“Elections are won from the centre ground.” Across the summer, this assertion has continued to dominate British political debate. Labour is deemed to have won because it occupied this territory. Conservative leadership candidates are advised by Jeremy Hunt and Rory Stewart to move towards it. But what defines the centre ground?
The term “centre ground” implies that the average voter lies in the midpoint between left and right (in the manner of the Liberal Democrats or the defunct Change UK). Yet as I write in my politics column in this week’s magazine, they do not.
Voters lean left on the economy – favouring public ownership of utilities and higher taxation of the wealthy – and right on crime and immigration (66 per cent believe immigration numbers have been too high over the past decade). They are also liberal on race, abortion and gay rights, and strongly in favour of action on climate change.
For this reason, I argue that rather than the “centre ground” we should use the term popularised by Keith Joseph: the common ground. “The middle ground consensus is only the middle between politicians,” the Thatcherite pioneer declared in a speech to the Oxford Union in 1975. “It is an ephemeral political compromise. It has no link with achieving the aspirations of the people.”
One way in which to identify the common ground is not just by what voters are for but what they are against . As the writer Phil Tinline documents in his essential book The Death of Consensus, politics has often been shaped by collective nightmares.
A recent poll by More in Common asked voters to name their “red lines”: policies that would stop them from ever supporting a party (even if they liked the rest of its programme). The top answers were: criminalising abortion (named by 67 per cent), privatising the NHS (61 per cent), opening borders to all (60 per cent), leaving Nato (56 per cent) and banning same-sex couples from adopting children (50 per cent).
In contrast, the least popular answers were: restoring the death penalty (named by only 35 per cent), rejoining the EU (28 per cent), nationalising all major industries (25 per cent) and legalising assisted dying (16 per cent). These are the specifics that support my general assertion: public opinion is a striking mixture of economic interventionism, authoritarianism and social liberalism.
This common ground helps explain why Keir Starmer was able to win a landslide. Labour put forward a programme that was interventionist – establishing GB Energy, renationalising the railways, taxing private schools – tough on crime and borders, and socially liberal.
Starmer’s riots response has strengthened his law-and-order credentials (who could now call him “Sir Softy” as Rishi Sunak once did?) but he is also patently at ease with modern Britain in the way most voters are.
Centrism is increasingly as much about vibes as it is policy: David Cameron and Rishi Sunak are often described as “centrists” because of their moderate, open manner (despite their right-wing policy positions). Labour is adept at giving its more left-wing policies a centrist gloss.
For these reasons – plus the genuinely centrist section of the electorate (hello Blue Wallers) – centrism is still a useful concept. But if you want to truly understand public opinion in all its variety, don’t think of the centre ground: think of the common ground.-The New Statesmen