A couple of years ago, Tim Farron’s often powerful speeches excited and enthused Liberal Democrats and beyond as membership more than doubled in his two years as leader. Too often these days his remarks or his actions cause anger and anxiety. I know that when I see the word Farron on Twitter, I’m thinking “Oh no, what’s he done now.” Don’t get me wrong, given the same choice I had in 2015, I’d vote for him again. However, in his quest to become leader and president before that, he went out of his way to build alliances with certain groupings in the party. It’s fair to say that some of those people feel intensely let down by certain of his pronouncements. They bear the scars of defending him in the face of some pretty hostile stuff from within and outwith the party. He shouldn’t underestimate what people went through showing loyalty to him.

To them, it feels like Tim is throwing a flame thrower at the bridges. On the other hand, Tim doesn’t seem to understand why they’re so upset. The way he sees it, he’s not picking on one group of people because he thinks we’re all sinners. Having spent a lot of time amongst evangelical Christians in my teens, I strongly suspect my registry office do 30 years ago doesn’t quite fulfil their standard of marriage.

I don’t actually care whether he thinks certain bits of my life are sinful or not and it makes no difference to how he treats me. We’ve worked perfectly well together in the past and I’m sure we will do so again. The big thing is, though, that you don’t tend to get beaten up for having a registry office do. You are more likely to be the victim of a hate crime if you are LGBT. That’s where his comments on these issues can cause actual harm to actual people. It legitimises those who would undermine just and equal treatment of LGBT+ people. I think that Tim needs to understand that.

On Monday night Twitter started to get a bit unsettled again. This time it was his comments on “identity politics” at an Oxford Union speech that caused some fairly widespread consternation amongst Lib Dems and others.

I argue that the poison in our national life is identity politics. ‘This is who I am: you accept me on all my terms, or else you commit violence against me.’ Identity politics is insidious, irrational, and leads to decisions that threaten our liberty. @TimFarron @LibDems pic.twitter.com/TCOC4yfnmZ

The term “identity politics” is generally used as a derogatory term by those on the alt-right about any marginalised group who are fighting against discrimination. And they don’t just do it for themselves, they show solidarity with others who are marginalised, too. Jennie Rigg explores the concept here.

If you point out the gender pay gap, or that bisexuals routinely have horrendous mental health, or that black women are held to impossible standards of behaviour that white women aren’t, or that 45% of trans youth have attempted suicide, as sure as eggs is eggs you’ll get some white guy moaning at you about identity politics, and how we should practise “equalism, not feminism”, and how we’re all equal anyway these days now.

When people use the phrase “identity politics” they are generally saying that all those marginalised groups should just stop fighting for fair treatment and leave all the power to the white men where they think it belongs. It was surprising to hear Tim, who has stood up for some of the most marginalised groups in our society, echo this sort of language.

I thought the only fair way to judge it was to look at the whole speech in context and I’m grateful to Tim for kindly sending me a copy. The stuff that’s caused the controversy is not even the main subject of the speech, which is about whether the centre ground of politics is a myth and exploring the common principles that tie it together and looking at the prospects of a new party.

For me, that section just doesn’t fit in. Apart from anything else the sort of people who need to work together or be appealed to are the sort of people who are generally reasonably fair minded people who understand the discrimination women, LGBT folk, disabled people and people of colour face – and the intersectionality between those groups – or if they don’t, they are more likely to be persuaded by evidence. How much better would it have been to say: “We’re seeing attacks on different groups of people from the likes of Trump and the right. We need to make sure that the equal rights and legal protections that have been so hard won are not compromised in any way.” The far left and far right don’t get this stuff at all. They are more interested in their own brand of revolution.

There are a few interesting observations on modern politics and some uncomfortable ideas in the speech, but I’ll let you find them for yourselves. Let us know what you think (politely) in the comments.



Is the centre ground a myth?

