When the centre goes berserk

Over at the Leveson inquiry a smug Lord Patten – there is no other kind — said the BBC could not possibly be biased because left wingers attack it on some occasions and right wingers attack it on others. The BBC holds the ring, he implied. Uncontaminated by the ideologies of extremists, and possessing indeed no bias or ideology of its own, it speaks for moderation and reason.

Although true, the argument that apparently moderate and reasonable people can be more ideological than extremists is ordinarily a hard one to make. Given the crisis in the eurozone perhaps even Patten can grasp that the centre ground offers no protection against deranged ideas.

Support for the euro was the mark of moderate men for almost two decades. No one seemed more reasonable than Patten when, as a former EU commissioner, he advocated policies that would lead Europe to ruin. On the contrary, it was the critics of the euro who seemed like crazies.  Now those who warned against what I think I can fairly call BBC orthodoxy have been vindicated, and events have revealed the centrists to be the dangerous utopians.
 
When they talk about the centre ground, everyone reaches for the lines in Yeats’ Second Coming about respectable society collapsing.     

Turning and turning in the widening gyre The falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.

We may yet see anarchy or something like it in southern Europe. But for the moment a better poem for our time is Church and State. It shows that, as well as understanding the dangers of anarchy, Yeats also understood that the Chris Pattens of this world – the careful bureaucrats, the respectable judges, and moderate purveyors of conventional wisdom – can be the most dangerous men of all.

What if the Church and the State Are the mob that howls at the door! Wine shall run thick to the end, Bread taste sour.