centre right doomed?

 

This post is not about whether the UK Conservative party will be replaced by Farage’s Reform as the main opposition to Labour. As long as the Conservative party sees its future in emulating Farage’s politics, then the Conservative party is no longer centre right, but a right wing populist party. Which of these two right wing populist parties will win out mainly depends on how good a politician and leader Farage turns out to be. If he plays his hand well, then it is quite possible that after the next election Reform will be Labour’s main opposition, but I have no idea if he will play it well. [1] Alternatively a merger is possible, because as Tim Bale, the UK’s leading academic expert on the Conservative party, has shown the membership of the two parties is pretty similar.

Instead I want to discuss why so many parties of the centre right across the West seem either to have been squeezed out by populist right wing parties (as in France for example), or have transformed into populist right wing parties (as the Republicans have in the US), or have done both (as in the UK). This is the topic addressed in this article by (in my view) one of the best political and policy analysts in the UK right now, Sam Freedman. It is also something I have written about myself, sometimes under the label of neoliberal overreach or plutocracy, most recently here.

At first sight the story Freedman tells is rather different to mine. He first talks about a middle class, then managerial class and finally (following Badenoch) bureaucratic class, that includes “civil servants, psychiatrists, compliance officers and risk managers, most lawyers, and everyone working in HR”. Once, alongside the capitalist class, this group was the bedrock of Conservative support, while the centre/left represented the working class. The political affiliation of this class became more contested as the centre left looked beyond the working class for support (e.g. under Blair in the UK), but initially the centre right still competed for their votes.

However, Freedman argues, a strand of thinking that saw this class as the enemy began to emerge on the right. The capitalist class saw the bureaucratic class as frustrating enterprise and profit, while older socially conservative voters became resentful of the social liberal ideas prominent within the middle/managerial/bureaucratic class. This coalition is exactly what you see behind Trump’s presidency today. (These two paragraphs cannot do justice to Freedman’s account, and I strongly recommend reading the article, particularly if you are interested in some of the thinkers behind this movement.)

My own account lays much more stress on the role of neoliberalism, and its capture of the centre right in the 1970s/80s. After an initial honeymoon period under Thatcher and Reagan, neoliberalism became much more problematic for voters. While politicians on the right wanted to go further in reducing the role of the state, voters clearly didn’t. Rather than compromise their neoliberal beliefs, right wing politicians and the media that supported them turned to culture wars (particularly immigration outside the US), as a vote winning tool.

This shift to social conservatism was largely instrumental: it was a means of keeping or obtaining power rather than a matter of principle or conviction. In areas like immigration and trade when it came to a conflict between neoliberalism and social conservatism, centre right governments when in power chose the former. That in turn led to a revolt by social conservatives (financed by particular members of the capitalist class), leading to either a take over of the centre right party (the US) or the emergence of a competitor party (the UK). Once competition or division emerged on the right, plutocratic elements (including media owners) could gain power and influence by playing one side against the other, and a neoliberal ideology could be subverted (but not completely overturned) with the help of particular monied interests (think Dyson over Brexit, who clearly didn’t speak for business as a whole.)

Although these two accounts sound different, I think there is a lot of common ground. Both involve the radicalisation of social conservatives. The centre right has always been a coalition between social conservatives and a more socially liberal but economically right wing middle class. But Tory MPs were typically much more socially liberal than the party’s members, and partly for that reason in the UK and elsewhere social liberalism has made great advances. Although there may also be specific national reasons, this is one common factor behind the radicalisation of social conservatives in many countries. However I would argue this radicalisation also reflects campaigning choices by neoliberal politicians on the centre right. (In the UK, contrast Edward Heath’s sacking of Enoch Powell with the Conservative party and its press after 1997.) But as my recent piece admits (see ‘critique’) it remains unclear to me how important these campaigning choices were, and whether the advance of social liberalism alone was sufficient to create social conservative radicalisation.

