Embracing patriotism and identity could reinvent the liberal centre – Telegraph.co.uk

What the SNP has also succeeded in conveying, though, despite having been in power in Scotland for ten years, is a sense of being anti-establishment. As Alex Salmond, its former leader, told me, We challenged the establishment in Scotland, which was the Labour Party, and the establishment in Westminster, which was often the Tory Party, and that defined the SNPs role.

Most centre-right and centre-left parties have been the establishment, though, for so many decades that voters are increasingly bored and angry with them. Its partly a matter of style. People cant bear the buttoned-up, stick-to-the-message-at-all-costs method of talking that was invented by New Labour, tested to its limits by Labour leadership candidates Yvette Cooper and Andy Burnham, and finally drove people to distraction with Hillary Clinton. To mangle Yeats, it seems to voters that the centre lacks all conviction while the populists are full of passionate intensity.

As Osborne put it to me, When President Trump tweets, probably at two or three in the morning, you may look at the tweet and think thats a pretty odd thing for the President of the United States to say, but you dont doubt that hes done it, whereas when Hillary Clinton tweets, everyone goes, "Well, that probably went through seven committees and is signed off by someones that not even her.

So mainstream politicians need to capture the authenticity and candour beloved by populists of the right and left. But they also need somehow to reinvent themselves, ideally outside the traditional party system. Thats what Emmanuel Macron is doing so successfully in France. His policies are avowedly centrist, but he has created his own party, En Marche!, and may reach a run-off against Le Pen in which no candidate from a mainstream party is represented.

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Embracing patriotism and identity could reinvent the liberal centre - Telegraph.co.uk