Ideology in the age of the coalition: the strange rebirth of British centrism

Abstract

The financial crisis of 2007–2008 severely disrupted the hegemony of neoliberalism. This article argues that since the establishment of the Coalition Government in 2010, a trend has become discernible within public opinion towards a new consensus on the size of the state, the role of markets and the function of civil society. This consensus constitutes a distinctive British centrist ideology, termed New Centrism. The article examines the methodological and ideological backdrop to New Centrism, considering the particular features of British party competition, rival critiques of the crisis and an ontology of the old neoliberal settlement. The article also assesses consensus in contemporary British politics and situates the rebirth of centrism in Britain in a comparison with the ideological heritage of centrism in European polities, drawing out a substantive characterization of the New Centrist ideological position as Britain's direct equivalent.

Notes

^1. Terrence Casey (Ed.), ‘Capitalism, crisis, and a zombie named TINA’, in The Legacy of the Crash: How the Financial Crisis Changed America and Britain (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), p. 54.

^2. Colin Hay, ‘ “Thing can only get worse...”: the political and economic significance of 2010’, British Politics, 5(4) (2010), pp. 391–401.

^3. Office for National Statistics.

^4.The Coalition: Our Programme for Government (London: HM Government, Cabinet Office, 2010), p. 7.

^5. Anthony Barnett contended that the ‘creation of a Conservative led coalition with the Liberal Democrats had brought the period associated with Margaret Thatcher after her election in 1979 to an end’. A. Barnett, ‘The end of Thatcherism’, Open Democracy, 13 May 2010, available at http://www.opendemocracy.net/anthony-barnett/end-of-thatcherism (accessed 14 November 2012). Given the authors detect a revival, there must be a historically locatable moment when centrism was abandoned. Such a location is questionable, however; the success of British social democracy under the Attlee governments and the Tory neoliberalism of the Thatcher governments certainly tested centrist politics ideologically after the Second World War.

^6. David Arter, Scandinavian Politics Today (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999), p. 78; Maurizio Cotta and Heinrich Best, Democratic Representation in Europe: Diversity, Change and Convergence (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), p. 227; Pim van den Dool, ‘CDA moet kiezer weer raken met keuze voor radicale midden’, nrc.nl, 21 January 2012, available at http://www.nrc.nl/nieuws/2012/01/21/cda-moet-kiezer-weer-raken-met-keuze-voor-radicale-midden/; CD&V ideology, available at http://www.cdenv.be/wie-zijn-we/ideologie (accessed 8 December 2012); Centrist Democrat International – Parties, available at http://www.idc-cdi.com/parties.php (accessed 8 December 2012); CDU Deutschlands – Selbstverständnis, available at http://www.cdu.de/partei/15_3269.htm (accessed 8 December 2012).

^7. Maurice Duverger (Ed.), ‘Factors in a two-party and multiparty system’, in Party Politics and Pressure Groups (London: Nelson, 1972), pp. 23–32; cf. Giovanni Sartori, Comparative Constitutional Engineering: An Inquiry into Structures, Incentives and Outcomes (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1994).

^8. Parties and Elections in Europe – France, available at http://www.parties-and-elections.eu/france.html (accessed 8 December 2012); Bahujan Samaj Party – About the Bahujan Samaj Party, available at http://www.bspindia.org/about-bsp.php (accessed 8 December 2012); ‘Democratic centrists declare cease-fire with liberals to establish united front’, Wall Street Journal, 16 July 2001, available at http://online.wsj.com/article/SB995228486181999191.html (accessed 8 December 2012).

^9. cf. Hans Daalder, ‘In search of the center of European party systems’, American Political Science Review, 78(1) (1984), pp. 92–109.

^10. Gary W. Cox, ‘Centripetal and centrifugal incentives in electoral systems’, American Journal of Political Science, 34(4) (1990), pp. 903–935; James M. Enelow and Melvin J. Hinich, ‘Probabilistic voting and the importance of centrist ideologies in democratic elections’, Journal of Politics, 46(2) (1984), pp. 459–478.

