The 2010s have revealed the new centre of politics

IT’S an odd tendency in our view of the past that we think of particular chunks of time, especially decades and centuries, as having characteristics: the Swinging Sixties, the Roaring Twenties, the materialistic 1980s. We conveniently ignore the fact that those generalisations often don’t fit the calendar neatly (the ’60s didn’t really start until 1963, for example).

Still, I suppose you’ve got to mark a point somewhere. As we approach the end of this decade (if you count them from the years ending with a zero), a great deal seems to have changed in political terms, and yet not at all in the way that most of us might have anticipated ten years ago.

We were sure that we were in for a tough time of it, economically. The optimistic view was then that the discipline involved in austerity would lead to root and branch reform of the structures of capitalism, tackling monopolistic firms and overhauling the banking system. There was also the expectation that it would offer the opportunity for a rolling back of the state, welfare and pensions reform and a radical reconstruction of the tax system.

But almost none of that happened. The banks and the corporatist rent-seekers continue much as before. The reduction in public spending has not been strictly speaking, a reduction in spending, but merely a reduction in the rate of its increase. The tax burden is at a high; as is the national debt. The new government – a Conservative government, allegedly – is aiming to spend even more.

The changes, which never transpired, were to be ushered in by a new sort of consensual, centrist politics in the form of the “heir to Blair”, David Cameron, and his Liberal Democrat partners. His jibe to Mr Blair, that he “was the future once”, looks more pointed now that Mr Cameron himself is history, while his programme of reforms, promises of stability, “a new kind of politics” and a “Big Society”, are as dead as the Charleston.

What was going to be the decade of consensus turned out to be division on an almost unprecedented scale; if you were looking for historical comparisons you would probably have to pick something like Irish Home Rule. What was going to be a transformative politics turned out to be a period of paralysis – almost nothing could be done while Brexit and independence swept aside the day-to-day issues.

The other thing wildly different from what might have been assumed ten years ago is where the centre ground in politics actually is. When Mr Cameron and “I agree with Nick” Clegg appeared in the garden of Number 10, we expected government that would be, for the foreseeable future, fiscally conservative and socially liberal. But now that it appears that nobody agrees with Nick, or with his successors in the leadership of the Liberal Democrats, it looks as if the

UK’S political centre is voters who are fiscally slightly to the centre-left, and socially rather more conservative than metropolitan liberals would like.

Contrary to the claims of their opponents, the Conservatives under Boris Johnson have not moved sharply to the right – with the exception of their rhetoric on immigration. In most other regards, the Tories have become steadily more centrist, especially on public spending, while remaining socially liberal on most issues.

If it doesn’t look like that to some people, it’s because the Labour Party has been even more radically transformed into what, to all intents and purposes, seems to be the Bennite wing of the Labour Party in the 1970s. Amazingly, after their catastrophic results in the election, the membership seems inclined to double down on this position.

The SNP, unsurprisingly, continues to bang on about independence, which is fair enough, since it is its raison d’être. The party’s persistent strength is in part due to their success in converting so many Scots to the cause, but it presents them with problems, too. One is the difficulty of uniting the country on anything else when the subject dominates all discourse; another is the practical matter of being the government, and being expected to deliver on domestic policy issues.

We start the new decade with a UK government once more promising real change and improvement. The Whig theory of history (and modern Tories are nothing if not Whigs) made the assumption that you could explain the present in terms of the past, with the implication that the present was better. I’m not sure anyone believes that anymore.

Almost nothing could be done while Brexit and independence swept aside day-to-day issues