There is an argument that the (further) disgrace of Peter Mandelson has been magnified out of all proportion. Mandelson was fired from his government post several months ago. These latest revelations will rightly ensure his permanent exclusion from civic life and possibly his inclusion in jail, but they shouldn’t be the dominant story of the day. Britain has much bigger and more urgent problems than the question of how to withdraw an honorary title from someone who can make no use of it anyway.
Yes, the affair raises a question mark against Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s judgement, but the page is already dense with those. The marginal value of this one is near zero. Why aren’t we obsessing over our chronically sluggish economy? Our failure to build houses and infrastructure? The state’s financial punishment of young graduates? The bloating of our public sector and simultaneous decay of our public services? Fixating on a cache of emails from over a decade ago is the mark of a country that doesn’t want to face up to its present, let alone its future. An avoidance tactic.
The fact I am even entertaining this point of view tells you I am a centrist. Insofar as that baggy term means much at all, it refers to one who puts hotheaded emotion aside in order to get things in proportion. Centrism, at least as I’m using it here, is not an ideological position so much as an attitude or style which prioritises competence and pragmatism and which focuses on sturdily tangible problems and feasible solutions.
Centrists find themselves impotent in the face of stories like Mandelson’s
This describes the approach of many or even most British politicians, although not any of the popular ones right now. When Prosper UK, a new movement of centrist Tories, launched last week, its co-founders Andy Street and Ruth Davidson declared themselves in favour of ‘sound finances’ and ‘evidence-based policymaking’. They sounded like faint voices from a bygone era and were immediately overrun by events.
Centrists find themselves impotent in the face of stories like Mandelson’s. They can condemn his offences and point to the mistakes of process and judgement. What they can’t do convincingly is express or channel the anger and disgust that voters feel about it, because they feel it obscures more substantive questions.
Strong emotions have no place in centrist praxis. When centrist politicians survey the scene, they see cynical populists, ideological extremists, and click-driven media whipping everyone into a frenzy. Their response is to invite everyone to calm down and be sensible. But some things are worth getting angry about. In fact, some things demand it. If the Mandelson affair isn’t doing it for you, try this.
Rhiannon Whyte, a 27-year-old mother of a little boy, worked as a receptionist at the Park Inn Hotel in Walsall. The hotel is one of those used by the government to house asylum seekers. One such resident, Deng Chol Majek, was a Sudanese national who had tried and failed to win asylum in Germany. He had been reported to hotel security for staring at female staff members. One night, after Whyte finished her shift, Majek followed her to the train station and attacked her with a knife on a deserted platform. She was stabbed 19 times in the head, one thrust going so deep that it pierced her brain stem.
Majek took Whyte’s phone and threw it in a river. Then he went for a stroll into Walsall, bought some beer, and returned to the hotel. At his trial for murder, the court was shown CCTV footage of him laughing and dancing with friends in the car park, Whyte’s blood caked on his clothes. Whyte died in hospital. Majek has been sentenced to life in prison. Whyte’s sister, in a victim statement, recalled having to tell Rhiannon’s son that his mother had died. She said, ‘It is no exaggeration to say that his screams will haunt me forever.’
Who was looking out for Rhiannon Whyte? We can agree that we have a duty of care towards asylum seekers from other countries. But the state’s most important duty of care is surely towards the people who have to manage them – who have to be in close proximity with damaged young men from chaotic and war-torn countries. These are low-paid workers who tend not to be the kind of people who go on TV or radio to talk in reasonable tones about our duty of care to asylum seekers.
Whyte’s mother is in no doubt about what the problem is: ‘It’s always the undocumented illegal immigrants that are doing this, and it’s not fair, they’re taking over our country,’ she said after the trial (speaking with considerable restraint, given her circumstance). I don’t imagine she will be voting for either of the main parties or applauding calls for evidence-based policy.
As a pragmatic centrist by instinct, I might point out that it’s not always illegal immigrants who do this, and they’re not actually taking over the country. But I find myself not wanting to say that. I find myself sharing in her anger and feeling it to be righteous. At the same time, I wouldn’t have a clear answer to what to do in practice, over and above what is already being done. I don’t think we can or should keep all asylum seekers out.
In short, if I was a politician, I would be terrible at responding to this justified outrage in a remotely satisfactory way. This is the centrists’ dilemma. It’s not that they’re Spock-like calculators who can’t feel rage or share in someone’s pain. It’s that they find it hard to incorporate rough-edged emotions into political communication and policy, because their ethos is founded on the suppression or exclusion of such feelings from the civic realm.
Populists are skilled, above all, at riding emotional currents. Recurring motifs include anger at corrupt elites and suspicion or fear of free-riding or predatory foreigners. The centrist is more comfortable with rules, process and compromise. Their vision of the good society involves getting people with radically opposing views about immigration around a table to reach cool-headed agreement on workable policies. It’s hard to read about the cases of Majek or Azzedine Mahmoudi or Edris Abdelrazig and imagine that such a colloquy could ever survive the anger, bafflement and pain these incidents generate.
Centrists shouldn’t try to fake anger but they can’t ignore it in voters
Centrists sometimes find themselves unable to decide between options or even to know which direction to head. Blank indecisiveness is one of their failure modes. Emotions are crucial to our decision-making process – they help us decide what matters. Centrists can behave like those victims of brain damage who retain the ability to reason perfectly well, but cannot function in real life because they spend hours weighing the pros and cons of using a black pen or a blue pen.
Centrists have been in the ascendant before and may be so again. But the current political environment makes their emotional constipation a bigger problem than in the past, for three reasons. First, social media rewards strong emotion, especially moral outrage, and this is particularly true of short-form video.
Second, depression and anxiety are on the rise. A person’s politics tends to follow their mood or temperament and voters experiencing depression are more likely to vote for populist candidates. Centrists tend to be relatively happy and optimistic by disposition. As a French novelist once remarked, happiness writes white. When so many voters are unhappy and frustrated, centrists become invisible.
Third, voters are very mistrustful of politicians in general. The ones they trust most (or distrust least) tend to be those who wear their heart on their sleeve, rather than those who are always calculating what the tactically optimal next word should be. Communicating emotional sincerity is the best way for leaders to win trust, especially in an environment of suspicion.
Anger is hard to simulate convincingly and consistently. In evolutionary terms, this is by design; emotional displays evolved as hard-to-fake signals of internal states, which is why they are such important markers of trustworthiness. Authentic displays of anger or delight give others a glimpse of a person’s soul. With trust in institutions and official credentials at historic lows, voters rely more heavily than ever on these signals of emotional credibility.
As in so many ways, Trump is the edge case here. Despite his galactically-sized flaws, he is a remarkably effective vote-getter, in large part because voters believe that with him, what they see is what they get. No politician would rationally choose to speak or behave as impulsively and emotionally (and often repulsively) as he does. That he does so signals a kind of hapless honesty, even when he’s lying. Keir Starmer, a centrist who might have been invented to discredit centrism, is hard to trust because he is so hard to see.
Centrists shouldn’t try to fake anger but they can’t ignore it in voters, especially not when it’s justified. They are at their worst when they don’t even seem to understand why voters are so upset. The best they can do is express emotion – when they genuinely feel it – and convincingly acknowledge the anger of voters even when they can’t promise to meet demands that follow from it. It’s a weak position in populist times. But at least it’s honest.
This article was originally published on Ian Leslie's substack, The Ruffian.
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