‘Elections are won from the centre ground,’ the Chancellor Jeremy Hunt has said. Perhaps he should have a word with his own party. The Conservatives have been in power for 14 years and, while they are nominally centre-right, many of the party’s policies and positions will hardly strike the average voter as sensible and centrist. Maybe if the Tories really had stuck to the centre ground they wouldn’t be 21 points behind in the polls and heading for electoral wipeout on 4 July.
Nowhere is the Tories’ refusal to adopt a sensible centrist position clearer than in the gender debate. The middle ground on this issue is surely that the safety of women and girls must be prioritised over the feelings of those who wish to change gender. Yet the Conservatives have adopted a muddled view that has ensured women feel less safe now than when the party came to power. Sex education has, in some cases, been handed over to people who don’t even seem to know what sex is. These ‘educators’ teach kids that men can be women because of some mysterious inner essence. Schools in England were finally told last month not to teach pupils about gender identity. Why did it take the Tories so long to say the sensible thing out loud?
Nowhere is the Tories’ refusal to adopt a sensible centrist position clearer than in the gender debate
When it comes to crime, the Tories have binned the centrist consensus and instead opted to be soft on crime and soft on the causes of crime. Nigel Farage, the party’s bete noire, said last week: ‘It’s OK, you can shoplift up to £200 of kit before anybody is going to prosecute you.’ Whether or not that’s true, the Reform leader had a point: the prosecution rate is now so staggeringly low that only a fairly incompetent thief would end up getting arrested if they stole from a shop.
The Tories have taken the tax burden to a post-war high. They’ve failed to crack down on mass immigration and they’ve put thousands of migrants up in nice hotels at enormous expense. The government has propped up the busted 1940s welfare model. They’ve also failed to build enough houses. This is all based on the mature and considered philosophy of ‘something will probably turn up’, married to Hunt’s ‘with what shall I mend it dear Liza dear Liza?’ economic policy.
The military is a shadow of its former self. The size of the UK armed forces shrank by more than 7,000 soldiers, sailors, and aviators – a drop of 4 per cent – to 183,130 last year. This at a time when the threat of war is higher than it has been for years.
At least there is no shortage of cash for the NHS. Eye-watering sums of money have been chucked at our Most Beloved Institution, yet the experience of patients in NHS hospitals – for the lucky ones who manage to get seen by a doctor before they drop dead – is more miserable than ever. A&E departments on Friday nights turn into Crimean-era field hospitals. Is the NHS really something to be proud of?
Quangos have boomed under the Tories: there are an astonishing 295 government bodies that spend hundreds of billions of public money every year and employ more than 300,000 people. It’s a remarkable achievement for a party that supposedly stands for a small state.
Call me old-fashioned, but none of these achievements sound like sensible centrism to me. The centre of what? An asylum?
Why did it take the Tories so long to say the sensible thing out loud?
We all, to varying extents, live our lives on what we might call the clown car principle. This view holds that, as long as things are still moving forward, it doesn’t really matter that one of the doors on the car is flapping, or that when you beep the horn a jet of water squirts in your face. All that matters is that things are still holding together, even if only just. Much of our life is guided by the hope that someone else will be in the driving seat when the wheels finally fall off and the thing collapses to the sound of children’s cackling.
The government seems to adopt a similar attitude. And the one consolation for the Tories when it comes to their imminent electoral wipeout is that they can run their hands of the situation they have left the country in. The reason for this mess is that the Tory model of centrism that has guided their time in power seems to be about politeness; of saying and doing such mad things but in a nice suit and shiny shoes, and speaking in a measured tone, like nice, sensible chaps and chapesses. Where too many Tory MPs are concerned, this is done apparently to prevent putative Waitrose shoppers in the Blue Wall from furrowing their brows. The Conservatives have tried to stop these voters straying to Labour by the cunning strategy of mimicking Labour policies, and being as indistinguishable from Labour as possible. The absolutely worst thing for too many Tory MPs would be to be seen as gammony (Lee Anderson) and/or ‘brash’ (Farage); simply ghastly.
Yet adopting this approach and sticking to a false idea of what it means to be ‘centrist’ has been what’s made the country such an increasingly unsettled, unproductive and unhappy place over the last few years.
Hilariously, when the Tories have very occasionally said something that might spark controversy – as when Sunak came out with the startling fact that there are two sexes – some of their opponents accused them of moving to the ‘far-right’. Really? Printing money, failing to properly police the borders or our streets, putting up migrants in hotels, and facilitating lessons for kids about ‘gender identity’ is a definition of dangerously right-wing that I’m unfamiliar with. I thought far-right meant annexing your neighbours with crushing military force. Shows what I know.
As Dr David Jeffrey, a lecturer in British politics at the University of Liverpool, recently remarked ‘the (Tory) party isn’t perceived as too liberal, too right-wing, too free market, etc. It’s perceived as too incompetent.’
It will take a practical demonstration from Labour that they are, incredibly, even more incompetent and even more ‘centrist’ than the Tories for the public to start thinking even vaguely fondly of Rishi Sunak’s party again. When, and if, the Conservatives return – and that’s a big when and a mighty if – let us pray that they’ve realised that their version of holding the centre ground has failed Britain and belongs at the bottom of the sea.
Watch more analysis from Katy Balls, Kate Andrews, and James Heale on Spectator TV:
Join Fraser Nelson, Katy Balls and Kate Andrews for a post-election live recording of Coffee House Shots in Westminster, Thu 11 July. Bar opens 6.30pm, recording starts 7.15pm
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