Nigel Farage is wrong – the political centre ground hasn’t split, it’s vanished

At his press conference last week, Nigel Farage was asked the broadcast media’s favourite question: how could he expect his party to have electoral success if it deliberately stood outside the sacrosanct ‘Centre Ground’ of politics?

He laughed – which was probably the right response since his party has clearly demonstrated its potential for serious electoral impact. But then he gave the wrong answer. There isn’t just one centre ground, he said, there are two.

It was obvious what he meant: there was the centre ground that is sanctified by the Left-liberal establishment, which accepts all the shibboleths and prohibitions that are now the official rules of social and political life. (You know what they are. I won’t bore you with a list.) And then there is the centre ground on which most real people stand which sees many of those rules as absurd, irrational or positively dangerous.

But that isn’t the case. There are not two competing locations vying for the right to be the natural home of rational public opinion – which is what “centre ground” is generally understood to mean. In truth, there can be no consensus of the reasonable because that whole vocabulary has been discarded. Rationality itself is now unfashionable: the idealistic tradition of moderate, fair-minded consideration of both sides of an argument, allowing the best possible solutions to emerge from an exchange of opinions, is now effectively finished.

The philosophical model adopted by most Western democracies since the middle of the last century involved adapting to changing conditions and attitudes by gradually amending the programme of government in ways that were thought appropriate to the times. Even quite radical societal changes – like abortion reform or the legalising of homosexuality – were introduced without civil unrest or disorder because the presiding governments had made accurate judgements about the boundaries of – yes – the electoral centre ground.

Well, forget all that. We don’t have arguments anymore, let alone rules-based orderly debate. We have hate fests in which the clashing sides believe that their mission is to silence their opponents and would-be interlocutors sometimes in the most permanent way conceivable judging by the proliferation of death threats. It is important to recognise that the absence of anything that could be recognisable as a centre ground (or even as several competing ones) is not accidental: it is the result of a quite deliberate dismantling of the principle that used to be the foundation of our political system.

The right to present an alternative view and the moral obligation to take into account the views of others was what distinguished free peoples from enslaved ones. In their place we have enmity, suspicion and a sense of abandonment by what should be the agencies of justice, as well as the weaponising of language itself. Words that were once mainstays in the preservation of liberty have changed their meanings completely. “Liberal” now means illiberal: intolerant of any deviation from dogma even when it defies scientific fact. That great American favourite “progressive”, now means repressive: demanding the extirpation of any views which contradict the imposed radical orthodoxy. As we are reminded constantly by endless further episodes in this Inquisition, careers can be destroyed, livelihoods terminated and – most depressingly – dissident voices simply intimidated into cautionary silence. And all in the name of what is being described as a new centrist consensus.

There are the beginnings of hope, of course: the first tentative signs that this grotesque hegemony may be imploding. Forbidden words are being uttered out loud and some of the banished are being rehabilitated – at least in the arena of commerce where reality, in the form of consumer choice, still has some bite. This may turn out to be the end of it, but before we get too smug and complacent, it is very important that we examine what just happened. If we did not, in the end, lose a grip permanently on our most treasured values, we came damn close to it. There will be a time for the academic dissertations and the popular books by public intellectuals examining the temporary insanity that nearly brought down democratic freedoms. But there is an urgent task that needs to be undertaken immediately because this is still too close to call.

First we have to be clear that this thing which, for some bizarre reason, was allowed to run amok – this presumed tyranny over words and thoughts – was not politics at all. It was a cultural nervous breakdown. Words that once had perfectly comprehensible meanings (like “crime”) were turned into coded ambiguities (“non-crime hate incident”) which were to be enforceable by the police even though, by definition, they were not criminal. Why are we wasting time talking about this? It is nonsensical. If a crime is committed, or suspected, that is the business of the police and the courts. If a non-crime (which is to say, no crime) has been committed, then it is not a matter for the police and the courts. No distinction is more important in a free country than that between crime and not-crime. There was a time when everybody in his right mind understood this. When exactly did that understanding break down?

Maybe this is a symptom of a civilisation in decline: a defiant flight of belligerent, self-indulgent fantasy that can only take control in a decadent, exhausted culture. The decency and tolerance of the discussion about assisted dying has been startling precisely because it is now so unusual. The Left-liberal axis which presumes to take such commanding power of social relations today is much more drastic and fundamental than the Marxist Left which tried to subvert the West when the contest was about economics. Those old school Communists would not have suggested that men could become women. They were busy arguing about the ownership of the means of production, not the biological facts of the human condition.

Perhaps this was the inevitable end of secularism. Losing the authority of revealed religion and the moral authority that goes with it, may be too great a deprivation for human conscience to bear and so the agnostic society had to create its own kind of moral absolutism to fill the vacuum.