Indeed it could be argued that the transformation of centre left parties from being made up largely of working class voters to containing more middle class, typically university educated voters (what Piketty calls the Brahmin Left) is part of the same dynamic as growing social liberalism. While until recently centre right parties didn’t try to reverse this trend because their leaders were relatively socially liberal compared to their voters, it is still clear to social liberals that the party of the centre left is the one implementing socially liberal reforms, so it will attract their votes. The advance of social liberalism causes increasing middle class support for the centre left, which in turn facilitates further social liberalism.

In addition, the members of the capitalist class wanting a smaller state emphasised by Freedman (eg Musk) and the politicians pushing for a smaller state that I sometimes focus on (eg Osborne) have similar effects. As I argue, the move of the centre right to become more populist follows naturally from the emphasis on social conservative (sometimes called authoritarian) ideas.

We also agree that, to use Freedman’s words, their current strategy is

“hopeless for the Conservatives, many of whom were either in or adjacent to this bureaucratic class before becoming MPs themselves. For those who wish to rebel against the establishment, Reform is a much more attractive choice. Meanwhile the Tories are gifting professional graduate voters to parties of the left and centre, as demonstrated by the ongoing destruction of the Tory party by the Liberal Democrats in long-held heartlands like Oxfordshire and Hertfordshire.”

In my view they would be much better advised to fight on this second flank where they have more chance of winning, but whether their membership and their press will allow them to do this is doubtful. I also agree with Robert Saunders who in 2019 argued that Brexit had helped rot the party’s strategic mind. He shows that before 1997 the party was always receptive to new ideas and thinking and this helped it become such a dominant force, but it no longer has that ability unless those ideas come from Nigel Farage. To quote:

“As John Stuart Mill well knew, the Conservative Party was never truly “the stupid party”. Yet what was once an insult has become an aspiration. It may yet prove the party’s epitaph.”

The parties of the centre right that survive best may be those that don't put all their focus into trying to copy populist right wing politics, and instead fight these populists head on. 

[1] That does not necessarily mean the death of the Conservative party, particularly if Reform does so well that it forms the next government and that proves to be predictably bad for the UK economy.

Reeves is not following in Osborne’s footsteps

 

I often see the claim that Reeves is just doing a version of George Osborne’s austerity, or that Reeves is following Osborne in being obsessed with fiscal rules. As Osborne’s period as Chancellor is increasingly seen as a disaster for the UK (as a few of us shouted at the time, but were ignored by a media that thought austerity was common sense), such comparisons serve a political purpose, but they are very misleading. The big mistake Reeves is making has little to do with Osborne and rather more to do with the folklore that emerged from Labour’s eighteen years in opposition between 1979 and 1997.

If anyone was following in Osborne’s footsteps it was Jeremy Hunt, who promised if a Conservative government was re-elected an additional period of significant spending cuts. In reality, as Will Dunn reminds us, he was repeating the trick played by Osborne before the 2015 election: set impossibly tough targets for spending after the election to limit what Labour could promise. Osborne was re-elected, and promptly moderated the decline in spending (as a percent of GDP). Hunt wasn’t re-elected, but Reeves raised government spending to be roughly flat (as a percent of GDP). From 2010 Osborne cut public investment (as a share of GDP) substantially, while Reeves raised Hunt’s plans to keep public investment roughly flat (as a share of GDP). As regular readers will know, Reeves has done much less than I would have liked, but it is not because she is following in Osborne’s footsteps.

Reeves appears obsessed by her fiscal rules, but in this she is following Gordon Brown rather than George Osborne. It was Gorden Brown that first created the ‘golden rule’, that current public spending should be matched by taxes. (It’s form was different because Brown’s rules looked backwards over a complete economic cycle, while today’s rule looks forward a number of years, but that is a detail compared to the rule’s basic principle.) The context in which Reeves is operating is also more similar to Brown’s than Osborne’s. Osborne’s principle macroeconomic error was to cut spending hard at the bottom of the deepest recession the UK had experienced since WWII, when interest rates were at their floor, going against standard macroeconomic theory and evidence. Reeves inherited a far weaker economy than Brown, but its weakness represents supply side stagnation rather than deficient demand. Overall, if Reeves is following anyone it is Labour’s most accomplished Chancellor, while any obsession about following rules on her part can unfortunately be laid at the door of Liz Truss.

