The Sensible Centre

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Britain and the West more generally are dominated by a paradigm of left-wing politics which normalises the ideological demands of left-wing extremists, resulting in radical policies that are causing severe damage to our societies. 

It is demonstrable that public policy in many cases is the complete opposite of what the public actually wants, which raises serious doubts about the legitimacy of what we putatively call our representative democracies. 

We must conceive of politics in a wholly different way than the abstract and ideological inheritances of the 19th Century; a paradigm we cannot seem to escape. In order to build a practical and useful politics, a new political conception has entered the discourse: the sensible centre.

What is the Sensible Centre? 

The sensible centre is the baseline majoritarian perspective of the civilisation in question. It represents the public’s basic political interests and is different in each time and place. It has a basic inertia and is not committed to anything other than what it already possesses. Change is, of course, a natural and inevitable necessity of life; the question is what kind of change we should permit. If pursuing a policy of deliberate change is beneficial to the majority concerns of the nation without being excessively detrimental to others, it should be adopted; if not, it should be rejected. 

The problem with the ideological politics of the 19th and 20th Centuries is that they are built back-to-front. These ideologies begin with a visionary future in mind and construct a (usually) coherent series of intellectual and moral demands on the premise that, if these are adhered to closely enough, the glorious future will be revealed. From this fantastical vision, a series of changes are imposed upon a society without heed to what the actual, physical effects of them are; it is politically correct to adhere to the ideological doctrine, even if it is not actually correct. 

Unlike ideological perspectives, the sensible centre does not have a vision of an ideal future. It is a primarily democratic view, born out of the lack of democratic accountability demonstrated by liberal democracies thus far. Throughout the 20th and early 21st centuries, we can see that almost no major policy has been popularly approved of by the voters themselves; rather, almost all initiatives are driven from the top down by ideologically-possessed politicians and kept in place by self-serving caretakers. 

The sensible centre represents the organic heart of the country, in which families, businesses, and social organisations live, work, and build their own personal futures. No one person or group controls this interconnected web of dependencies, and because of its complexity, any radical ideological proposal must be rejected due to the scale of its consequences. 

As such, the primary consideration for the sensible centre is prudence: grounding politics in the real world, in the here and now, and putting the concerns of real people and communities first, rather than appealing to abstract and timeless demographic constructs such as the ‘The LGBT Community’ or ‘The Black Community’, et cetera. A community is fixed in a real time, a real place, and is composed of real relationships between named individuals. Abstract false communities do not exist and do not represent anyone or anything; they are a vehicle for ideologically possessed politicians and activists to implement radical changes against the will of the majority for their own self-interest.

The ‘true’ interests of a community are, of course, a question of complex philosophical debate, which I will generally avoid for this discussion. Instead, I will presume that the sensible centre wishes to preserve the goods it has inherited from the past in order to pass them on to future generations. These can include any number of things, both material and immaterial, which make people feel at home and safe in their own communities and content with the direction their country appears to be heading. 

When these things are put into doubt by changes implemented by radical extremists, then the course of travel should be corrected by incremental and moderate changes. We should be able to be proud to pass down a legacy to future generations and not have them look back at us with shame, disappointment, or anger. 

We Are Not Represented

It is easy to show that the majority of the changes occurring in Western democracies since World War II have been fundamentally anti-democratic, meaning they lacked the support of the majority of the people. In the case of Britain, many of the legal impositions inflicted by the Tony Blair government of the late 90s and early 2000s did—and still do—not align with the wishes of the public. MPs from all political parties have, since then, been entrenched in this paradigm and remain out of step with the majority of the British public. 

According to the Mind the Values Gap study conducted by the think tank UK in a Changing Europe, MPs from both Labour and the Conservatives do not represent the values of the people. This means that the public’s desire for the country to be governed in a way that is respectful of their values is not being fulfilled. While we may call it a democracy, it is not representative. 

The first place to look when assessing this discrepancy is to compare public opinion on preferable economic policy to what the MPs believe. 

