Hollowed out

Can the centre hold and resist the far right?

Many countries are now run by parties of the centre-left. Here I ask if they are strong and agile enough to hold off the challenge from the populist right – and I open up the broader question of whether progressive movements can thrive without an idea of progress.

In this first piece I dissect the political hollowing out that now sees centre-left parties relying on the argument that they are not the populist right to keep themselves in office, and I suggest some surprising lessons they can learn from the British Tories and from Donald Trump. In a second piece to be published shortly, I’ll look in more depth at what it means to be progressive in the 21^st century.

Over the years I’ve been an activist, bureaucrat, adviser, funder, writer and academic, and involved in progressive causes of all kinds, from community campaigns to national governments, NGOs and elections to experiments. I like to think that my speciality is how to generate good ideas and then make them happen.

Three years ago I put out a book (‘Another World is Possible’, out this month in paperback) which argued that we are suffering not just from obvious crises – economic, ecological, geopolitical – but also from a crisis of imagination, since although we can easily imagine future ecological disasters or technological futures of AI and drones, most people struggle to imagine better futures for welfare, democracy or care.

The book looks at the history of imagination; the competing currents of the late 2020s, from technological authoritarian nationalism to ecology and neo-neoliberalism; and how parties and movements could reignite their own capacity to imagine, not as an alternative to practical action in the present, but as a complement to it that can give actions shape and direction.

After the book came out I had fantastically rich and lively conversations with socialists, greens, conservatives, liberals and nationalists from Brazil and China to South Africa and right across Europe and north America. They included Mayors, ministers and members of parliaments, businesspeople and NGOs, community groups and academics. The book also seemed to chime with many people who aren’t involved in politics.

But two groups hardly engaged. One were the ideologues who now promote reversing history and returning to monarchy, empire and patriarchy, a group which ranges from figures like Curtis Yarvin (one of JD Vance’s favourites) and Jordan Peterson to hardline Islamists.

The second group were the leading figures in the mainstream parties of the centre-left: the Liberal rulers of Canada, Macron’s En Marche in France, Keir Starmer’s Labour, the centrist Democrats in the US and the SPD in Germany. They said: this isn’t for us. We don’t want too many ideas or too much imagination. Instead, we want to be thought of as practical competent problem-solvers, sensible, grown-up and realistic. Many individual politicians and thinkers in and around each of these parties thought that pragmatism should be combined with bolder imagination. But the message from on top was clear.

I’ve become increasingly convinced that this political stance risks being a political dead-end, as well as inadequate intellectually for the challenges ahead. In many countries the far right is already in power or close to power, and the centrists are depending on their ability to unite every other political viewpoint under them as an alternative. But this risks making the far right the only change option in elections at a time when much of the public badly want change. Worse, because the centre lacks a lively flow of ideas, it risks becoming too hollow and weak to withstand its opponents with compelling arguments.

There are many reasons why progressive parties lost their belief in progress (which I look at in more detail in the next piece), and many electoral factors that have pushed them towards the centre and away from more radical programmes. The decline of their traditional working-class base, and its capture by the right primarily through culture, nationalism and family, drove the centre-left parties more towards the relatively prosperous and highly educated, a base of more winners and fewer losers, while pragmatism made them conclude, not unreasonably, that capturing swing voters required toning down radicalism.

As a result, they slowly mutated into advocates of stability more than change; of orthodoxy more than radicalism; of piecemeal incrementalism rather than structural reform.

The shifts also created a striking cultural gap. The core support for the centre-left parties became the relatively prosperous inhabitants of big cities who tend to be instinctively pro-globalisation, pro-migration and socially liberal, much more than the wider electorate, contributing to a widening gulf between the decision-makers and the public they’re meant to serve.

UK Labour is not an outlier in this respect, and nor is the ethos which during the 2020s led to a conscious retreat from ideas and imagination. This was justified partly by fear of the left who had just been defeated within the party, and partly by the argument that the public only cares about immediate results – better hospitals, rising pay, controlling migration. Longer term ambitions and visions were thought to be a luxury that would annoy the public and be taken as signalling lack of seriousness.

These choices also reflected the personality of the leader, who is a decent, intelligent man, with many of the qualities anyone should want in a leader: calm, thoughtful, ethical. But it’s long been clear that he isn’t much interested in vision, policy or the practicalities of government. The most influential people around him tend to have backgrounds in campaigns, lobbying and communications rather than running organisations or driving through radical change, which helps to explain why, once in power, it soon became obvious that although Labour had plenty of good initiatives and policies, there simply wasn’t enough breadth or depth to the programme for government.

The new centrism

Nearly 18 months after the election the centrist political stance taken by Labour and its equivalents looks neither viable nor sustainable. At various points in history centrists have been bold and radical. But at present they are not. Each country’s politics are different but some common features of the new centrism have become increasingly problematic and are clearly playing into the hands of the populist right.