As I have argued many times (most recently here) Reeves’s main error has been a failure to raise tax sufficiently. This is partly the result of commitments that Labour made before the 2024 general election. But Brown and Blair also committed not to raise the standard and higher rates of income tax before the 1997 election, as well as pledging to exempt some items from VAT. That the 2024 commitments covered more areas on tax than in 1997 may just reflect that the Conservative government had changed these additional taxes. Gordon Brown did eventually raise personal national insurance contributions (NIC) to partially fund higher health spending, but only after winning a second term of office. Even in this case I remember him telling me that they were really worried about the media and public reaction to this tax increase, and spent months carefully preparing the ground for that announcement. (Preparations that were, apparently, blown out of the water by Tony Blair in a media interview.)

Labour’s fear of tax increases is therefore longstanding, and owes a great deal to a belief that the public's distaste for tax increases was key in keeping Labour in opposition for eighteen years before 1997. In particular, their defeat in 1992 is often put down to a shadow budget which involved increasing taxes on high earners, which John Major described as Labour’s ‘tax bombshell’. 1992 was an election Labour thought they were going to win, but where they were soundly defeated yet again.

Are Labour’s fears about the electoral impact of tax rises justified? I’m not really qualified to answer (and I’m not sure anyone really knows), but some things are clear. First, many more voters favour higher taxes and spending compared to lower taxes and spending, although in recent years that large gap has been closing. However, the link between the two in many voter’s minds may not be clear: voters know that they pay taxes, but may be unsure that additional tax revenue will go to the kind of government spending they favour. In addition, those with high incomes and wealth tend to have an outsize influence in the media.

What does seem clear is that Brown’s concern about the reaction to his NIC increase to fund additional health spending proved unwarranted. Even a majority of Conservative voters supported it at the time. One difference between then and now, of course, is that back then real incomes were growing, whereas today they are not, such that those on low or modest incomes are already stretched. However, even if that concern is valid, the case for not increasing the top rates of income tax today looks rather thin.

Starmer’s Disgraceful and Damaging Remarks

 

I’m on holiday, and wasn’t going to write a blog post this week. But after a splendid day out on the Northumbrian coast I made the mistake of reading Starmer’s remarks on Labour’s immigration white paper. I have in the past gone through speeches by Cameron or Osborne to point out the lies and deceptions they contained, because most of the media and generally the opposition would not do this job. Unfortunately much the same is now true for what Labour says about immigration. Going through the speech:

1. In the first para: “This strategy will finally take back control of our borders and close the book on a squalid chapter for our politics, our economy, and our country.” Elsewhere he said that high immigration had done ‘incalculable damage’.
   
   You may not have liked the immigration policy of the previous government, but calling a system that prioritised skilled over unskilled immigration or allowed migrants to take jobs in areas where shortages were causing real harm (social care) is hardly ‘squalid for our economy or country’ and it certainly did not cause incalculable damage. This is nonsense language worthy of a Trump style populist.

2. Apparently the previous government’s immigration policy was “A one-nation experiment in open borders conducted on a country that voted for control.” That is a simple lie. A visa system that excludes most low skilled migrants is not an open borders policy. Yet apparently it risked the UK “becoming an island of strangers, not a nation that walks forward together.” Starmer has no evidence to support this, so it’s just a simple appeal to xenophobia, with a long tradition (e.g.)
   
   

3. “Migration is part of Britain’s national story…..But when people come to our country, they should also commit to integration, to learning our language, and our system should actively distinguish between those that do and those that don’t.” Integration is of course important, but implying that this is all down to migrants and nothing to do with the government is false, and voters understand that. So why not say this? Perhaps because the white paper proposes doubling the time before migrants can apply for citizenship, which hardly encourages integration.
   