Labour and Conservative voters occupy a spectrum of the middle ground when it comes to economics. Both believe in some kind of social welfare and protection of the NHS, and this usually manifests in the philosophy that those at the economic top should pay a disproportionate amount to those at the economic bottom. As the report tells us:

“The average British adult supports the principle of income redistribution, unlike the average Conservative Party member or MP – just (unsurprisingly) not with the same overwhelming enthusiasm as Labour Party people.”

Labour MPs are, in this regard, relatively representative of their constituents. In contrast, Conservative MPs seem to have been captured by a radical free-market perspective and dragged far from the centre. It seems that the only positive position Conservatives are able to fall back upon is the “neoliberal” shine from the economic success of the Thatcher years. 

When it comes to social values, however, both parties demonstrate that they are completely out of touch with the voting public.

As we can see, Conservative MPs are nearly as socially liberal as Labour voters, who are far to the right of the average Labour MP. This clearly leaves the average voter with little in the way of political representation on social issues.

“The effect of this spread of views is that the average British adult is more socially Conservative than the average Conservative MP. Indeed, on these issues Conservative MPs have views that more closely align with the average Labour voter in 2019 than they do with their own supporters.”

Ironically, Figure 7 reveals that Labour voters who switched to the Conservative Party in 2019 have more conservative social values than the average Conservative Party member. This leaves them politically homeless and in a party which is at odds with both their social values and economic views. 

One conclusion that can be drawn from this data is that the average member of the voting public is not adequately represented in politics. The average British adult does not want a combination of left-wing social policies and right-wing economic policies, or left-wing social policies and left-wing economic policies; instead, they are broadly non-ideological, socially conservative and economically liberal.

“To the extent that May’s Law once explained British political parties, if indeed it ever did, it clearly does not do so any longer. Almost nothing discussed above fits the expectations of ‘curvilinear disparity’. In only a small minority of cases do either of the two parties behave in a curvilinear fashion; indeed, of the ten separate questions posed, there is not a single one where the responses from members and supporters of both parties display a curvilinear pattern.” 

The British do not have grand visions of a utopian future, preferring incremental improvements and a general balancing of the scales to favour the poor rather than the rich, rather than aggressive socialist redistribution or a completely free market. Additionally, they do not favour extreme social policies driven by ideology, instead preferring to maintain traditional conservative social standards. 

Who are the Extremists?

In Britain and the United States, the political culture is saturated by left-wing assumptions about how the political environment should operate, which does not align with the views of the overwhelming majority. This anti-democratic nature of the political space ensures that extremist policies of the left receive vast amounts of attention, coverage, and implementation, while the opinions of the sensible majority remain unrepresented. Opinions from the far right are automatically locked out of political debate due to the constant vigilance of extreme-left-wing ideological gatekeeping

It is unacceptable to allow a small minority of very engaged political activists to dominate the directions in which our countries change. In the United States, for example, only 6 per cent of the voting public hold extreme left-wing positions, which Pew summarises as:

“Very liberal, highly educated and majority White; most say U.S. institutions need to be completely rebuilt because of racial bias.”

In Britain, progressive activists make up approximately 13 per cent of the voting public. This contingent is described by the More In Common foundation as: 

“A powerful and vocal group for whom politics is at the core of their identity, and who seek to correct the historic marginalisation of groups based on their race, gender, sexuality, wealth and other forms of privilege. They are politically engaged, critical, opinionated, frustrated, cosmopolitan and environmentally conscious.”

We can fairly characterise progressive activists as being extremely left-wing in their politics and holding very abstract and ideological conceptions about the world. These are the people who comfortably use acronyms such as ‘LGBT’ and ‘BAME’, and collectivise descriptive characteristics into ‘communities’ in order to frame the discussion in a way that benefits their arguments.

Opposed to the left-wing extremists are the right-wing extremists. Pew terms these people as the “populist right” and informs us they make up 11 per cent of the US voter base. 

