The Barbarism of Pure Centrism
A Note on the Green Menace and the Blond Plumber
Hannah Spencer’s victory for the Green Party in the Manchester parliamentary by-election marks an historic revival of left populism. The vote, however, also indicates a strong challenge from the right populism of Reform UK, who eclipsed the Conservatives. Labour was beaten into third place and the Liberal and Conservative vote was negligible. Centrism is being stretched.
Jude Wanga, in ‘The centre shrinks’, London Review of Books, 5 January 2026, writes,
“Centrism in Britain is less a set of principles than a style: a preference for triangulation over truth, ‘responsibility’ over morality, ‘electability’ over leadership. It treats politics as a stress test of optics rather than a contest of values. It confuses the avoidance of conflict with coherence.”
Centrism presents drift as stability.
l... the deeper problem with centrism: it wants the prestige of professing values without the cost of acting on them. It’s allergic to taking moral risks…”
The struggle between the ‘elite’ and the ‘people’ is waged with a weaponry of words and phrases that appear to have become dislodged from their meanings. From Starmer’s centre, strategy is projected with abstract nouns (“stability”. “security”, “change”); tactics from middle-England focus groups. In the latest by-election contest Starmer thought Reform UK could be seen off by Labour itself performing anti-immigration, law’n’order dog-whistles, whilst appealing to patriotic anti-fascism. But Peter Mandelson’s “rule” that working-class Labour voters could always be taken for granted (having “nowhere else to go”) doesn’t hold when there are “practical solutions” on offer from the snake-oilers and crypto-pushers of the Far Right.
Starmer doesn’t seem capable of landing a punch on a British Far Right the US President wants to see replacing him in Downing Street. In Wanga’s words,
“And it creates a vacuum, an absence of moral clarity, that the far right is delighted to fill… Fascists thrive on the collapse of shared standards. They feed on the public recognition that rules are selective, that principles are mere branding, that justice is transactional”
Secondly, Starmer has dismissed the Greens as too extreme to be argued with. For him this may be true. Spencer says that working people are being “bled dry” in a country that works to “line the pockets of billionaires. I don’t think it’s extreme or radical to think that working hard should get you a nice life.”