   

4. The previous immigration system meant “Fewer people who make a strong economic contribution, more who work in parts of our economy that put downward pressure on wages.” There is no good evidence for this, and plenty that shows it is false. If Starmer is talking about social care, then what would he have done when acute shortages emerged and the previous government allowed substantial immigration for social care jobs? Nothing, allowing job shortages to persist with all the suffering that would bring? Or would he have raised taxes or cut government spending to make room for higher wages to attract more to take up social care jobs? By pretending this dilemma doesn’t exist he is being deceitful.
   
   

5. “But at the same time, we do have to ask why parts of our economy seem almost addicted to importing cheap labour rather than investing in the skills of people who are here and want a good job in their community.” As the above shows, ‘parts of the economy’ here includes this government.
   
   

6. “If we do need to take further steps, if we do need to do more to release pressure on housing and our public services, then mark my words – we will.” The old lie, repeated at every opportunity by Reform and many Tory politicians, that immigration puts pressure on public services. The evidence suggests the opposite is true, as the OBR have noted. What the OBR thinks matters a lot, because if immigration is less than they expect that will mean their projections for the public finances will get worse, not better, and the Chancellor will respond with higher taxes or more spending cuts. As for housing, there is this.
   
   

7. “So perhaps the biggest shift in this White Paper is that we will finally honour what “take back control” meant and begin to choose who comes here so that migration works for our national interest.” This statement suggests a fundamental change in our immigration system, whereas in reality the white paper essentially keeps the same skilled based visa system and just changes its parameters.
   
   

Taken as a whole, what I find distasteful about these remarks is not their political viewpoint but instead their simple dishonesty. They suggest, just as right wing populists do, that reducing immigration involves no costs, and in particular it’s unequivocally good for the economy. From these remarks you would be forgiven in thinking that there are no trade-offs at all. You might also wonder why, if that is the case, previous governments have found it so hard to control.

If a government told you that you could have lower taxes and higher public spending without additional borrowing you would be a fool to believe it, but politicians continue to treat voters as fools when it comes to immigration. It is as if politicians believe that being honest will be seen as a weakness of resolve, whereas in reality the opposite is true.

That is why these remarks are disgraceful. They are damaging in part because they validate the rhetoric and dishonesty of both Reform and the Conservatives. But, incredibly, they are also seriously damaging for the Labour government itself, for reasons I spelt out here and here. By seeming to validate almost everything right wing populists say it only makes them more attractive to voters, while remarks like this are almost designed to make social liberals and anyone with a bit of knowledge of the issue disinclined to vote Labour again.

This government had a golden opportunity, with immigration numbers falling, to try and make the UK's debate about immigration more honest. It has done the opposite, and the chance is unlikely to come again. As a result, the UK's squalid and damaging discourse on immigration will continue. 

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The mistakes that have led the Conservatives towards annihilation, and Labour copying them

 

Despite what you read, we have been here before. In the 2019 European Election, Farage and his Brexit party won over 30% of votes, with Labour on 14% and the Conservatives 9%. That directly led to the Conservatives adopting populism by electing Johnson as its leader. The Conservatives under Johnson ticked most of the boxes that define right wing populism: an all powerful leader, endemic lying, attacks on our pluralist democracy (e.g. suspending parliament), sidelining expertise (the second and third Covid waves), culture wars, corruption and so on. The one box he didn’t tick was reducing immigration, which is one reason the Conservatives lost big in 2024 and why Reform has now taken their place. [1]

To some extent the elections last week told us what we already knew, which is that both the two main traditional parties are very unpopular. It emphasised this unpopularity, however, because both Labour and Conservatives underperformed their current national polling as many of their voters didn’t bother to turn up. As the Liberal Democrats and the Greens also did very well, last week was about Labour and Conservative unpopularity more than the popularity of Reform.

