- Notes From the Cult: The Extremist Centre? Archived Message
Posted by johnhol
on February 23, 2019, 7:44 pm
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Extract: 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.” Full article: https://disidealist.wordpress.com/2019/02/23/notes-from-the-cult-the-extremist-centre/ |
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