“Very conservative and overwhelmingly Republican, Populist Right hold highly restrictive views about immigration policy and are very critical of government. But, in contrast to other parts of the GOP coalition, their criticism extends well beyond government to views of big business and to the economic system as a whole: 82 per cent say that large corporations are having a negative impact on the way things are going in the country, and nearly half support higher taxes on the wealthy and on large corporations.”

The More In Common foundation describes Britain’s radical right as “loyal nationals,” who make up 17 per cent of the voter base. 

“A group that is anxious about the threats facing Britain and facing themselves. They are proud, patriotic, tribal, protective, threatened, aggrieved, and frustrated about the gap between the haves and the have-nots.”

Both of these groups have extreme political demands based on their ideological worldviews, which would cause radical changes in our societies. Some of these may be beneficial, while others could have undesirable consequences. Therefore, the sensible centre should not accept their framing or policy suggestions uncritically; instead, they should assess each on its own merits. 

There are many notable political areas in which the extreme right and extreme left have completely opposite views and demands. In many cases, there is no room for compromise. However, some action does need to be taken, and the sensible centre must decide to either adopt one of the radical positions or establish a reasonable middle way through the issue. 

On some issues, the views of the extreme left and extreme right overlap. However, this does not signify that a centrist concordance and a sensible position has been established. In fact, the radical left and radical right can agree on a topic for completely different reasons, despite the topic remaining no less radical. There is no single formula that will act as a silver bullet for identifying these issues and formulating solutions; rather, answers must be found through prudent reasoning and consideration of the current context.

The Case for Sensible Centrism

What does the public actually want, then? What are the majoritarian positions on the major political issues in this country? 

Immigration

To begin, we can examine the question of immigration and compare state policy to the public’s wishes. In Britain, it wasn’t until the late 1990s that the country experienced a consistently high inflow of immigrants; previously, there had been occasional net outflows of emigrants instead. Since the Blair government of 1997 onwards, immigration into the United Kingdom has ballooned. As Migrationwatch put it: 

“In the late 1990s the pace and scale of migration increased to a level without historical precedent. Indeed, between 2001 and 2018 the foreign-born population doubled from 4.6 million to more than nine million. Part of the reason for this huge upturn in migration is that under the Labour Government of 1997-2010 immigration controls were relaxed. Over that period, net foreign migration totalled 3.6 million. This was the result of deliberate policy changes rather than changing patterns of migration or globalisation. The massive increase in the level of migration after 1997 is totally unprecedented in the country’s history, dwarfing the scale of anything that went before.”

In 2021, the UK saw record migration, with over one million new immigrants arriving (net immigration of over 500,000). This has resulted in upwards of 15 of the 60 million people in England and Wales having foreign descent, with the large majority of these being concentrated in urban England. 

This is not what the British public has ever affirmatively voted for. For example, in Labour’s 2019 manifesto, the party promised to continue freedom of movement and end the “hostile environment” policy for immigration, whereas the Conservative Party promised to reduce immigration “into the tens of thousands.” Despite the Conservatives winning the 2019 general election in a landslide, they permitted record migration to take place.

Conservative voters should not be surprised that they are not being represented when it comes to immigration. The Conservative Party has been promising to reduce annual numbers ever since David Cameron headed the party in 2010; however, instead of reducing immigration, the Conservative government continued New Labour’s open border policy. The 2021 census revealed that now more than one in four people in England and Wales are not English or Welsh. 

In 1961, the total population of England and Wales was 46 million people, with only 3.1 per cent of them being foreign (non-English and Welsh). By 1991, the total population had grown to 49.9 million, with 11.4 per cent of them being foreign. New Labour took power in 1997 and began their open border policy shortly thereafter, which continued to unprecedented heights under the Conservative Party's governance. This has allowed the population of England and Wales to balloon to 59.5 million, with only 44.4 million of them being "White British" (English, Welsh, Scottish or Northern Irish), making the non-indigenous population of England and Wales a staggering 25.1 per cent of the total population. This is clearly an unsustainable trend that goes directly against the wishes of the British people.