If last week’s vote shares were repeated in a general election Ben Ansell calculates that Reform might win an outright majority, but with a bit of tactical voting a Labour/LibDem coalition is more likely. But neither result is that surprising when you see that the same calculations give the Conservatives just 10-20 seats. The Conservatives are in annihilation territory, with Reform taking their place.

Reform gets most of its voters from the Conservatives, and Farage sees the future of Reform as replacing them, so it is instructive to see why the Conservatives have so far utterly failed to stem the Reform tide. Under Sunak and Badenoch their line seems to have been: we agree with Farage on the key socially conservative issues and their importance, which is why you shouldn’t vote for him. It was Farage who first popularised the issue of what he termed an ‘invasion’ of small boats, and the Conservatives who invented a crackpot scheme to deal with them.

By adopting largely the same rhetoric of Farage on asylum and immigration, but failing to change things, the Conservative government set themselves up to lose large numbers of votes to Reform. Worse still, by adopting the language of Farage they alienated those Conservative voters who were economically right wing but socially liberal, and so in the General Election they lost a large number of seats to the Liberal Democrats.

There seems little chance that Badenoch will change this failed strategy, but equally there seems little chance that the strategy will suddenly come good. Put simply, their record on both immigration and asylum will over the next few years weigh more heavily with voters than their Farage-like rhetoric. So why would a voter who really cared about these issues vote for the Conservatives rather than Reform?

On the other hand, the success of the Liberal Democrats has a less secure foundation. If the Conservative party moved away from trying to beat Farage on socially conservative rhetoric and policies, and instead started to sound a little more liberal and less populist, then there is the potential to squeeze the LibDem vote in a general election. The Conservatives' not unreasonable argument would be that voting LibDem would keep Labour in power, because the Liberal Democrats are clearly not against cooperating with a minority Labour government while Reform could not.

To make that transformation the Conservatives would need a new leader, and here they have a problem. James Cleverly is the obvious alternative leader to achieve such a switch, but while a ballot of MPs might put him first, his main rival Robert Jenrick is far more popular with Tory members. These members, who are largely sympathetic to Farage and his agenda, have the final say in choosing a leader and will not want to choose someone who sounds more liberal.

The Conservatives seem to be hoping that over the next few years Farage and Reform lose some of their current appeal. That could occur if Reform makes a mess of running some councils and that gets media coverage, but would that coverage ever be extensive enough to influence predominantly low information Reform voters? Is there any other reason why the media might start subjecting Farage and Reform to proper scrutiny, when they have largely avoided doing so until now. The right wing press is increasingly acting as the media arm of Reform rather than the Conservative party.

Equally it is quite possible that, with more Reform politicians at the local level, we will see more internal dissent within the party. But that has happened already, and it doesn’t seem to have done Reform any harm at all. This is partly about media coverage, but it is also about the nature of a populist party where the leader is king, and unlike the Conservatives there is no means for the king to be deposed.

It is therefore not obvious why what happened to the Conservatives last week will not continue to happen over the next few years, and they will be facing wipe-out at the next general election. For this reason they will be desperate to do some kind of deal with Reform, but equally there is no obvious reason why Farage should cooperate. The final card Conservative MPs have is to offer Farage a merger that included his leadership of their party, which takes us back to those 2019 European election results. Conservative MPs dealt with that existential crisis by giving the leadership to their own right wing populist, when most MPs knew full well that he would be a terrible Prime Minister.

The possible death of the Conservative party is such a momentous milestone in UK politics that you would think the other main traditional UK party, Labour, would be doing everything they could not to make the same mistakes. Yet incredibly Labour seem to have decided to follow much the same strategy that failed the Conservative government so badly. They too are employing rhetoric and making policy that says Farage is right about small boats and immigration. This is alienating parts of their core vote just as the Conservatives alienated its southern heartlands.