A great question and title, I was going to congratulate you on it… and then I realise that my office had come up with it. which makes me think they are spending too much time chin-stroking and not enough time campaigning. I shall have words

What I love about ‘is the centre ground a myth?’ is that it implies glamour and mystery.. putting the centre ground on a level with Atlantis, Planet Vulcan and Eldorado… when actually we’re talking about Stephen Kinnock, Vince Cable and Nicky Morgan. Lovely people, but not quite on a par..

And I have indeed met all three of them and I can vouch that they are real people, not mythological in any apparent way.

The centre ground. How boring. I joined the Liberals as a 16 year old because I’m a liberal, because I was an awkward kid who was passionate about politics and didn’t want to conform to the tedious sheeplike predictability of joining the Tories or Labour. No offence, but I thought that any old mediocrity could be a Labour or Tory MP. Whats the point in that? Its like winning the Premier League with Man Utd, Chelsea or, these days, Man City – its expected, its not interesting. Winning the league with Leicester City, or if you go back a few years, Blackburn Rovers or Nottingham Forest – that’s interesting, that’s worth doing. Being a Liberal, even becoming a Liberal MP, that’s interesting, its quirky, it’s worth doing.

That’s how my 16 year old head worked. I had joined a radical liberal party. Call me a centrist, and I’d have given you a very hard stare…

Today, at nearly 48 years of age, with 4 children, I look myself in the mirror and I come to the realisation that I am – in pretty much every sense – a centrist Dad. And ladies and gentlemen, I am cool with that.

So, of course the Liberal Democrats are in a sense the occupants of part of the political centre. Depending upon how you define it of course…

So, what is the centre ground? Is it a myth? And even if it isn’t a myth, does it really matter?

Defining characteristics of those inhabitants of a centre ground would be that they are idealistic but not dogmatic;

that they accept what we used to refer to as the concept of the mixed economy – a regulated market economy but with state ownership of key cornerstone services and infrastructure.

Redistributive taxation and an enterprise culture.

Pragmatic, seeking in all areas to compromise with others because of instinctive belief that no one movement or person or party has a monopoly on good ideas or even bad ones.

And that compromising will extend not just across parties and UK communities but internationally too. Its hard to see how a resident of the centre ground would be against us being in the EU, or NATO.

There are complications and camps within the centre ground, not just partisan divisions but instinctive and ideological. For example, in the UK, Liberals tend to be social democrats. But not all social democrats are liberals. You only need to look at the moderate Labour government of 1997 – 2010 and their focus on ID cards, detention without trial, and the treatment of asylum seekers. They were clearly social democratic, but not that liberal…

There is a great temptation for all of us with a political creed to make it sound more glorious and precise that it really is. That a dawning of consciousness came up on us and that we concluded in some amazing epiphany that our political views are completely and utterly right. If that really does describe you then frankly you should get out more. In reality people come to political conclusions in a far more shambling and human way.

I went canvassing in my village about a month ago and a guy came to the door and said ‘Oh yes, I’m voting for your lot, lots of people do round here..’ I expected him then to say something nice about the hard work we do for the community… but he didn’t. He said this: ‘I’m voting for you because the Tories are evil, Labour can’t add up and you’re alright’.

People have spent many hundreds of thousands of pounds for market research like that. You’ve heard of Worcester Woman, may I now introduce you to Milnthorpe Man.

Now that three part assessment of the political menu is hardly inspirational, in fact it’s an almost insultingly boring label to wear… but in this world of extremes, of populism, authoritarianism of the left and right, I’d totally settle for boring right now.

I am enthused by boring, I am desperate for boring. Because boring means safe.

And to be serious, that is precisely why we need a centre ground. Because no one is free, no one can flourish or prosper if they aren’t safe.

Safe from the ideological experiments of the zealous and the ultra-convinced.

And my evidence? 2 bits of evidence for you. Exhibit A, the current Conservative Party. The Conservative and Unionist Party to be precise.