^11. cf. Christoffer Green-Pedersen, ‘Center parties, party competition, and the implosion of party systems: a study of centripetal tendencies in multiparty systems’, Political Studies, 52 (2004), pp. 324–341.

^12. Daalder, op. cit., Ref. 9, p. 107; cf. James Adams and Zeynep Somer-Topcu, ‘Policy adjustment by parties in response to rival parties’ policy shifts: spatial theory and the dynamics of party competition in twenty-five post-war democracies’, British Journal of Political Science, 39(4) (2009), pp. 825–846.

^13. Keith Joseph, Stranded on the Middle Ground? Reflections on Circumstances and Policies (London: CPS, 1976), p. 25. For earlier Conservative critique of the ‘middle ground’, see R. Coleraine, For Conservatives Only (London: Tom Stacey, 1970).

^14. Keith Joseph, Reversing the Trend: A Critical Re-appraisal of Conservative Economic and Social Policies: Seven Speeches (London: Barry Rose, 1975), p. 5. The ratchet effect described the phenomenon of Tory accommodation and concession in government during the post-war period to the shift in public policy positions bequeathed to them by outgoing Labour administrations.

^15. Friedrich Hayek attributed this to the ‘weasel word’ social. Friedrich Hayek, The Fatal Conceit: The Errors of Socialism (London: Routledge, 1988), pp. 114–119; Joseph, op. cit., Ref. 14, p. 25.

^16. The ‘market-oriented society’ is Joseph's Thatcherite decontestation of Karl Marx's pejoratively named capitalist society, Joseph, op. cit., Ref. 14, p. 68.

^17. Michael Freeden, Liberal Languages: Ideological Imaginations and Twentieth-Century Progressive Thought (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005), p. 191.

^18. Margaret Thatcher, Speech to the Conservative Party Conference, 14 October 1983, available at http://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/105454 (emphasis added) (accessed 16 November 2012).

^19. A brief and short definition is offered due to the constraints on space and time. It is the subject of countless and continuously emerging studies, of which the notable contemporary examples include Jason Peck, Constructions of Neoliberal Reason (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 2010; David Stedman Jones, Masters of the Universe: Hayek, Friedman, and the Birth of Neoliberal Politics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012).

^20. Perry Anderson, ‘Renewals’, New Left Review, 2(1) (2000), p. 17.

^21. Indeed, neoliberalism has multiplied in its usage in political discourse, see Taylor Boas and Jordan Gans Morse, ‘Neo-liberalism: from new liberal philosophy to anti-liberal slogan’, Studies in Comparative International Development, 44(1) (2009), pp. 137–161.

^22. For example, the emphasis on supply-side economics was always stronger in the strain of neoliberalism practiced by Reagan than Thatcher. See David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005); S. Watkins, ‘New labour: a weightless hegemony’, New Left Review, May/June 2004, pp. 1–28.

^23. See Rachel Turner, ‘The “rebirth of liberalism”: the origins of neo-liberal ideology’, Journal of Political Ideologies, 12(1) (2007), pp. 67–83; R. Turner, Neo-Liberal Ideology: History, Concepts and Policies (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2008).

^24. Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the College de France, 1978–79, in M. Senellart (Ed.) (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), p. 131.

^25.Ibid.

^26. Andrew Barry, Thomas Osborne and Nikolas Rose, ‘Introduction’, in A. Barry, T. Osborne and N. Rose (Eds.) Foucault and Political Reason (London: UCL Press, 1996), pp. 1–18.

^27. Philip Mirowski and Dieter Plehwe (Eds.), The Road to Mont Pelerin: The Making of the Neoliberal Thought Collective (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009); Ben Jackson, ‘At the origins of neo-liberalism: the free economy and the strong state, 1930–1947’, Historical Journal, 53(1) (2010), pp. 129–151.