The only way a Labour government can avoid a similar fate to the previous Conservative government is by having a really good (in the eyes of social conservatives) record on immigration and asylum. A record that was Farage proof. To see why that is very unlikely to happen, they just need to remember Cameron’s immigration targets.

What Labour, the Conservatives and Reform will not admit is that measures to directly reduce immigration have clear economic costs. If you stop granting visas during a period, like now, of low unemployment you create labour shortages that will reduce output in the short term, and may move jobs, output and therefore income overseas in the longer term. If you stop overseas students going to UK universities you will bankrupt some (with big losses to the local economy) and require government money to help others out. That is on top of the fact that cutting immigration makes the public finances worse. [2]

There was a reason why Cameron didn’t try to hit his targets for immigration. But the fact that he had targets which he missed played into Farage’s hands, who blamed free movement under the EU. Is Labour really prepared to reduce real incomes and growth to hit low levels of immigration? Even if they did, small boat numbers are largely governed by events overseas over which the UK government has almost no control. By mimicking Farage on these issues they are laying the ground for their failure in the eyes of voters.

Will Labour see sense on this? The FT’s George Parker writes: “Morgan McSweeney, Starmer’s chief of staff, will pore over the results on Friday and is likely to conclude that he is right to pursue a “Blue Labour” strategy to address the populist threat — a policy which is already starting to be deployed.” Parker is probably right, unfortunately, but hasn’t this strategy already been deployed since Labour were elected, and for some time before that as well? Are last week’s results more a comment on the failure of that policy?

Or George Eaton in the New Statesman: “expect an increasing number of MPs to demand a “reset” – greater action to reduce immigration (one of the defining issues in Runcorn) and an avoidance of further austerity measures.” Except as any Labour MP should know reducing immigration will increase the need for austerity measures given Labour's fiscal rules, or do these MPs believe the Reform party politicians who falsely say the opposite?

And this, suggesting Labour’s unpopularity is all the fault of Ed Miliband and trying to save the planet! And this. Many Labour ministers, MPs and advisors seemed to have learnt nothing from the demise of the Conservative party.

As I have argued before, it would be far better if Labour started developing a more distinctive line on immigration issues, which didn’t just parrot Farage. Crucially they need to start relating immigration to the jobs immigrants do, and start talking about the causes of high UK immigration at the same time as showing why crude targets are either pointless or damaging. On asylum they need to talk about international fairness and establish safe routes. As yet there is no sign of any of those things happening. [3]

[1] Even earlier, right wing populism achieved its first majority win in the UK with the Brexit referendum.

[2] Migrants tend to be young, so pay taxes but put below average demand on public services. In the short term it is what the OBR does that matters, and here is their analysis.

[3] Unfortunately the Labour government is not just copying Conservative strategy on immigration and Reform, it is in danger of effectively doing so on growth and public services too. In the General Election the Conservatives lost so badly not just (or even mainly) because of immigration but because living standards were stagnant and public services had been run into the ground. There is some evidence that, in terms of losing voters to Reform in Runcorn at least, these issues mattered more than immigration.

On growth and public services Labour wants to do much better than the Conservatives, but they have not as yet put the resources in place to do so. Joining the EU’s customs union and harmonisation of standards would lead to significantly higher growth quite quickly, but Labour are moving much more slowly because they don’t want to upset social conservatives. By pretending they can make Brexit work they are not using one of their strongest weapons against the man who championed it during the referendum.

On public services Labour have stopped the ridiculous additional cuts the Conservative government had pencilled in, but they haven’t raised taxes enough to significantly improve service provision compared to levels they inherited. Hence their very unpopular decisions to end the winter fuel allowance and cut disability benefits. As I note here, planned total current public spending in four years time is slightly below the level it was at the end of the previous Conservative government.

Labour say that they have taken unpopular decisions to enable improvements that will come good over the next few years. If they believe that then they are in serious danger of deluding themselves. The reality is that they have taken unpopular decisions for very little money, so the big danger is that voters will not see future benefits and will decide that a Labour government is little better than a Conservative one, and vote for something different.