Tactics not strategy: First, because centrism now lacks a sense of a desirable future it tends to become tactical not strategic, very responsive to media crises or new opinion polls, but not good at articulating anything longer-term except for the occasional word salad. The centre of the UK government now has literally no people working on medium to long-term strategy, yet dozens if not hundreds working (not very successfully) on communications. Visitors from other governments – such as China, India, Singapore or the Scandinavians – struggle to understand why. Without much strategy, the UK government seems to have defaulted to living in an eternal present and a mood of permanent crisis.

Incumbency bias: Second, the new centrism is strongly biased to incumbents and winners, partly because these are its base. Most of the current leaders implicitly assume that most systems are working quite well (which is natural for people who have benefitted from them, whether bankers like Macron and Carney or lawyers like Starmer) and that they require at most tweaking at the margins. Many individual ministers have a much more radical diagnosis, but feel they have to hide it to survive.

Business capture: Third, and related, the new centrist governments are often captured by corporations and the wealthy. The UK gave a senior job to Peter Mandelson, a professional lobbyist, who then used his role to promote clients such as Palantir, but also to many others dotted around government, and even put the competition regulator in the hands of a former CEO of Amazon. Party finance is one factor here: the need for parties to raise money from sources other than members and trade unions pushed them to become dependent on the rich, and on corporates. It doesn’t take much imagination to see how this can go badly wrong. For example, public opinion surveys on AI and public services show that the British public are quite pragmatic about much more use of technology. But they are also very concerned that data should not be handed over to US corporations, with Palantir an ideal candidate to be seen as a villain.

No culture. Fourth, there’s been a cultural hollowing out in many parties that were once fuelled by festivals, music, poetry, film and art and a rich working class culture (the SPD was a prime example). Over time the parties have become desiccated and more dominated by professional fixers, leaving a politics that often feels joyless, airless and lightless (in stark contrast to figures like Meloni or Farage, let alone Trump, who look like they are enjoying themselves, and like to entertain their audiences). A partial exception is Emmanuel Macron, who even made the restoration of Notre Dame a signature project. But the more general pattern has been an almost complete removal of culture from the political stance of parties which have instead become dourly utilitarian at a time when politics has to be as much about theatre as substance (see my comments later).

Low energy equilibrium: Finally, because the new centrism is by its nature a low energy politics, it tends to hollow out the political movements it came from. It’s lack of energy then has unfortunate consequences. It makes no call on citizens to play a part in change - they are left merely as passive spectators. Because it’s reactive rather than proactive, it means that progressive parties do not change the weather where in the past the best always forced their opponents to take up their ideas. And it means that they don’t leave any change in the landscape either – a shift in underlying social and power structures, in the way that contemporary right-wing parties are very careful to do.

These five features look fairly common amongst the old centre-left parties of the developed world. Australian Labour is a partial exception. It has shown itself quite open and creative, and Anthony Albanese is in many ways a model of wise patience, helped by figures like his Treasurer Jim Chalmers who have been given space to think ahead. But elsewhere most centre left parties have experienced long-term declines in identification and support at the same time that they have become intellectually becalmed. The symptom is that they have struggled to achieve the simplicity and clarity that’s needed for messages to get across (for example, to really double down on housing provision, or fixing care, or turning around stagnant productivity).

The far right as a lifeline

The oddity of the late 2020s is that the populist right has given the centre and centre-left a lifeline. In the absence of vision or strategy the centrists have increasingly gravitated to the argument that they are the best protection against the populist right, the only plausible alternative to nationalists, extremists, racists and more.

This has indeed worked well as an electoral strategy for Macron, Carney and Albanese, and it could work for Starmer. As politics in many countries becomes more polarised, the centrist parties can present themselves as the only viable unifiers of a left 50%, and this at least gives them a possible route to survival even as they haemorrhage support to green and left parties (see this latest poll below). It gives them the raison d’etre they were otherwise missing, and a battleground on which they can be genuinely passionate, and it’s encouraged Labour ministers to be much more punchy over the last few weeks: fighting a real enemy rather than enemies on their own side.

But it remains unclear how many times the anti-populist right card can be played. And in many countries a depoliticised electorate will at some point think it worth taking the risk on other parties who can’t be worse (though they can) or who at least deserve a chance (even if they don’t).

All of the governments of the centre left can point to many useful policies and programmes, from pursuing quite bold net zero policies against bitter opposition to seeking to ameliorate social ills and shore up public services. But the hollowness of the centre becomes evident if you look more closely. Where is the serious debate about what stance to take to a capitalism that has clearly so often become the enemy of democracy? How to respond to rapid demographic shifts and remake welfare? How to share power between multiple levels? How to use all the powers of the state to boost affordable housing? How to reinvigorate democracy and restore public trust? How to walk a line between financial excess (often the downfall of left-wing governments) and excessive orthodoxy (which has also sometimes caused their downfall and looks just as big a danger now)?

