It is bleakly hilarious how much of Westminster has convinced itself that Rishi Sunak’s platform of soft scepticism towards net zero, £12bn of cuts to welfare, bringing back national service, etc. is closer to the “centre” than Johnson’s “no cuts, more police, 40 hospitals” shtick.
I think some of it is unwitting. It’s one of the most repeated pol science findings that people perceive ethnic minorities as more leftwing than they are, and it’s also why his supporters’ club talk of him as as a “moderate”, too.
(And there are some incredible assumptions and dangers in that. Competent must always = politically moderate is a centrist conceit which, well, could store up quite a lot of danger if, well, the extremes ever managed competence)
And it depends on how you define competence. When I worked on French politics I remember a journalist in the south of France telling me that the Front National was very good at prettifying tired civic spaces when they got elected at local level, and were very popular for it.
To give the argument probably more credit than it deserves, I wonder if some of it is because he's not a nationalist.
On an issue by issue basis, he's about as right-wing as Braverman, but her rhetoric is much more stridently Britain Must Triumph whereas he's more Winning the Global Race.
Yeah. Obviously most words can mean more than one thing, but I think “centrist” is particularly bad because a lot of people using it don’t realise they are flitting between about four of them.
am I wrong to think of the electorate like a normal distribution with fatter tails in the UK ? winning from the centre is in fact, exactly how to do it. Johnson was unpopular, but was perceived not to be as extreme as the very unpopular Corbyn etc. still, let's not stop Frost's continuing muppetry.
I think the Chorley mistake comes from having lived through 2016-2022. Sunak has proven a poor performer, but Oct 2022 to now has felt more "ordinary" than the extraordinary 6 years preceding it. Easy to mistake the end of the circus with a return to the centre.
I think it reads as cynical, but in practice a lot zealots do believe that the revolution can never fail, it can only be failed. So cynical in impact but genuinely meant nevertheless.
I also suspect that there’s a certain kind of brain that can marginalise veracity to such a massive degree that it becomes irrelevant to them, if it serves their wider purpose. It’s not even cognitive dissonance exactly, cause they’re almost removing the contradictory aspect.
More seriously it does remind me of some of the reaction on the hard left over defeat. It’s always a conspiracy, there was always a group of media/business/their-own-side working against them, they shouldn’t water down their ideals next time, etc etc
It’s so much easier than self reflection.
But if they’re losing it this much 3 weeks *before* an election… I do wonder quite how mad it’s going to get. This is something we don’t normally see is it? Does anyone have any comparisons from history?
