Is now the moment for a new centrist party?

Privately, it has dominated talk in the corridors of Westminster
Isabel Hardman27 September 2018

Have you set up your new centrist party yet?

If you haven’t, you’re in a minority. Talking about a new political force has become the Westminster equivalent of fantasy football, albeit with less inspiring teams. And even though the parties are currently having their tribal conference gatherings, the gossip on some of the fringes and in bars will be as much about who might leave their party as it will be about what the existing party plans to do.

One MP who is longing for a new movement says: ‘We can’t go on like this until the next election. There is a group of voters who feel homeless and detached from the main parties — and it’s fair to say that there’s a group of us in Parliament who feel that, too.’

For some, the new centrist party will always be just a fantasy for when they’ve temporarily grown weary with the reality of party politics, a little like a child wishing they had actually been adopted by a fairytale princess after being scolded by their own parents. It’s easy when you are having a fight with your national leader and your constituency to yearn for a simpler life in which local party meetings are just you and a glass of gin, rather than bores who have been defending their own personal fiefdoms for years. But there is no denying that there is a hunger among some MPs, and in parts of the electorate, for a different political force.

Mission impossible? Tony Blair has doubted the viability of new centrist party
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Bump into any Liberal Democrat or ‘moderate’ Labour MP and the conversation will soon turn to the need for a new party. Some Lib Dems are so keen to conjure up scenarios of this new organisation that it becomes easy to forget that they’re currently members of a party that already claims to be the only centrist force in British politics. The plight of Labour’s centrists has long been known, too.

But once you move beyond the imaginary refuge for homeless centrists and start asking about what might actually happen, it quickly becomes clear that no one really knows. It’s not just that a new centrist party would be difficult and costly to set up, or that it would be still more difficult to get an MP elected. It’s not even that the reality of a new party would be that it would still contain people who sometimes vehemently disagreed with one another over policy. It’s that no one who wants a new party is mentally ready to do anything about it.

Labour ‘moderates’ are the most obvious candidates for walking out of their current organisation and setting up a new one. After all, it is well-reported that a number of them have been meeting secretly to discuss leaving Labour now that Jeremy Corbyn has consolidated his power over its structures. Tony Blair is known to be sympathetic to the argument that the Labour Party is over, but he has recently switched to warning about the impossibility of setting up a new centrist party. He wrote in The Times this month that ‘in the British system such an endeavour may be impossible’. But something other than practical problems is holding Labourites back.

‘They’re just not psychologically there, yet,’ says one MP who is minded to leave. ‘It’s not just their jobs, their mortgages, all the stuff that normal people worry about when making decisions like this. It’s also that for Labour, far more than for the other parties, this is kind of part of your blood, your heritage. It really is like walking away from your own family.’

Come together: Liberal leader David Steel, left, and Shirley Williams of the Social Democratic Party annouce their parties’ merger in 1988
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Whittling down the numbers of the would-be splitters is another group of Corbyn opponents who believe it is better to stay in the Labour Party and fight to bring it back to what it once was. They have mounted a vigorous operation over the past few weeks of talking to MPs believed to be on the brink of leaving and sowing doubt about whether this is a good idea for them personally, or for their constituents. Their most effective message is to those representing solidly Labour seats: they tell their colleagues that of course a Labour candidate will always win in that constituency, so if the sitting MP leaves the party then they’re just handing the seat over to another hard left candidate who may make it even easier for Corbyn to move in to Downing Street. It’s a compelling argument if one of your chief reasons for going is because you think Corbyn as Prime Minister would do tremendous damage to the country.

Even those who still think the Labour Party just cannot be saved and that to stay in it is to enable Corbyn are now catching their breath a little before jumping. ‘It needs to be a really big moment if it happens,’ says one MP, who seems to have stared over the cliff edge and panicked somewhat. Others have told friends they want to stay in the party and try to move its position on Brexit. They seem the most enthused of all the groups, as they’ve got something constructive to do beyond holding miserable secret meetings in which they talk about leaving without actually doing anything.

The anti-Brexit brigade in the Tory party contains the MPs who would be most likely to defect. It is remarkable how many Conservatives have openly said that they could not stay in a party led by one of the frontrunners for the leadership, Boris Johnson. Sir Vince Cable told the Evening Standard recently that ‘conversations’ were ongoing with ‘four or five’ Conservative MPs unhappy with the direction their party is taking. There are certainly MPs who are worried about what the Tories currently stand for, but they are far, far behind those miserable Labourites in that they believe that it is all to play for in their party, and that they just need to organise themselves better in order to change the Conservative appeal for the next election. One says: ‘I’m not opposed to the idea at all, but I think there’s more of a chance to save our own party. We just don’t have that sense of total desperation that our Labour friends have.’

If Tories did come over, it would change the political landscape, suggesting that a genuine political realignment was under way rather than a remodelling of the centre left.

The Lib Dems do have all the structures and money to make a centrist party happen far quicker than if fleeing MPs tried to set up a new one. It’s instructive that the Women’s Equality Party asked the Lib Dems for help when it was getting started— and was shocked by how much everything would cost, and how complicated the structures of a real political party are.

Cable’s party is re-pitching itself as something he rather clunkily calls a ‘movement for moderates’, though once again it isn’t quite psychologically there in terms of what this might mean. There are those in the Liberal Democrats who are currently enjoying being the anti-Brexit party and there are those who think that being a single-issue party is damaging. There is also a split between Lib Dems who think their party can lead the new centrist force in politics, even if they have to rename it, and those who believe that the Lib Dems can only really be a part of something entirely new.

It is certainly the case that none of those wavering Labourites would defect straight to the Lib Dems if they ever do manage to find the courage to leave their own party. Many of them confess to feeling very politically close to certain Lib Dems such as Norman Lamb and Jo Swinson, but feel the Lib Dem brand is damaged beyond repair. Even those Lib Dems who think their party can lead the change agree that there are significant branding problems. They’re quite comfortable, for instance, with the idea of the party’s name changing, and it not being what one thinker describes as ‘too precious about what we stand for, beyond being liberals, of course’.

But any rebrand will be painful for many in the party who find the current drunken spider-web of internal structures strangely thrilling. After all, Liberal Democrats know better than anyone else what it’s like to set up or dramatically change a party. The history of the Social Democratic Party (SDP) serves as a cautionary tale to anyone dallying with the idea of setting up a new party. Founded by the ‘Gang of Four’ Labour moderates — Roy Jenkins, David Owen, Shirley Williams and Bill Rodgers — the SDP lived from March 1981 until March 1988, when it was folded into the new Social and Liberal Democrats.

The SDP failed to make the electoral gains for which its founders and new members had hoped. But even if the circumstances for a political party today are rather different from those that the SDP struggled with in the 1980s, there are still Lib Dems who recall the problems that their modern party faced when it was created. There were arguments about the name, with a great deal of resentment about the order in which ‘Social’ and ‘Liberal’ appeared. A year after the Social and Liberal Democrats was formed, it was renamed the Liberal Democrats. Now, it is thinking of renaming once again, a bit like the ever-changing law firm Pearson Specter Litt in Suits.

Labourites also argue that the SDP didn’t fail: it succeeded in dragging their party back to the centre, even if it never established itself as a major party.

But you can see why, once an MP looks into whether a new centrist party might work, they retreat, hoping that someone else might pitch up and do all the dirty work of finding donors and committees and so on. Indeed, even though most would-be members of this new organisation say dramatically that ‘we can’t go on like this’, many are quite clearly happy to carry on just as they are for quite a while longer, fantasising about a new party while staying well away from its reality.

Illustration by Michelle Thompson

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