Owen Jones on Centrism in 2017

Some years ago Owen Jones took on the matter of centrism. As Mr. Jones remarked, centrists present themselves as "above ideology: pragmatic, focused on 'what works,' being grown up," in contrast with the extremists to the right of them, and (especially) the extremists to the left of them, while when one moves beyond the abstract principles to specific policy positions one finds that they offer "a blend of market liberalism, social liberalism and--more often than not--a hawkish military posture." Translating to an obliviousness about the reality that they are just another pack of ideologues pushing most of the substance of right-wing politics with an insistence quite at odds with their pretensions to an enlightened moderation.

All this seems to me about right as a characterization of British Labour party centrism. It also seems to me that Jones was right about how centrists have conducted themselves amid what must now be regarded as decades of not only economic stagnation but economic crisis and nationalistic backlash, "offer[ing] little evidence of reflection about their plight," sure that everyone but themselves is to blame for their rejection by a public as they refuse to admit the existence of problems, let alone suggest solutions.

Of course, in considering what this has meant for the Labour Party, where the centrists were out of power amid the ascendancy of "Corbynism" (and going out of their minds over the fact), Jones would seem to have underestimated centrism's capacity to recover politically--and this without modifying themselves in the slightest. Thus does the last sentence of his comment read that "until [the centrists] come to terms with their own failures, they will surely never rule again." Not quite two-and-a-half years later Keir Starmer ousted Jeremy Corbyn from the party leadership, while if it is undeniable that Starmer passed himself off as a social democrat at the time of the contest, his quick and brazen retreat from his promises (confirmed in his repudiation of almost all of them by the time of the 2024 General Election, as an examination of the party's GE Manifesto shows, while he engaged in a ruthless purge of the left-leaning members of the party in Parliament), makes it almost impossible to deny that the center is back in control of not just the party but the country without having come to terms with said failures as it shamelessly flogs the same old policies.

Still, in fairness to Jones one should note that if the center returned not just the leadership of the party but to 10 Downing Street it did so in most unusual circumstances. The election of 2024, after all, came after fourteen straight years of Tory rule with little but a train of disasters to show for it ( Austerity, Brexit, the disastrous response to the COVID-19 pandemic, the 2022 sterling crisis) that ignominiously ended one prime ministership after another in unprecedented succession (David Cameron, Theresa May, Boris Johnson, Liz Truss each leaving office in, to use one of Ms. Truss' favorite words, "disgrace"); and with the particularly unfortunate and multiply unsalable Rishi Sunak at the head as Nigel Farage's Reform UK split the right's vote in a manner unseen in British electoral history; which enabled Starmer to become Prime Minister even with his party getting the ballots of a mere fifth of the eligible voters (rather less than Jeremy Corbyn lost with in 2017, and even less than he lost with in 2019). Nevertheless, if Starmer's becoming Prime Minister is less explicable as a Labour victory than as a shocking Tory collapse that one can be forgiven for recalling to the minds of the historically literate of 2024 the shake-up of the electoral system seen in 1924, it still happened, a reminder of just how much business-as-usual manages to creak on in the absence of anything like genuine public support for political "leaders" and the policies they advance as a product of "consensus."