Public attitudes towards immigration have always been, and remain to this day, overwhelmingly negative. In 1968, following Enoch Powell’s infamous ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech in which he denounced foreign immigration into the United Kingdom, polling revealed that 74 per cent of the public agreed with his sentiment, with only 15 per cent opposed. In 2005, a Labour-run survey of public opinion revealed that 77 per cent of people wanted immigration reduced. In 2011, 69 per cent of the public supported reducing immigration and in 2019, 40 per cent of people wanted immigration reduced, with only 17 per cent wanting it increased. A poll from November 2022 showed that 56 per cent of voters felt immigration was “too high,” with only 30 per cent finding it either “too low” or “about right.” Another poll released in December 2022 showed that 54 per cent felt it was too high, with 33 per cent of the opinion that a new political party should emerge to tackle the problem.

In 2020, a series of YouGov polls revealed that only 30 per cent of people thought immigration had had a beneficial effect on their local area, while 36 per cent felt it was a net negative for the UK as a whole. A 2015 YouGov poll found that only 1 in 10 people would take a refugee into their homes. When it came to illegal immigration, one poll found that only 24 per cent of the public thought the Rwanda deportation plan was “too tough,” while 51 per cent were in favour. Also, 76 per cent of the public felt that immigration was generally being handled very badly. 

We can conclude, then, that the UK public has never had political representation on the issue of immigration. The public has always been against immigration, and despite their consistent wishes on the subject, a series of UK governments have completely ignored their democratic sentiment, often reneging on their own manifestos.

From this position, an appropriate policy from the perspective of the sensible centre would be to end immigration into the United Kingdom. Foreigners do not have a right to immigrate to the UK; however, the British public does have a right to secure and police their own borders. The consequences of unlimited immigration have been dramatic, so ending this policy is a reasonable measure.

Social Services and Housing

The result of allowing 15 million non-English and non-Welsh people to settle in England and Wales has been an spike in demand for the National Health Service (NHS), social services, and skyrocketing house prices. This is only to be expected; after all, the foreigner is no different from the native when it comes to needing access to a place to live and healthcare when they are ill.

The influx of immigration has created an unprecedented demand for the NHS, making it an unsustainable project. Looking at figures from up to 2019, prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, we can see that the NHS was already struggling to meet the public’s needs. Accident and emergency, general waiting lists, and cancer treatment waiting lists all skyrocketed between 2011 and 2019. 

A&E: “In 2010/11, one in every 25 people attending major A&E facilities in England spent over four hours in the department. By 2014/15 this had risen to one in 10 patients, and in 2018/19 it rose to almost one in five. Performance has continued to decline so far in 2019/20, with over one in five major A&E visits lasting over four hours.”

Waiting Lists: “2.5 million people were waiting for hospital treatment in 2010. This rose to 4.6 million in September 2019, the highest number to date. The waiting time target, which states that 92 per cent of those on the waiting list should have been waiting for under 18 weeks, hasn’t been met since early 2016. Currently, more than 15 per cent of patients have been on the list for over 18 weeks.

Cancer Waiting Times: “NHS England reports nine different cancer waiting time measures, and all have dropped to their worst levels in 2019. One key standard is that patients should wait less than two months for their first cancer treatment after an urgent GP referral, but the 85 per cent target hasn’t been met regularly since 2013. So far in 2019/20, only 78 per cent of patients have been treated within two months.”

Since the COVID-19 pandemic, NHS waiting times have been at the highest ever recorded. In February 2020, before the pandemic, there were 4.43 million people on the NHS waiting list for elective care. In October 2022, this number rose to an all-time record of 7.21 million people. 2.91 million of those are waiting over 18 weeks for treatment, 411,000 are waiting over a year for treatment, and the median waiting time for treatment is nearly 14 weeks, which is “significantly higher than the pre-COVID duration.”

This cannot be attributed, as is commonly claimed by left-wing extremists, to “Tory NHS budget cuts” or the Conservative Party putting the NHS “under siege.” There are many false claims that the Conservative Party have reduced the budget of the NHS, which are simply untrue. Every year, the NHS receives a higher budget from the government, Conservative or Labour, with no end in sight. During the pandemic, the government provided a massive temporary funding boost to cope with the excess demand. 