New ideas on any of these are thought too risky to even countenance, and so a brittle, factional control takes the place of ideas and argument, with often toxic briefings against opponents (including many inside the government) yet another symptom of the hollowing out.

Often this stance is justified by the lazy argument that the public don’t care about ideas, only about practical results, and it’s true that most of the public have little interest in theories and abstractions. But all successful leaders, from Lenin to Roosevelt, Thatcher to Blair, understood just how much ideas give fuel to politics.

Progressive politics around the world is quite dynamic intellectually - full of arguments, some crazy, some intriguing, with lively debates about everything from wealth taxes and radical democracy to new forms or welfare or better ways to harness AI for social goals. But the centrists have detached themselves from these currents and indeed sometimes even seem to take pride in distancing themselves.

A previous generation of leaders, such as Blair and Brown, Clinton and Obama, were hungry and curious about ideas, and adept at adapting them to their needs. By contrast many of the current centrist leaders appear to lack even the slightest curiosity about ideas that could help give them definition - one of many reasons why more radical leaders like Zohran Mamdani or Zak Polanski have become so attractive, tapping into an evident hunger for vision and boldness.

What we can learn from Trump?

Donald Trump exemplifies the very worst of modern leadership: predatory, values-free, vain and destructive. But he also some things to teach. Whatever you think of his actions, there is no doubt that he has shown courage, which shows up the timidity of many of his opponents. He has been willing to resist assumptions and traditions and is confident in bypassing what are assumed to be barriers, highlighting the excessive status quo bias of his enemies. He’s also shown himself willing to use the power of the state for his purposes.

Above all, Trump realises that politics is in part art: a performance, a theatre, an entertainment, as well as a vast machine for action. The best contemporary leaders grasp this and know that they have to feed this, the front of house side of politics, without harming the back of house, the practical everyday work of governing.

But it remains unclear whether many of the centrist leaders quite grasp this. They show little familiarity with a world where so many people get their messages from short form videos; they rely on the kind of formulaic responses that worked quite well a generation ago but now reek on inauthenticity; and they still default to the old formats of lengthy speeches and press conferences aimed at the traditional media. Not many centrist politicians feel really present when they speak to audiences. Too many seem unable to fuse their personal stories and feelings with their jobs.

I have worked for Labour governments at city level, and national level in several countries. Each era demands different approaches – and I don’t advocate repeating the methods of the past. Political creativity has to align the poetry, prose and plumbing of government to the needs, and methods of the time. In the UK too often the current Labour leadership apes New Labour in the wrong ways, both in terms of content (as if the financial crisis hadn’t happened) and in terms of style (with a rigid, pre-social media approach). The outsize influence of figures like Peter Mandelson, particularly on less experienced people around government, has undoubtedly contributed to these mistakes.

I could understand why Keir Starmer and his team concluded that their best chance of winning the last election was to offer only a minimal programme that would be hard to attack. But I couldn’t understand why they decided not to work either on long-term vision or on the detailed planning for how they might govern (I was one of many who offered to help with this, the boring plumbing of getting the bureaucracy to work). I still can’t understand why, once in government, they chose not to create any teams or units focused on the medium-term, let alone the long-term (despite being encouraged to do so by most of the friendly thinktanks, as well as parliament and the civil service).

These choices have, predictably, led to a rapid loss of energy and confidence. The tank looks quite empty because it is. And the result is a visible depression in many of the people in government, who are often clever and well-intentioned but find themselves battered day to day in a politics of premature retreat.

In the UK as elsewhere the centre in its current forms may simply not be strong enough to hold. Many will rally round when faced by the risk of a lurch to the far right, as they have done in recent elections elsewhere. But becoming the parties of stability and orthodoxy almost guarantees that when an energetic and intelligent populist right presents itself as the agent of change, millions will be willing to take the risk. Many of my neighbours in Luton – of all races, classes and ages – already say they might do so. A negative argument – better the devil you know - looks unlikely to sway them.

There aren’t many good lessons to be learned from the period of Tory rule from 2010 to 2024. But one is that the Tories retained power over 14 years in part because of their divisions not despite them. They became a space for often-bitter argument, and repeatedly shape-shifted in ways that helped them defy political gravity and win elections.

Labour too could reinvent itself: it still has time. But it’s cracked down on debate of any kind and has drifted into immobility and rigidity, responding to agendas set by its opponents rather than making the weather. Facing up honestly to the hollowness of the centre is the first step to renewal: but who has the courage to do this?

Another World is Possible: How to Reignite Political and Social Imagination is available from Hurst Publishers, with a paperback edition published in late October.