Let us leave the ‘centre ground’

30 September 2006

Maurice Saatchi says that the dull terrain of modern politics is the breeding ground of voter apathy and cynicism: the Tories must ‘climb the hill’ of idealism once more

The chess analogy proved attractive to politicians on both sides of the Atlantic, who decided, as a matter of electoral calculation, that they were better off in the centre. President Clinton made the opening gambit — a smart Left to Right move praising profit, tax breaks, the market economy, etc. Tony Blair copied the move. Eager to avoid contamination with what Marx called ‘the Spectre of Communism’, he invented New Labour, which would combine compassion with competition, freedom with fairness, etc. Between them, they won five elections in a row — a tribute, all agreed, to the power of ‘the centre ground’.

Fuelled by their electoral success, reinforced by the rise of globalisation (if barriers between countries could come down, why not between political parties?), symbolised by the fall of the Berlin Wall (so that there were no dragons left to slay) and endorsed by academic works such as The End of History and Beyond Left and Right, the myth of the centre ground was born and became the conspicuous feature of the age — the equivalent of a political law of gravity. The myth grew and grew until it achieved the level of dinner-party platitude in London and New York — as in the popular injunction: ‘You can only win elections from the centre ground.’

Even the Conservative party succumbed. Hurt by long years of condemnation for ice-cold brutishness, and anxious to avoid contamination with the Spectre of Thatcherism, it was relieved to shed its ‘nasty’ image with a simple move from Right to Left. Everyone hoped, like Jack Nicholson’s American president in the movie Mars Attacks, that if we could put aside our philosophical differences and come closer together, then perhaps, at last, we could all just get along. How much better, anyway, than insisting ‘My ideology is better than yours!’

Lenin and Mao were the dog-eared trump cards of those opposed to ‘ideology’. They remind us what happens when Utopian visionaries are let loose on the world, and that,

Great wits are sure to madness near allied,
And thin partitions do their bounds divide.

But if all ideologies are indefensible, then all ideologies are equal, and the centre ground becomes a moral void.

The first consequence can be seen in domestic politics. The last 20 years have seen a dramatic increase in public sophistication and awareness. People can now spot a Left/Right ‘positioning exercise’ a mile off. The motive for these moves is too transparent. Voters always suspected that politicians would say anything to get elected. Now they know it’s true.