The phrase “What you’ve never had, you’ll never miss” probably overstates it a bit: I really miss not having ever scored the winning try for St Helens at Wembley. But it’s true that it’s not a gap in my history which tears at my soul. The old adage does express the truth that we usually feel the loss of what we had more intensely than the absence of what we never had. In a way, this is why the Right starts with an advantage in elections: the Left says “look what you could have” to the poorer and younger voters, while the Right says “look what the left will take away” to the richer and older voters. Guess which group turns out in greater numbers?

Anyway, this morning I was musing on the power of loss, and the way it can direct people into odd places. In a way, the passionate intensity of the Brexit confrontation reflects this old adage. Many Remainers feel that they have lost their identity as Europeans, as international citizens in an open border world. Many Brexiters, on the other hand, now fear that “their Brexit”, the vote, the thing they own, will be taken away from them. Both sides believe – and they’re both right, by the way – that the other side is intent on taking from them something which they see as theirs, and of great value.

The prompt for my musing this morning, though, was a tweet from Carole Cadwalladr (now deleted) in which she condemned the Labour Party, and Corbyn in particular, for organising a campaigning day in Broxtowe, Anna Soubry’s constituency. Broxtowe is a marginal seat – one of the top target seats Labour needs to win in order to form a government. Soubry is a Tory who has currently defected to The Independent Group over Brexit, but who proudly and unapologetically supports other previous and current Tory policies, including austerity. In other words, there are very few things more sensible and legitimate for the Labour Party to be doing than campaigning in Broxtowe to replace Soubry with a Labour MP. In fact, it’d be an odd old world if they weren’t doing so. Yet Cadwalladr condemned this as “ugly and vindictive”.

It was particularly jarring because Cadwalladr has done some superb, prize-deserving journalism unpicking the lies and corruption of the 2016 Leave campaign. She is no fool, yet today condemned the Labour Party for campaigning to win a marginal seat held by a political opponent (who, by the way, is openly and ferociously hostile to the Labour Party) as “ugly and vindictive”. There is no rational world in which that view is anything other than bizarre.

However, it’s not an isolated incident of increasingly bizarre statements from people who belong to the amorphous group of “centrist” politicians and media commentators who coalesce around a worldview which is as hostile to Corbyn’s Labour as it is to Brexit. These include many people who self-identify as “moderate”, “common sense”, “liberal” and often “centre-left”. For these people, their very political identity revolves around the idea that they are “sensible”, while those opposed to their worldview are extremists or ideologically blinded.

Yet consider these various other positions which are entirely commonplace amongst that group: the Brexit referendum was illegitimate; Corbyn’s two election victories were illegitimate; the Independent Group defectors from both Labour and Tory parties, who won their seats under a party banner with party money, party volunteers and on a party manifesto less than two years ago, should not put their current position, which opposes the policies they stood for, to the electorate; and Labour party members should not be allowed to express their lack of confidence in sitting MPs.



By their own account, these “moderate centrists” are the people who are in theory most attached to the institutions, conventions and principles of liberal democracy. And yet can anyone else notice the theme developing here?



These same “moderate centrists” are adopting positions which are contemptuous of, and hostile to, democracy itself, where they believe the result is likely to be not of their choosing. Whether that be a referendum, the principle of voting for MPs standing on a party platform, or the right of party members to elect a leader or choose their representatives.



These are positions which go much further than the traditional “The other buggers won, so let’s knuckle down, fight hard and next time we win”. Instead, this seems to be much more of “How dare you vote that way. Your vote is illegitimate. You have no right to make a choice I dislike.”

This developing hostility to democratic processes seems to be going much further than the traditional disappointment, grief or anger of those who finish on the losing side of any vote. It seems to have led a very vocal group of otherwise sane, rational individuals into a place where they don’t just oppose the positions of those they disagree with, but seek to deny the legitimacy of any vote for positions with which they disagree. Which is all the more ironic because one of the most common positions adopted by this group is the demand for a second referendum on Brexit!



I’ve highlighted the apparent growing intolerance of this group (which is heavily overrepresented in political and media circles) to democracy itself, as an irrational and inconsistent position. But I could also have highlighted various other equally irrational positions adopted by this same group of people who see themselves as the beacon of reasonableness in an increasingly irrational world:

All these positions range from dangerously mad, to merely obviously unreasonable. Yet all are commonplace amongst the “centrist” political/media commenteriat. An entire group who self-identify as the sensible, moderate, rational people at the centre of political discourse, regularly make statements and adopt positions which are transparently untrue, unreasonable and occasionally deranged. How did we get here?

