Saatchi warns against shift to centre ground
The drift into the centre ground by British political parties has created a “supercynical” electorate who no longer see the point in voting, Lord Saatchi has warned.
The former Conservative chairman, who also led the party’s advertising campaigns under Margaret Thatcher, warned politicians nowadays would “say anything to get elected”.
Although he does not mention him by name, Lord Saatchi’s comments will be seen as a thinly-veiled attack on new Tory leader David Cameron, who has made clear his determination to shift the party back to the political centre.
In an article for the Centre for Policy Studies, entitled In Praise of Ideology, the peer said US president Bill Clinton began the rush for the centre in the 1990s, followed by Tony Blair with the creation of New Labour.
“Even the Conservative party succumbed. Hurt by long years of condemnation for ice-cold brutishness, and anxious to avoid contamination with the ‘spectre of Thatcherism’, it attempted to shed its ‘nasty’ image with a simple move from right to left,” he wrote.
But Lord Saatchi warned this had “ground the ideology out of politics” in Britain and left voters unenthused about the options available to them.
“People can now spot a left-right ‘positioning exercise’ a mile off. The motive for these moves is too transparent. Voters always suspected that politicians would say anything to get elected. Now they know it’s true,” he wrote.
Politics had become a “commodity market”, the peer said, arguing: “Because pragmatism leads to opportunism, which leads to cynicism. Without ideology, political discourse is reduced to claim and counter claim about actual ‘delivery’.”
By contrast, “true” Conservatism was “practical idealism”, Lord Saatchi said. Focused on the ideology of individual self-development, it was naturally allied closely with economics, because this defines people’s ability to look after themselves.
He urged conservatives in the UK and the US to “man the ideological barricades”, warning: “The centre ground is low and flat. From here, you cannot see far. No man can see to the end of time.
“But if you climb to the high ground, there the air is purer, and the sweep of naked eyesight much broader. To do that, requires a certain idealism, a nobility of purpose, a marching tune people can respond to – in other words, to be a vanguard force.”