The Party of the free market, of Margaret Thatcher, the author, designer and lead advocate of the European Single Market…. Today, risking a return to violence in Northern Ireland, indeed risking the loss of Northern Ireland from the United Kingdom, fuelling nationalism and separatism in Scotland risking the loss of Scotland from the United Kingdom, turning their backs on a single market, extracting ourselves from the very institution that gives Britain its unique power and influence in the world, turning our backs on the European project which remains – and without compare – the most successful peace project in the history of the world. That this is not the party of MacMillan, Churchill and Heath is a given. But Conservative rationalists need now to accept the truth that it isn’t even the party of Margaret Thatcher anymore. No matter how much you might dress up Mrs Thatcher’s legacy, she was a free-marketeer, a unionist, a patriot, a European and a pragmatic internationalist. Today’s conservative party is in practice absolutely none of those things. If you are a true Thatcherite today then you are way to the left of the Conservative mainstream.

That’s exhibit A. Exhibit B? Oh Jeremy Corbyn.

First off. I like Jeremy Corbyn and I even admire Jeremy Corbyn. I know him fairly well. I mean, during the Blair years he was always in our lobby. Not in Labours.

And I admire him, what I admire most about Jeremy is that he has – amazingly managed to unite all the Trots! If you know anything about the far left then you will know that they are comprised of about 73 different factions all of whom hate the Tories less than they hate each other. So Jezza has pulled off something of a miracle there, credit where its due.

I respect people with strong ideologies, even if they worry me. But Jeremy is a socialist, not a social democrat. He takes the basically Marxist position that society is easily analysable in a scientific way, and easily re-cast and ordered in a scientific way. Now maybe he is right. Empirical evidence suggests otherwise.

Labour outperformed expectations in June last year. But despite Theresa May pretty much throwing the election away, they still lost. And Labour in its current form is clearly the Conservatives best hope of winning again. You see, love him or not, Jeremy Corbyn is divisive. There aren’t many people like me who disagree with him and like him. Most folks love him or hate him. There is certainly no centre ground when it comes to views of Jezza.

And that matters. In 1997, the Liberal Democrats didn’t just win Oxford West and Abingdon. We also won Newbury. Newbury! We’d won it in a by election in 93 but in 97 against all the odds we held it. And moderate conservative voters in Newbury who were thinking about voting Lib Dem were sent a lot of Tory direct mail. I remember one piece – it said vote Lib Dem, and you’ll end up with Tony Blair in number 10. The reaction of those voters was to shrug and say, well that doesn’t bother me too much. Contrast that to 2015 when even nice cuddly Ed Milliband was presented as sufficiently worrying for millions of voters to back the Conservatives in marginal seats, even though many of them had no love for the Tories at all. The problem we have if we want to see a non-Conservative government after the next election is that the current Labour leadership frightens the horses, it creates a narrative that allows the Conservatives to avoid taking responsibility for their own record and simply run a campaign that succeeds in persuading the voter to vote against their nightmares rather than voting for their dreams.

And let none of us be so naïve as to assume that the ruthless and well-funded Conservative party will make the crass errors of 2017 next time. They won’t.

The hard truth is that we will only beat the Conservatives by being cleverer than them, not by being wide-eyed and hopeful.

The Conservatives themselves give us plenty of reasons to aspire to there being a centre ground to challenge them. Brexit is not the be all and end all. But it is a Trojan horse for those who now control the Conservative party. We are now on a trajectory towards small government, partly because the Government’s own figures show that leaving the EU will cost the exchequer something like £120billion a year, and partly because the Conservatives have made the ideological choice to shrink the state. For instance, we hear plenty of fanfare about new investment in mental health. The reality is that most mental health trusts are having to make savings of 4 or 5% in their budgets every year far into the foreseeable future. The overwhelming majority of schools are laying off teaching staff and teaching assistants. Our police force is shrinking in every part of our country every year. Our armed forces are smaller now than they have ever been. Child poverty is at an all time high and yet the services available to support families are cut back every year. Local government has seen a 40% cut in its funding with all the knock on effects on education, social care, social work and child protection.

