William Hague:
The Lib Dem leader’s flirtation with other political figures seems doomed in this climate
Sir Vince Cable has denied that he was plotting to set up a new anti-brexit centrist political party when he embarrassingly missed a knife-edge Commons vote last week. But other reports suggested that was indeed what he was up to, and during last year’s general election he predicted that such a party might emerge.
For those who do want to create a new centrist party, it is easy to see why now could be the time to try it. Labour is stuck with Jeremy Corbyn, rows about anti-semitism and a hard-left grip on its future. The Conservatives seem to many to be mired in the Brexit swamp. The Liberals could well take many more years to recover from their near-fatal participation in the coalition government. If I were one of the people interested in setting up a new party, I might easily think there wouldn’t be a better time to do so.
When discussing the obstacles, Sir Vince himself pointed to our electoral system, which does make life very difficult for new parties. This is not France, where Emmanuel Macron could seize the presidency in a single national vote. In Britain, to get anywhere, you have to organise in most or all of the 650 constituencies and get the most votes in a lot of them.
Of course, a party also needs funding, agents, headquarters, members, and all the other tools of election campaigns. Yet neither these requirements nor the voting system are the tallest hurdles for a centrist party, for if it had sufficient support it could rapidly overcome them.
The biggest challenge is not organisational at all. It is something else, which those toying with the idea in private dining rooms around Westminster might not want to admit. It is the problem of deciding what, in the 21st century, a centrist believes.
It is taken for granted that such a party would be anti-brexit. So that’s half the voters in the country excluded from the beginning. If it shared the views on immigration of Liberals and former Blairites, it would alienate an additional large slice of the electorate. As problems go, setting up 650 offices would be trivial compared with fighting an election on staying in the EU and having an open-door immigration policy without having anything much else to say.
President Macron has got round this problem by having a distinctive drive for European unity but that is hardly appropriate for the UK. He has also governed so far with a Right-wing programme of confronting labour unions and cutting business taxes. But any such party in Britain would need to attract initial support from within Labour, so it could scarcely unite around being a new form of Conservative Party.
Elsewhere, most centrist political forces across the democratic world are struggling. What we call globalisation – rising immigration, accelerating technological change and intense international competition – is providing political momentum only for nationalists and socialists. On the Right, nationalists like Donald Trump tell people the answers lie in raising barriers around their country, whether that be to Mexicans or free trade. On the Left, socialists like Corbyn go back to old solutions of nationalisation and state control, but with a new audience after the traumas of the global financial crisis.
Many of these ideas are horribly mistaken, and will only lead to further disillusionment in the longer term. But in the meantime, the pressures of globalisation are going to get bigger, and speed up. The Chinese economy is going to grow much larger yet, and turn out hundreds of millions of educated, competitive people. The population of Africa is going to double in 30 years. Artificial Intelligence is going to change all our lives and working habits profoundly. The reason mainstream political parties are faring badly around the world at the moment is that they lack new or convincing answers to these issues, and a British centrist party would be yet another one that lacked them.
What could the new ideas be like, for a centre party or anyone who isn’t a nationalist or a socialist? They would ask people to wake up to how much life is likely to change. Then they would put education front and centre of everything, keeping a lot of good Conservative reforms but adding a whole new area of how to think, learn and reinvent yourself throughout life. They could demand more of the business world, but not through higher taxes or controls. Instead they could focus on every firm training and preparing its staff for the future.
It would be a good idea to borrow from the Left ideas about how businesses and local authorities can work together to support their local economy and be more resilient to globalisation. And in Britain, it would be vital to have a strategy for house building that incorporates all the current initiatives but cuts through all the delays and excuses. With the addition of plans to speed up further the adoption of the most modern communications infrastructure, the centrists could say they have a plan to make Britain and its citizens ready for the next few decades.
Listing these possibilities tells you why a British centre party is not going to work. First, there is no sign of anyone coming up with such ideas. It is possible that this is what Sir Vince and his dining companions are working on while missing votes, but it seems unlikely. Secondly, there is something necessarily absent: making the most of Brexit. Leaving the EU has disadvantages, but it will at least allow us to have an immigration policy of our own and a better approach to the environment than elsewhere in Europe. This involves being reconciled to Brexit, which the putative centrists are not.
Third and crucially, there is nothing to stop the existing parties adopting their own convincing plans for education, training, housing and infrastructure in a more radical programme for this century. By far the best opportunity to develop those ideas and combine them with using the advantages of leaving the EU is to do so within the Conservative Party.
That is why the realignment of the British party system to include a strong new centrist force is unlikely to take place for now. But it is also why Conservatives have to hold themselves together, focus on what happens after Brexit and ensure the new ideas so urgently needed belong to them.