Things Fall Apart

Nick Cohen writes:

Over at the Leveson inquiry a smug Lord Patten – there is no other kind -- said the BBC could not possibly be biased because left wingers attack it on some occasions and right wingers attack it on others. The BBC holds the ring, he implied. Uncontaminated by the ideologies of extremists, and possessing indeed no bias or ideology of its own, it speaks for moderation and reason.

Although true, the argument that apparently moderate and reasonable people can be more ideological than extremists is ordinarily a hard one to make. Given the crisis in the eurozone perhaps even Patten can grasp that the centre ground offers no protection against deranged ideas.

Support for the euro was the mark of moderate men for almost two decades. No one seemed more reasonable than Patten when, as a former EU commissioner, he advocated policies that would lead Europe to ruin. On the contrary, it was the critics of the euro who seemed like crazies. Now those who warned against what I think I can fairly call BBC orthodoxy have been vindicated, and events have revealed the centrists to be the dangerous utopians.

When they talk about the centre ground, everyone reaches for the lines in Yeats' Second Coming about respectable society collapsing.

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.

We may yet see anarchy or something like it in southern Europe. But for the moment a better poem for our time is Church and State. It shows that, as well as understanding the dangers of anarchy, Yeats also understood that the Chris Patten’s of this world – the careful bureaucrats, the respectable judges, and moderate purveyors of conventional wisdom – can be the most dangerous men of all.

What if the Church and the State
Are the mob that howls at the door!
Wine shall run thick to the end,
Bread taste sour.

Where and what is this "centre ground"? Who has staked it out, who has built on it, and who now occupies it? The 1970s campus-based sectarian Left, variously Stalinist, Maoist and Trotskyist, though with chemical and sexual habits that would not exactly have been tolerated in the USSR or, at least officially, in the PRC. And the 1980s campus-based sectarian Right, devoted to apartheid South Africa, with its official monument to Hitler, and to the Far Right, often Nazi-harbouring pioneers of monetarism in Latin America and elsewhere. Though with chemical and sexual habits that would not exactly have been tolerated by P W Botha or by General Pinochet.

Those were the same chemical and sexual habits in both cases, and the two supposedly warring sides indulged in them together. Since they both came to unchallenged power, those habits have become legal for all practical purposes, and fall increasingly within the realm of enforced social respectability. Everything from cannabis and cocaine use, to sex between men and teenage boys. That, apparently, is "the centre ground".

The archetype of this supposedly mainstream, moderate, sensible polity is the carve-up of Northern Ireland between a fully armed Marxist terrorist organisation, and a bizarre fundamentalist sect with little or no connection to the norm within Ulster Protestantism. And the good old cause of these soi disant centrists is European federalism, which has always been opposed by the completely ignored figures of pro-Commonwealth Keynesians in both main parties, and which subjects us to the legislative will of Stalinists and Trotskyists, neo-Fascists and neo-Nazis, members of Eastern Europe's kleptomaniac nomenklatura, neoconservatives such as now run France and Germany, people who believe the Provisional Army Council to be the sovereign body throughout Ireland, Dutch ultra-Calvinists who will not have women candidates, and a French Green who is unrepentant about his active and proselytising sexual abuse of very young children when he was a leader of 1968 student movement. That, apparently, is "the centre ground".

Roll on electoral reform, after which at least one and possibly both of two patriotic, socially conservative parties, one with Labour roots and the other with Tory roots, would always be in the governing coalition at any given time. A permanent restraint, if not outright banishment, of the extremist and evil "centre ground".