Centrism as political vapourware

Across many fields there’s a regular occurrence of people announcing that they’re soon going to be launching something that’s Big and New and Different and Will Definitely Change Everything. “Soon” never gets officially quantified to anything more specific than “in a few months” but it’s always really close, honest, so just hold on in there and, oh, if you happen to be an investor we might just need a little bit more funding to get over the line, but the payoffs will be huge.

In politics, this type of vapourware has normally applied to individual policies in various forms, be they the think tank trailing a really challenging paper, the party telling journalists to just wait until they see the manifesto or the government promising that there’s definitely going to be a White Paper on that issue sometime in this Parliament. Now, though, we appear to have someone creating a whole political party on the principles of vapourware.

Since the collapse of the Liberal Democrats at the 2015 election and the election of Jeremy Corbyn soon after, many people have declared that what British politics really needs right now is a brand new centrist party, a chorus given additional voices after the Brexit referendum. Various people have tried to set one up (or proposed turning an existing party into a “movement for moderates”) and there have also been various rumblings that some Very Important (And/Or Rich) People have been working on putting together their very own Brand New Centrist Thing which is always about to be launched Really Really Soon.