Of centre extremists

Many years ago I read a joke about a political survey on the continent in which one voter described herself to the pollster as a "centre extremist," by which she meant, quote "I have moderate views but I'd shoot anyone who disagrees with them."

That is primarily not the sort of "centre extremist" which this post is about, although I note with concern that over the past few years the idea that people who you disagree with are evil or stupid enemies who it is legitimate to harass, insult and even commit low-level assault against (e.g. throwing milkshakes) rather than human beings with a different view to debate, has gained traction in parts of the political spectrum where I would never have expected to see it.

The point I want to make in this post is that, among the shakeup of the political landscape created by Brexit, a lot of people who on most issues have a reputation, usually justified, for being moderates find themselves at one extreme pole of the argument on the Brexit question.

The words "extreme" and "extremist" have pejorative associations to most people in this country which is one of the reasons a lot of people automatically resist applying them to those who we normally think of as "moderates." It would be very easy for me to write that I don't mean to apply those pejoratives in this case and am only writing in a neutral sense about those who are at one end of a spectrum of opinion.

Unfortunately it is not that simple. Because the sort of pejorative we associate with the word "extremist" includes things like refusing to an accept the result of a democratic vote. 

And if that doesn't perfectly describe the most hard-line opponents of Brexit, what does?

It's not just the Lib/Dems. A very large proportion, though not all, of the "right" of the Labour party, and a segment, though not remotely as large, of the "left" of the Conservative party, people who we have great difficulty thinking of as anything other than "moderates" and to whom on most issues it is perfectly correct to apply that term, are anything but moderate when the subject moves on to whether Britain should leave the EU.

If you want an indication of the tension, look at the people who have left the Labour party rather than support Corbyn. Some of them are voting with the government to leave the EU. Others are hardcore remainers whose defining objective at the moment is to stop Brexit.

The best example of this tension is the group who at various times have been known as Change UK, the Independent Group for Change, Tiggers, or in some cases recently, as Liberal Democrats.

There were two main drivers pushing these people out of the parties on whose tickets they had been elected as MPs.

One was exhibited by those former Labour MPs who were strongly and with complete justification opposed to, or had been the target of vile abuse from, the Anti-Semitic element in the Labour party. In this respect these people can accurately be described as moderate.

But the other driver is that, almost to a man and woman, the "TIGgers" are very strongly pro-EU. They are not in the centre on that issue, they are at one end of the spectrum.

 For want of a better term I will use the term "Centre Extremists" for people whose views on many issues are moderate but are not moderate on the subject of Brexit. Another way of saying the same thing: people who are near the centre of the right/left axis but are at one extreme end of the Remain/Leave axis.

MPs, peers and those with enough money to take the government to court who come from this part of the political spectrum have for the pat three years been using every trick in the book which the courts and Britain's unwritten constitution allow to try to frustrate what people voted for in the 2016 referendum election and 85% of MPs promised to do in their 2017 manifestos. But they went through the roof when Boris Johnson started playing the same game back. 

Actually I think playing ducks and drakes with the UK's unwritten constitution is more than a little dangerous for democracy in Britain, whichever side it comes from. However, one of the most worrying things is that the "Centre Extremists" just don't seem to see that the conduct of John Bercow as Speaker of the House of Commons and that of extreme Remainers in parliament is at least as dangerous as anything Boris Johnson has done, and probably more so. 

But that's part of the problem. The hardliners on both sides see the dangers in what the other side is going but not that on their own. And for those who are used to thinking of themselves as moderates - justifiably so in the past when the structure of politics was different, or on issues other than Brexit - it appears to be particularly hard to apply the same critical gaze to one's own side's actions that you apply to everyone else.