The centrists will not hold
In 1793 revolutionary France, the republicans enacted a levée en masse – a mass conscription of all able-bodied Frenchmen between the ages of 16 and 25. It was a rushed response to a military in crisis, but also a spectacular act of overreach. Revolutionaries faced enemy forces numbering in the tens of thousands, so in answer they attempted to mobilise hundreds of thousands, eventually close to a million men, far beyond anything Europe had seen before. The result was chaotic and deeply unpopular: desertion was widespread and the burden fell disproportionately on the rural poor. Nobody actually knew how many men there were, or which of them could be relied upon.
Some on the British centre right are now urging the Conservative Party to attempt a levée en masse of its own. In a Times column last Monday (19 January), Matthew Parris wrote that Kemi Badenoch should seize the one-nation opportunity, which comprised “tens of millions” sitting ready to respond to “a unifying message from a sensible centre-right party”. Tens of millions? 20 million at least, then. Considering the Conservatives won a mere 13 million votes in 2019, this would be an absolute game-changer. If such a force existed – disciplined, single-minded, conscious of itself – it would already have dominated elections. Dear reader, it has not. Because, dear reader, it is not real.
Nonetheless, this fantasy now has an official political home. The loser of the West Midlands Combined Authority mayoralty, Andy Street, and former Scottish Conservative leader Ruth Davidson have launched a new group called Prosper UK: “a new political movement focused on growth, opportunity, and listening to people and business”, and not, as a cursory Google search might suggest, a procurement advisory group. The revolution, it seems, will not be SEO-friendly.
Prosper’s cast list is full of ex-Conservative MPs and ministers, most of whom lost their seats at the last general election. The very people whose decisions created the conditions in which Reform UK could thrive now lecture the country on how common-sense centrism is the answer. The common-sense centrist decade of austerity. The common-sense centrist decision to boil Europe down to a single referendum question. The common-sense centrist Covid corruption. All part of the master plan, apparently.
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The problem is that Nigel Farage is simply better at being right-wing than they are. He’s not sorry or embarrassed about his positions and does not pretend to be anything but a right-wing populist. He names problems, simplifies causes, and offers a clear enemy. His rhetoric is crude, dishonest, and genuinely dangerous, but it is intelligible. Against that, sensible centrism offers an insistence that nothing fundamental can really be done, and we must continue marching on.
There is a neat irony here. Those on the sensible centrist right who sneer at Reform’s characters as the simple-minded person’s idea of intellectuals so often commit the same offence themselves. Their columns are padded with shallow metaphors and polished turns of phrase, not to clarify arguments but to flatter the sensibilities of their dinner guests. It is copy written to reassure the writer and their friends that they remain clever for holding the correct opinions.
You can smell the contempt they hold for the British working class. How foolish, they think, to be taken in by a man who speaks the same language they do – and not to blindly vote for the moderate conservatives who forced a decade of austerity upon them. Fools.
Actually, the 1793 levée en masse did not fail militarily: it threw endless men at the frontier, stabilised the revolution, and helped turn the tide of the war. But the revolutionary state found that raising endless armies did not actually produce a unified nation. The idea that tens of millions of centrists can now be summoned into political life is stupid, and the idea that they could be summoned by Kemi Badenoch is even more stupid. If such a force existed, it would not need to be willed into being by columnists and failed politicians. You cannot expect the moderate centrists that created the environment for Reform UK to thrive, to be the answer to it. Comrades, perhaps a more fitting French maxim here would be tout pour le peuple, rien par le peuple – everything for the people, nothing by the people.
[Further reading: The only conspiracy at the Fabian Society conference]
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