^28. Thatcherism and neoliberalism are distinguishable however. Neoliberalism, unlike Thatcherism, is primarily an ‘economistic ideology’, which ‘puts the production and exchange of material goods at the heart of the human experience’. Thatcherism was foremost a moral ideology. Manfred B. Steger and Ravi K. Roy, Neoliberalism: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), p. 12. Thatcherism, furthermore, attends to the historical conditions and inheritance, which allowed the English culture to sustain itself. Individualism and free markets are couched in a matrix of complex, historical traditions with customs, habits and practices that behave as harness to corrosive libertarianism: John Gray, ‘Conservatism, individualism and the political thought of the new right’, in J. C. D. Clark (Ed.) Ideas and Politics in Modern Britain (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1990), p. 91.

^29. One of the distinguishing features of neo-liberal theory is the emphasis on procedural rules and rule-governed approaches to the role of the state (nomocratic) rather than the outcome or end-state views of the role of the government (telocratic). Raymond Plant, The Neo-liberal State (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), pp. 5–27.

^30. See John Gray (Ed.), ‘The undoing of conservatism’, in Enlightenment's Wake: Politics and Culture at the Close of the Modern Age (London: Routledge, 1995), pp. 131–179.

^31. See Andrew Gamble, The Free Economy and the Strong State: The Politics of Thatcherism (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 1994).

^32. Shirley Letwin, The Anatomy of Thatcherism (London: Fontana, 1992), pp. 32–36. Thatcher called them the ‘serious, sober virtues’.

^33. This included, for example, the introduction of the Winter Fuel Allowance, Child Tax Credits, Family Tax Credits and the Educational Maintenance Allowance.

^34. For the dual and often contradictory nature of New Labour, see Matt Beech, ‘New labour and the politics of dominance’, in Matt Beech and Simon Lee (Eds.), Ten Years of New Labour (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), pp. 1–16.

^35. Philip Lynch and Robert Garner, ‘The changing party system’, Parliamentary Affairs, 58(3) (2005), pp. 533–554; Paul Webb, ‘Parties and party system: prospects for realignment’, Parliamentary Affairs, 56(2) (2003), pp. 283–296.

^36. See Paul Marshall and David Laws (Eds.), The Orange Book: Reclaiming Liberalism (Profile Books: London, 2004).

^37. cf. Josephine T. Andrews and Jeannette Money, ‘The spatial structure of party competition: party dispersion within a finite policy space’, British Journal of Political Science, 39(4) (2009), pp. 805–824.

^38. Patrick Wintour, ‘Liberal democrats bank on ground war to hold on to seats’, The Guardian, 4 January 2013, available at http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2013/jan/04/liberal-democrats-hold-onto-seats; Richard S. Grayson, ‘Change and continuity in the liberal democrat general election campaign of 2005’, The Political Quarterly, 76(3) (2005), pp. 393–401; David Cutts, Edward Fieldhouse and Andrew Russell, ‘The campaign that changed everything and still did not matter? The liberal democrat campaign and performance’, Parliamentary Affairs, 63(4) (2010), pp. 689–707.

^39. ‘Lib Dems “are real alternative”’, BBC News, 14 April 2005, available at http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/vote_2005/frontpage/4442769.stm.

^40. Tim Farron, ‘My thoughts on the Cabinet reshuffle’, LibDem Voice, 6 September 2012, available at http://www.libdemvoice.org/tim-farron-mp-writes-my-thoughts-on-the-cabinet-reshuffle-30093.html

^41. Nick Clegg, Conference Speech, 13 March 2011.

^42. Folkpartiet – Liberalism, available at http://www.folkpartiet.se/var-politik/liberalism (accessed 8 December 2012); Parties and Elections in Europe – Sweden, available at http://www.parties-and-elections.eu/sweden.html (accessed 8 December 2012).

^43. Parties and Elections in Europe – Denmark, available at http://www.parties-and-elections.eu/denmark.html (accessed 8 December 2012).

^44. This is perhaps explained by the Gaullist or dirigiste tendencies in the French supra-ideology, which, unlike Britain's neoliberalism, are significantly removed (almost to the point of anathema) from the ideologies espoused by any explicitly liberal party. See Europe Politique – Gaullisme, available at http://www.europe-politique.eu/wiki/Gaullisme (accessed 8 December 2012).