I think the answer is loss. This group of “centrists” have lost a lot in a very short time.

First, they lost their political predominance in the Labour Party after the 2015 leadership election, and in the Tory Party after the 2016 Brexit referendum and Cameron’s subsequent runner. Remember just how absolutely certain this group were that Corbyn couldn’t win the Labour leadership, and that Cameroonian liberal Thatcherism was the only future direction of travel for the Tories? They were wrong. For a group of people who felt that they were the natural leaders of both parties, that sense of lost influence must have been crushing, and it seems to have left them deeply hostile towards the members of both parties who rejected their leadership and ideology.



Then they lost the electorate with Brexit. Again, recall just how relaxed the centrists were about the forthcoming referendum in 2016. There has been much hindsight wisdom, but in the months leading up to the referendum, few seemed to understand or foresee the upsurge of Brexit support which most now acknowledge stemmed in large part from a rejection of the society that business-as-usual centrist politics had created.



Finally, in the 2017 General Election, they lost the political philosophy which had underpinned their entire worldview – that accepting the Thatcherite status quo with a dash of social liberalism to capture “the centre ground” was the only way to win. The crushing of the centre in that election, and the level of popular support for the new Tory and Labour Parties which offered much more divergent policy platforms was a tremendous shock , particularly to those “centrists” who saw themselves as Labour, and believed with all their souls right up until June 8th 2017 that a Corbyn-led Labour Party standing on even a mildly social democratic manifesto, would be wiped out in a “nuclear winter” of rejection. Since June 2017, the Labour Right in particular has refused point-blank to accept that Labour’s greatest increase in the vote since 1945 might have had anything to do with the policies and leader they so despise.

That’s a lot of loss. And it’s loss which many centrists seem to believe was unfairly imposed on them by various electorates: Labour members, Brexiters, 2017 Labour and Tory voters. It perhaps shouldn’t be surprising that so many seem to have become irredeemably and irrationally hostile to those electorates, and to the democratic processes through which the loss was inflicted.



Why does this matter? Two reasons, I think. Firstly, any history teacher can give you a couple of concerning historical precedents of what can happen when a previously controlling ‘centre’ is faced with what it believes is a threat to its political dominance, particularly from the left. The declaration of the Independent Group that it would vote to keep a Tory government in power rather than risk even a mildly social democratic Labour government is entirely in keeping with historical precedent.



More importantly, however, is that like any loss, we can’t get past it until we accept it, and that has major ramifications for the Labour Party in particular.

The five stages of grief are, famously: Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression and Acceptance. It seems to me that most of political/media “centrism” is stuck somewhere in Denial and Anger.



The Independent Group may as well call itself The 2015 Party, with a nascent policy offer which is essentially the Coalition rehashed. The statements by those “centrist” MPs still inside the Labour Party about what the Party must do if it is to prevent them from also going to help the Tories, come across less as bargaining and more as angry threats demanding submission.



Even those “centrists” who currently try to cut a figure as conciliators are badly failing to manage it. Tom Watson, for example, is quick to demand understanding from members for the departing right-wing MPs who are publicly tipping buckets of excrement on to the heads of those same members in a gleeful right-wing media. He is also pretty nimble in condemning entire CLPs for daring to challenge sitting MPs. But he seems remarkably reluctant to similarly urge right-wing MPs to understand or listen to the majority of the membership, or to urge them to stop deliberately provoking members with public attacks. When listening and understanding is demanded but not returned, then there is little grounds for any mutual reconciliation.

As I wrote in a previous blog, the Labour Right (long part of the cross-party broad “centrist” group in political terms) desperately need a leader who can help them past denial and anger over their loss. We’re in the fourth year of angry denial now and, helped by the self-referential closed bubbles of social media, that angry denial seems to be leading some people not towards understanding, acceptance and accommodation, but toward irrationality, nihilism, and even a contempt for democracy itself. People who refuse to accept the world has changed cannot make the compromises necessary to function effectively in that new world, and so it is with many in the dispossessed “centre”, who instead turn angrily, and dangerously, against all who seem to represent their dispossession and loss.



The Labour Right and their supporters have been searching for a leader who will return them to their dominance, vanquish those who dispossessed them, and restore the pre-2015 world. It’s not going to happen under Chuka and Chris, who represent the glorious past pretending to be the impossible future. What the “centrists” need is a leader who will help them reach an accommodation with the post-2015 world, where they can still play a vital and valued role. Less a politician, perhaps, and more a political priest. But at a time when the “sensible, moderate centre” now routinely argues for nonsense, and stands even against democracy itself, that political priest is needed now, more than ever.