Introduction to the Centre Party

Politics is open

For a very long time, the Whigs were the main party of British government.

To take another example, in the late 19th and early 20th Century, the Midlands was dominated by the ‘Liberal Unionist Party’.

Throughout British history, political parties have transformed into new forms, or have been replaced by new ones altogether.

There is nothing inevitable about the choices we are offered.

The old approaches

In the mid and late 20th Century, the British political landscape was dominated by both the Labour party, founded on socialist principles from Marx and Lenin, and the Tories, based on privilege and capitalist principles from Adam Smith and Hayek.

However, most people are not so ideological. Most people are more centrist. We don’t want the government to tell us what to do or think but we do want a national system of healthcare.

It is contradictory, but that is okay. Approaches which work in one area of life do not work necessarily work in another. We want the government to regulate train safety but we don’t want them to regulate sock production.

The UK Liberal Democrats became a spent force when they ran on a platform of abolishing student tuition fees and then immediately introduced them when in office. Also their MPs have murky connections to special interests, especially to financial institutions and banks. It seems like their MPs expect to become extinct and are getting rich while they can.

Centre Parties

The Nordic countries of Finland, Sweden and Norway each have a ‘Centre Party’. Denmark and Iceland also have something similar under different names.

These were invented to replace the farmers’ parties which had lost any meaning in the era when most people are not farmers.

At one point the UK Liberal Democrats tried to claim itself as a Centre Party, and sits with the Centre Parties in the European Parliament, however the emphasis is quite different.

The Nordic Centre parties are non-capitalist and non-socialist, are often euro-sceptic and believe in political decentralisation. They are often supported by small businesses rather than large corporations.

In any case, we just liked the name, whatever a UK Centre Party means, we have to decide it for ourselves.

Road to victory

The Centre Party is not a registered party (for now). As a first step, we need more policies beyond replacing the House of Lords and being nicer to chickens, important as those policies are.

We need to discuss policies that are not only different but also focused on the benefiting and appealing to the majority. This is the Centre Party, not the corner party. The platform needs to be able to appeal to at least 50% of the population or it can never even hope to gain power.