^45. Both sit together as the Alliance of Liberals and Democrats for Europe group, which is majority liberal and where centrism is very much a minority view. See Parties and Elections in Europe – Ireland, available at http://www.parties-and-elections.eu/ireland.html (accessed 8 December 2012); Alliance of Liberals and Democrats for Europe – Country: Ireland, available at http://www.alde.eu/alde-group/alde-across-europe-map-member-state/country/?tx_flowchart_pi2%5BshowCountry%5D = 3 (accessed 8 December 2012).

^46. Parties and Elections in Europe – Finland, available at http://www.parties-and-elections.eu/finland.html (accessed 8 December 2012).

^47. Parties and Elections in Europe – Norway, available at http://www.parties-and-elections.eu/norway.html (accessed 8 December 2012).

^48. Parties and Elections in Europe – Italy, available at http://www.parties-and-elections.eu/italy.html (accessed 8 December 2012).

^49. Ludger Helms, ‘The German federal election, September 2009’, Electoral Studies, 29(2) (2010), pp. 289–292.

^50. See Susan Strange, Casino Capitalism (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997).

^51. For overview of ideological diagnoses of origins of the financial crisis, see Terrence Casey (Ed.), ‘Introduction: the political challenges of hard times’, in Casey, op. cit., Ref. 1, pp. 1–16.

^52. ‘“Occupy” protests: activists deliver charter of grievances’, The Telegraph, 17 October 2011, available at http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/8831851/Occupy-protests-activists-deliver-charter-of-grievances.html; ‘Archbishop of Canterbury questions whether public will accept austerity to save the economy’, The Daily Mail, 15 July 2010, available at http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1294739/Archbishop-Canterbury-questions-public-willl-accept-austerity-save-economy.html; Deborah Orr, ‘We did socialism and capitalism, and we're still in a mess. But there is hope’, The Guardian, 1 June 2012, available at http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/jun/01/middle-class-recession-financial-crash

^53. Alison Park, Elizabeth Clery, John Curtice, Miranda Phillips and David Utting (Eds.), ‘Key findings: social attitudes in an age of austerity’, in British Social Attitudes 29th Report (London: Sage, 2012), p.iii.

^54.Ibid., p.ix.

^55.Ibid., p.iii.

^56.Ibid., p.ix.

^57.Ibid., p.ix.

^58. Erik Voeten, ‘Partisan shifts after financial crises’, Washington Monthly, 14 October 2011; Mark J. Smith, ‘Is austerity causing a shift to the left?’, MSN News, 17 May 2012, available at http://news.uk.msn.com/blog/politics-blogpost.aspx?post = 348d80cd-2335-45f7-a51b-823801fb0eb0 (accessed 8 December 2012).

^59. Stuart Jeffries, ‘Why Marxism is on the rise again’, The Guardian, 4 July 2012, available at http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/jul/04/the-return-of-marxism; ‘The reawakening of Europe's “Genuine Left”’, QFinance, available at http://www.qfinance.com/blogs/-economy%20watch/2012/11/19/french-socialist-europe-left-eu-ideologies-policies-austerity (accessed 8 December 2012).

^60. Ted Halstead and Michael Lind, The Radical Center: The Future of American Politics (New York: Doubleday, 2001); Mark Satin, Radical Middle: The Politics We Need Now (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2004).

^61. John Curtice and Alison Park, ‘A tale of two crises: banks, MPs’ expenses and public opinion', in British Social Attitudes27th Report (London: Sage, 2010), 150ff.

^62. For caution seeing the aftermath of the financial crisis as the end of neoliberalism, see Wyn Grant, ‘Was there ever an Anglo-American model of capitalism?’ in Casey, op. cit., Ref. 1, pp. 19–37; Colin Crouch, The Strange Non-Death of Neoliberalism (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2011).

^63. Alexander Herzen, ‘[T]he departing world leaves behind it, not an heir, but a pregnant widow. Between the death of one and the birth of the other’, quoted in Neal Ascherson, Black Sea (London: Vintage, 1996), p. 12.

