‘Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
…
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.’
Written in the shadow of the First World War and the October Revolution, WB Yeats’s words in ‘The Second Coming’ capture a feeling that resonates just as strongly today. The idea that ‘the centre cannot hold’ is a fitting description of our current political discourse.
Both Left and Right repeat familiar narratives to explain the rise of extremism. Inequality, neoliberalism and racism on one side; regulation, immigration and bureaucracy on the other. But what has truly crushed centrism is what I call the sanctification of political discourse.
By ‘sanctification,’ I mean that debates which should remain open, pragmatic questions of policy have been elevated to the status of sacred truths. Institutions and policies are defended not in terms of the goals they serve, but as unquestionable ends in themselves. This has produced a host of ‘untouchables’ in UK politics. The triple lock on pensions? Untouchable – because pensioners are a core Conservative base. The NHS? Off-limits – every family has someone working there, and it is the fifth-largest employer in the world. Taxes? The rich must ‘pay their fair share’. Housebuilding that helps relieve our current crisis? Dismissed as ‘luxury homes for the rich’.
The consequences of sanctification are serious: it blocks dynamism in policymaking, replaces empirical argument with moral posturing, and entrenches the status quo until small solvable problems swell into existential crises. Immigration, taxation, and the NHS are all cases where incremental reform could have prevented today’s overwhelming pressures – had discussion not been shut down by sanctification. It is, in effect, a manufacturing plant for ‘Too Big To Change’.
Take the NHS. It is treated as sacrosanct, so any suggestion that universal healthcare might be achieved more effectively under alternative models – such as in the Netherlands or Singapore – is dismissed as an attack on the principle of universal healthcare itself. If the goal is universal access, there are more efficient ways of achieving it. But that is beside the point: the institution has been sanctified, not the purpose it serves.
The same is true of taxation. Taxing the rich has become so sacred that even raising concerns about capital flight or competitiveness is dismissed as heresy rather than debated as policy. The top 10% already pay 60% of income tax. Now the situation is ‘too big to change’: bond yields limit borrowing, wealthy individuals leaving the country limit taxes and last month’s 3.6% inflation places another limit on government spending. All these political untouchables have piled pressure on the public finances, and now further spending cannot happen without huge sacrifices – yet another case of something becoming too big to change.
One of the clearest examples of sanctification and its link to extremism is immigration. For a long time, any rational argument about immigration and integration was quickly labeled racist or colonialist, until the arguments themselves came to be treated as such. When even the basic idea of British identity was cast as racist or colonial, it opened the door for ethnonationalism, which we see today. The ‘too big to change’ principle fuels bad theories and worse solutions: once discussion was silenced, only radicals won. Problems that could have been solved by centrists were sanctified until, like the child shouting that the king is naked, radicalism followed. The discovery process of open discussion, which could have produced small, practical improvements, was replaced by self-styled all-knowers who saw politics as the task of correcting and guiding people.
At its core, sanctification rests on a pretence of knowledge: the idea that once something becomes politically correct, it enjoys unassailable moral authority regardless of evidence. This makes genuine reform nearly impossible until the system collapses and only extreme measures remain.
Today we face a multitude of political ‘untouchables’ that paralyse governance. The expansion of the state has created powerful interest groups invested in the status quo. The result is a tyranny of that status quo – a tyranny that was avoidable, had we not mistaken politics for romance.
The way forward is to understand politics more honestly. Nobel laureate James Buchanan wrote of the need for ‘politics without romance’. Romanticism in politics sees politicians through rose-coloured glasses: selfless actors who pursue the public interest and maximise welfare. In reality, politics exists as a form of exchange – in the realm of trade-offs, winners and losers and competing goals. As Thomas Sowell famously put it: ‘There are no solutions. There are only trade-offs.’
Perfect, costless solutions exist only in fiction – in utopian manifestos and Hollywood scripts. In the real world, scarcity, opportunity cost and conflicting aims make trade-offs unavoidable. Yet, as Sowell warned, while the first lesson of economics is scarcity, the first lesson of politics is to ignore the first lesson of economics.
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