The British state is getting smaller, all in the name of the dogmatic right wing nationalist Conservatism that now rules the roost. That right wing faction that now holds the Conservative party in its grip doesn’t give itself a name, like Momentum does. It isn’t a mass membership outfit like Momentum. But its far more effective. It is insidious, and thousands of loyal Conservatives across the country know it and have voted with their feet and left. As a result, the party that looks likely to run Britain for the next decade, has lost countless members. The ludicrous reality is that the party that is making the British state smaller, is itself smaller than it has ever been. The Conservative party’s membership is now around a fifth smaller than the Liberal Democrats. In part this is because the very attractive gentleman who led the Liberal Democrats between 2015 and 2017, doubled that party’s membership, but I digress..

Many who would have counted themselves on the right of the Conservative party in the 80s and 90s have now left the party because it has become too right wing, too ideological and insufficiently interested in those historic Tory ideals of service and good government.

So many good people without a good political home.

The poison in our political culture, indeed in our national life, is identity politics.

This is who I am. You must accept me on my terms at all times or else you have committed violence against me. And you whose identity is different, are committing an act of violence against me for being different, or for holding a different world view.

I challenge you, in the next 24 hours to take a moment in quiet to ponder the extent to which that might even describe you…

Identity politics is insidious, irrational and leads to decisions that fracture us as a community and which threaten to rob us of our liberties.

Being concerned about identity politics doesn’t do any good unless you are keen to understand the other, and do your bit to act and think differently.

Because identity politics is emotional, we run the risk of asking the wrong questions.

I got asked by someone last week, ‘what do we need to say to leave voters to switch them to remain?’ My blunt answer is that for most people, this is really a very naïve question. Asking a leave voter, what would it take for you to switch to remain, or a remain voter what would it take for you to support Brexit? Is the equivalent of going the door of a Welsh miner in the 1980s and asking what would it take to persuade you to vote Tory? Or to ask a Manchester United fan what it would take for them to switch to supporting Manchester City.

Identity politics is all about symbolism. I was with the parents of a friend of mine on one of the Scottish islands a few months ago. They are over 80 and they’ve farmed there for 60 years. In a quiet moment over lunch, my friends Mum looked out over the moor to the neighbouring farm where a saltire flew from the tower. She sighed. ‘That’s what I hate the most. They’ve stolen our flag’. They’ve stolen our flag. You can’t be Scottish unless you are a nationalist, you can’t be intelligent or decent unless you voted remain, you must not love your country because you failed to say something saccharine about Meghan and Harry.

A real centre ground is about much more than ideology or economics, its about attitude, tone and conduct. It’s about how we think about one another, speak to one another, act towards one another, listen to one another. Telling one side to suck it up and stop whining, or the other that they are bigots isn’t just unpleasant, its extremely foolish.

Its counterproductive. I’m a liberal, and I’m keen observer of US politics. I was an Obama fan, I’d have enthusiastically voted for Hilary and I’m pretty horrified by President Trump. But Donald Trump is a lesson to us about what happens when liberals get sucked into identity politics. The problem was not specifically what liberals believed or stood for. It was attitudinal. Liberals acted as though they’d won the argument, and they treated with contempt anyone who spoke out of turn. I’d argue that the Brexit vote had something of that in it too.

You see, every empire sows the seeds of its own opposition and overthrow through over-reach, arrogance and complacency.

This does not mean that we all have to agree with each other and have a soggy mush in the middle. No, in fact the desire to assimilate people into one single set of cultural norms is utterly illiberal – not to mention incredibly dull… but ironically it’s the very thing that so called liberals have tried to do. John Stuart Mill would tick them off and gently tell them that they are liberals in name only. His contention was that the great threat to freedom was the tyranny of opinion. That by social pressure, people who hold certain world views are frozen out and isolated. The law doesn’t stop you thinking or believing certain things, but in reality you aren’t allowed to think or believe them.

Real tolerance and diversity involves fighting for the rights and freedoms of people you don’t like or agree with. Simply fighting for your own rights won’t do.

Put short. Calling people gammon or snowflakes is beyond idiotic.