^64. Peter Mandelson, ‘An effective state, not a big state: forging a national strategy’, in R. Philpot (Ed.), The Purple Book: A Progressive Future for Labour (London: Biteback, 2011), p. 36.

^65. From the Latin, Consentire, meaning to feel together or agree.

^66. Michael Freeden, ‘The stranger at the feast: ideology and public policy in twentieth century Britain’, Twentieth Century British History, 1(1) (1990), p. 32.

^67. Ben Pimlott, ‘The myth of consensus’, in L.M. Smith (Ed.), The Making of Britain (London: Macmillan, 1988), pp. 129–142.

^68. Conflict is a more apposite hallmark of contemporary British politics than consensus. See P. Kerr, Postwar Britain: Politics from Conflict to Consensus (London: Routledge, 2001).

^69. Freeden, op. cit., Ref. 66, p. 32 (emphasis added).

^70. The broader problem of rupture is discussed in the political theory of Jacques Rancière. For Rancière, a ‘rupture’ in the ‘order of legitimacy and domination’ reveals and accentuates the contingency of the order in which rupture occurs; thus, rupture allows for a momentary passage from what Rancière calls la politique (‘police order’) to le politique (politics as antagonism). Rupture, in Rancièreian thought, breaks with the consensus of the police order: ‘Consensus, then, is actually the modern form of reducing politics to the police.’ Jacques Rancière, ‘Introducing disagreement’, Angelaki: Journal of Theoretical Humanities, 9(3) (2004), pp. 3–9, p. 3. More narrowly focused, rupture in contemporary British political discourse largely depends on the prejudices and inclinations of the individual or group pronouncing rupture.

^71. Oliver H. Woshinsky, Explaining Politics: Culture, Institutions, and Political Behaviour (Oxford: Routledge, 2008), pp. 141–161; see also the explicit ideological substantivization of centrism by the Centrist Party in the USA: US Centrist Party – Positions, available at http://uscentrist.org/platform/positions (accessed 8 December 2012).

^72. Leo XIII, Pope, Rerum Novarum (London: Catholic Truth Society, 2002).

^73. Thomas Meyer and Lewis P. Hinchman, The Theory of Social Democracy (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2007), p. 137; cf. Sheldon S. Wolin, Politics and Vision: Continuity and Innovation in Western Political Thought (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004), p. 525.

^74. Felix R. Fitzroy and Kornelius Kraft, ‘Co-determination, efficiency and productivity’, British Journal of Industrial Relations, 43(2) (2005), pp. 233–247; Clive Jenkins and Barrie Sherman, Collective Bargaining (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1977), 148ff.

^75. Ton Wilthagen and F.H. Tros, ‘The concept of “flexicurity”: a new approach to regulating employment and labour markets’, Transfer: European Review of Labour and Research, 10(2) (2004), pp. 166–186; cf. European Commission, Employment in Europe 2006 (Luxembourg: Office for Official Publication of the European Communities, 2006),pp. 75–93.

^76. Richard Henry Tawney, The Attack and Other Papers (Nottingham: Spokesman, 1981); Alan Wilkinson, Christian Socialism: From Scott Holland to Tony Blair (London: SCM Press, 1998); Paul Q. Hirst, The Pluralist Theory of the State: Selected Writings of G.D.H. Cole, J.N. Figgis and H.J. Laski (London: Routledge, 1993).

^77. Vince Cable, ‘When the facts change, should I change my mind?’, New Statesman, 6 March 2013.

^78. See Phillip Blond, Red Tory: How Left and Right Have Broken Britain and How We Can Fix It (London: Faber and Faber, 2010).

^79. Jesse Norman, The Big Society: The Anatomy of the New Politics (Buckingham: University of Buckingham Press, 2010), p. 4.

^80. The Labour Party, Refounding Labour: A Party for the New Generation (2010).

^81. Ed Miliband, Conference Speech, 2 October 2012.

^82. See Matthew Lakin and Marius S. Ostrowski, ‘Ideology in the Age of the Coalition: New Centrisms in British Party Politics’ (forthcoming).