Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.’
(From: W.B. Yeats, The Second Coming, 1919)
The context of the poem
It has been noted that the famous lines above from the first stanza of the poem describe a time of chaos. While the poem is partly about the second coming of Christ, hence the title, it was also written with the First World War and the dramatic events in Yeats’ own country of Ireland in mind, following the Easter Rising in 1916 and the election of 73 Sinn Fein MPs in the 1918 UK General Election out of 105 in Ireland as a whole.
‘You always win from the centre …’
Yet, it also seems to speak to the political situation in Britain today. Let me explain why I think this.
For at least 30 years now, large swathes of the political world, including commentators and particularly the right wing of the Labour Party, have had a particular mantra about how to win elections. This mantra basically says you can only win from the centre and it is therefore vital to occupy that centre ground in order to win a general election.
This certainly seemed to work for Blair and his New Labour project in the 1990s, although I still believe that after the trauma of Black Wednesday in September 1992, a Labour Party led by the late John Smith would have won a comfortable majority in 1997.
Regardless of the merits of taking the centre ground, the problems with endless triangulating and compromising are today there for all to see, as we have a Labour government, which doesn’t really seem to stand for anything, having spent a year in power making itself more and more unpopular. If you need further proof of the folly of trying to win from the centre in the third decade of the 21st century, you only have to look at the mess that the Democrats are in in the United States. So why has the mantra of winning from the centre become so outdated and why is it that, in the words of William Butler Yeats the centre now ‘cannot hold’?
The UK since the financial 2008 crash
The simple answer to that is the 2008 crash. Since that crash, wages and living standards across much of the Western world have stagnated and the all-powerful Neoliberal economic system has been shown to be of little use to most people. This presents us with serious problems. As the prevailing economic model breaks down, so people are beginning to question the prevailing political model which underpins it, that is democracy.
This means that unless real change is brought in by democratic parties, to challenge the inequalities in countries like the UK, then people are going to start looking for alternative political systems. And we have been here before, or at least in Germany they have, 90 years ago. When the economic system broke down in the Weimar Republic, so did the democratic political model and the Nazis came to power.
The situation in Germany in the 1930’s can of course be contrasted with that in the USA at the same time. There, the newly elected President Roosevelt brought in the New Deal and did change the economic situation and while it wasn’t perfect thereafter, it never is, democracy in the USA held and was indeed strengthened as a result.
A New Labour tribute act
Sadly, the present Labour government seems utterly incapable of rising to the occasion. Just as old rock bands have tribute acts, so the present Labour government is nothing more than a New Labour tribute act, with the caveat that under Blair, left wingers were not summarily thrown out of the party.
In many other respects however, the government seems trapped in a world that existed 30 years ago but is no longer here since the 2008 crash. Trying to apply 1990’s solutions to 2020’s problems simply doesn’t work and isn’t going to work. One way or another, there needs to be real change in our economy and society and meaningful change, which can make a real difference in people’s lives. This might include helping to rebuild our public realm and our communities, sorting out the scandal of dirty water once and for all by nationalising the water companies and making sure that they are truly accountable to the people of this country, by properly tackling the scandal of child poverty or the calamitous inequalities within society along with numerous other measures.
Without this happening, like many I fear that we could be going down the road towards a Reform government. People desperately want change and although Reform in reality are on the side of the wealthy, want to dismantle the NHS and destroy even more of the public realm, people perceive that they offer change.
Where do progressives go now?
To return to Yeats’ poem, while it is clear that the centre cannot hold, the lines, “the best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity,” seem frighteningly prophetic for our times, over 100 years after the poem was written.
If indeed the centre cannot hold, and the threat of a Reform government looms ever larger, there is also the pressing question of where progressives go now. It seems likely that the Labour Party will try and rely on the ‘need to keep out the Reform vote’ and returning to them at the next general election, but I don’t think this will work.
Indeed, Labour’s complacency is more likely to mean more people drifting away to alternatives. The new Corbyn/Sultana party and possibly a left populist Green Party under the potential leadership of Zack Polanski, then offer alternatives to choose from. The danger of a split left vote of course only enhances the chances of a Reform government, but given Labour’s stance on so many issues, from not cutting the two-child benefit cap to not really dealing with water companies, from not dealing meaningfully with the situation in Gaza to silence over human rights issues in other places such as Saudi Arabia, it is increasingly likely.
The centre is not where people want politics to be in this country today. It implies the status quo and just as Kamala Harris found out last November in the USA, far too many people here also not happy with that status quo in this country. The challenge to the Left is to be both united and have a genuinely progressive offer that can appeal to people with a sense of real change and real improvement in their lives.
Otherwise, to paraphrase Yeats, what is left of our innocence may indeed end up being drowned.
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