These are hard times for centrists, though we should be used to that by now. My tribe – clever, technocratic, sometimes liberal and sometimes smug – has been losing arguments and elections consistently for several years, often deservingly. We may know all about how policy works, but we haven’t been great at politics.
A common centrist lament comes from looking at the current government and despairing at the way libertarian ideologues have taken control, running the country according to the ideas found in Institute for Economic Affairs pamphlets and Allister Heath columns. Is there no one in government who is prepared to take a pragmatic, what-works approach to policy?
Well, I have good news for my anguished centrist chums. We do indeed have a friend in high places, a minister who is open to ideas regardless of their political complexion, interested in evidence and concerned about the situation of the disadvantaged. His name is Jacob Rees-Mogg.
No, this isn’t a joke, though I suspect it may raise a smile from the man himself. I really am arguing that JRM has centrist tendencies.
Let’s start with boilers. Earlier this week Rees-Mogg was on ITV, where among other things he explained that people can cut their gas use and gas bills by turning down the flow temperature on their combi boilers. So what? Isn’t that just common sense?
These days, appealing to the other side and talking to people who disagree with you are rather out of fashion
Yes, but it’s common sense that Liz Truss thinks government has no business sharing with the public. The PM vetoed a public information campaign on energy demand reduction assembled by Rees-Mogg’s business department, because she has ideas about the ‘nanny state’ or something. So, Rees-Mogg went on TV to get the information out there anyway.
This is the sort of practical politics we centrists like – I wrote a whole column earlier this year castigating politicians for not having the wit and courage to do exactly what Rees-Mogg did this week.
Then there’s the Guardian. A staple of centrist politics is appealing across party lines. Our default view of politics is that Tories should do more to appeal to Labour voters, and Labour should do more to court Tories. ‘Elections are won in the centre’, we like to say. (Where the electoral ‘centre’ is, is a tricky question. The awkward truth is that centre-ground opinion is probably less economically liberal and more socially conservative than a lot of centrists assume.)
These days, appealing to the other side and talking to people who disagree with you are rather out of fashion. En vogue instead is staying in your own political comfort zone. Labour people cheerily talk about hating Conservatives. The Conservatives chose as their leader the candidate with the lowest appeal to Labour voters. Truss is the core-vote candidate intent on showing just how small that core is.
Yet this week a cabinet minister went to the Guardian to write an op-ed directly addressing voters who don’t naturally support him, and appealing for their support. Yes, Rees-Mogg again.
His piece was about renewable energy. Centrists like it, because it works and the main objections to it are political and often silly. Rees Mogg likes it too, because it means more British jobs and less British dependence on imported gas.
And just for good measure, Rees-Mogg is again in dispute with the PM over solar energy, where she has some regrettably illiberal ideas about banning farmers using their own land to install solar panels if they want to.
A third piece of evidence is less visible but possibly more significant than the two above. It’s welfare policy. It might surprise some people to know that the cabinet ministers resisting moves to impose real-terms cuts in welfare include the Business Secretary. His colleagues report that Rees-Mogg has been resolute in opposing policies that would make people on low incomes (40 per cent of universal credit recipients are in work) poorer.
Defying Liz Truss over the nanny state. Standing up for green energy and the poor. Appealing across the political divide. When Michael Gove did stuff like this he was hailed as a compassionate genius by many of my commentariat brethren. Where’s the celebration of Jacob Rees-Mogg, the secret centrist?
Here, I should clarify my point. In case it needs saying, I’m not really trying to argue that Jacob Rees Mogg is a centrist politician. Nor am I endorsing him and all his various policy positions. I’m just saying I agree with him on some things. And disagree on others.
And this is the real point. People are complicated, and so are politicians. They very rarely, if ever, fit perfectly into the cookie-cutter shapes that common political labels describe. So ‘right-winger’ Jacob Rees-Mogg sometimes does very centre-ground things. But because we all find simplified narratives easier and more comforting (my side are all good people: their side are all bad) such nuance is often overlooked.
The example of Rees-Mogg is valuable for another reason too, and that’s because it’s a challenge to my tribe. We pride ourselves on putting evidence before ideology, pragmatism before parties. That should mean working with anyone who agrees with us, who does the things we consider ‘sensible’.
Yet centrists are as prone to blind spots as any other group. How many people in the sensible centre were willing to recognise that Theresa May’s attempts at Brexit were the most centrist way to resolve that agony? We got Boris and a harder Brexit partly because centrists helped kill May’s compromises. Tory hardliners helped too, with Rees-Mogg among them.
This week too, he’s been doing things that centrism abhors, such as attacking the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR). Centrists like independent institutions like the OBR, and not just because they’re run by People Like Us. It’s because they work: just ask our friends in the bond markets if you don’t believe me. Rees-Mogg is wrong to attack the OBR, just as he was about Brexit.
But so what? Why not dislike the man’s positions on Europe and economics while agreeing with him on energy or welfare? It’s possible, and should be utterly normal, to agree with someone on some things and disagree with them on others. That is – or should be – an article of centrist faith.
But today, where are the centrists, liberals and greens endorsing Jacob Rees-Mogg on solar or benefits? If he’s right about something, he’s right. So, in a turbulent week, take a moment to note and praise the overlooked centrism of Mr Jacob Rees-Mogg.
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