So the centre ground is about being reasonable in our politics, economics, our tone of debate…. and its also about being reasonable about political realities.

The Tories are – marginally – ahead in the polls. Even the most loyal Tory supporter probably has to admit that this is somewhat surprising. This is a government doing something that half the country didn’t want, and doing it in a way that about half of those who did want it, don’t like. It is leaking cabinet members like a faulty bucket, it is split down the middle, riven by gaffs, mistakes. It appears almost comically incompetent. It is overseeing the worst economic situation in years. People’s real incomes are down, prices are up, public services are now visibly falling apart – police, schools, NHS… It is poorly led, badly split, on the wrong side of nearly everything… and still, it’s just about winning!

You see, Labour did better than expected last year. But when all said and done, they came second and they’re still second despite the fact that their main opposition is rubbish.

When you are making Theresa May look good by comparison, you are letting the side down.

A movement that could give this awful government the drubbing it deserves needs not to be a myth, it needs to be real.

So does this mean a new party? Well, maybe. Tribalism probably stops liberal Tories and social democrats in Labour just joining the Lib Dems. Of course tribalism might stop people like me joining a new party?

So, to those who are seeking to set up a new party – let me give you some advice. The first thing you need to work out, is what will your relationship be with the liberal democrats? The Lib Dems have 2,000 councillors, 100,000 members, parliamentarians throughout Britain. A heritage going back 150 years. And they have the organisational capacity and expertise to actually win elections on the ground from the perilous position of being the third party. Those who seek to set up a new party have none of those things. If they want to survive even six months, they need the Lib Dems. And personally, if a new party is what they want then I’ll be excited to work with them.

The problem for the centre ground is that beyond the Lib Dems, all we hear is impressive individuals but no grassroots. British politics today seems to be awash with generals without armies.

One of the charges made by the Labour moderates against Momentum is that its not good enough to just do and believe things that make you feel good, you need to win elections so that you can do some good.

But this argument works back at the moderates too. Unless a new movement can win electoral scraps in every council and in more than a hundred parliamentary constituencies, then will simply become – ironically – a carbon copy of UKIP. Lots of bluster, good poll ratings and no bums on seats.

We are a month off the world cup. I don’t expect England to do that well this time, I’m looking forward to being pleasantly surprised. 22 years ago. I did expect England to do well. It was the European championships, held in England. We’d battered Holland 4-1 and beaten Spain on penalties on our way to the semi finals. Where we played Germany. We were the better side… and lost on penalties. After the game, John Motson interviews the crest fallen England manager Terry Venables and asks him, some what insensitively, ‘so Terry, what do you most admire about the Germans?’ Terry cut him back a look of contempt, ‘their results John, their results!’

And by that measure, I admire Tony Blair. He beat the Tories three times. He did so by drawing together a coalition that cut across normal party allegiances and by presenting a politics that was hopeful, competent and broadly progressive. He did some really terrible things, and he missed some really good opportunities.

For all that, much was achieved, after a quarter of a century of decay the NHS was essentially saved by Tony Blair’s investment. Similar boosts were felt across schools, the police service and much of the rest of the public sector.

You can’t do those things if you don’t win.

A movement of the centre ground needs to show Macronesque ambition, practical calculated ambition.

Winning must be our first and last thought in all that we do.

So. A political victory for the centre ground, is not a myth.

It is not planet Vulcan

Its more like planet mars.

In that it definitely exists, but is flipping difficult to get to.

And to do so will require putting aside our labels and prejudices and putting our country before our tribes.

Because I want a government that understands that the free market is only free if it is refereed

And that to keep us safe and prosperous we must be internationalist

That knows that small governments mean weak citizens

And ensures that the state works for the people not the people for the state.

A government that is both competent and compassionate.

…And I want a movement that is wily, mature and realistic enough to win

So that this vision actually happens.

So it is a difficult journey to a movement of the centre ground.

But it is no myth.

The question is: can we bury our pride, our tribalism, even our own personal ambition,

in a common endeavour to reach it.

I’m up for it if you are…