Unsurprisingly, public satisfaction with the NHS is at near-record lows, with only 36 per cent of people being satisfied with the service they are paying for, and 41 per cent being dissatisfied with the NHS’s performance.

“The main reason people gave for being dissatisfied with the NHS overall was waiting times for GP and hospital appointments (65 per cent) followed by staff shortages (46 per cent) and a view that the government does not spend enough money on the NHS (40 per cent).”

The blame cannot be laid at the feet of the NHS staff themselves, who are undoubtedly doing all they can in the face of a rising tide of demand that can never be satiated due to the UK Government's persistent open borders policy. Repeated complaints of staff shortages and underfunding are merely symptoms of the root cause of the problem. 

To give you some perspective on just how much money the NHS consumes when the Conservative Party's Brexit campaign promised to spend “£350 million per week” extra on the NHS, this amounts to 17 hours’ worth of NHS spending. The grand and lavish ceremony that marked the funeral of Queen Elizabeth II amounted to a mere 23 minutes of NHS spending. 

It is not that the British people do not like or want the NHS, or are unwilling to pay higher taxes to sustain it. Rather, it has become evident that this money is being poured into a bottomless pit. Britain's open border policy has put it in a position of attempting to provide healthcare for the entire world, and this is steadily bankrupting the country. Experts have warned that the wider welfare state is “unfit for purpose,” and outside of London, most of England is not described by the British Social Attitudes Survey as “pro-welfare” and is generally socially illiberal. 

“47 per cent of people in London can be classified as pro-welfare, compared with 30 per cent-37 per cent in other English regions.”

The same problem manifests in both England's welfare state and the NHS: too much demand from too many people, since it is providing welfare for the whole world. 

The housing market is, of course, labouring under precisely the same burden. The sheer number of people has caused a high level of demand for housing, pricing out first-time buyers.

When adjusted for inflation, we can see that house prices were 4-6 times the median UK wage until the late 1990s, when New Labour came to power and allowed for mass immigration into Britain. This caused house prices to skyrocket and, although the 2008 financial crash lessened them somewhat, prices have remained high.

Since then, prices have returned to almost the same level they were at before. The COVID-19 pandemic did nothing to stop the rate of price increase either. As the BBC described it:

“Family homes are more popular, partly because people have reassessed their priorities during Covid lockdowns…A lack of homes on the market, when demand from buyers is high, is inevitably pushing up prices.”

The narrative surrounding the “lack” of available homes on the market is driven by left-wing extremists who argue that instead of putting sensible measures in place to reduce immigration—thereby reducing the pressure on the housing market and our public services—we should “build 100,000 council houses” per year. 

But who are these houses being built for? The answer is, of course, foreign immigrants who are arriving at a rate of one million per year as of 2022. Why should the British taxpayer be forced to pay for houses for immigrants and why should they be priced out of the private market? None of this makes any sense if one approaches the problem from the general interest of the native British public.

The sensible centrist policy on welfare, the NHS, and the housing market all follow from a reduction in immigration. The overall budgets of our social services should be reduced and the need for state housing will diminish due to reduced demand.

Gender Politics

In total, gay and transgender people make up between 2-3 per cent of the population, according to official figures, and the British public is generally very tolerant of them. Polls indicate that only a tiny proportion of the public are disgusted or hostile to homosexuals and homosexuality, seeing it as a normal part of the human experience for this minority. This tolerance extends to almost all levels of public life:

“92 per cent of people state they are totally or fairly comfortable with a gay or bisexual man, or lesbian or bisexual woman, being their neighbour, manager, GP or Prime Minister.”

However, while people are tolerant of homosexuality for adults, a large minority do not think that it should be proselytised to children in schools. This may be the result of prudence, rather than bigotry, as people may be uncertain of the effect such lessons will have on children's development.

Tolerance is lower in areas of mass immigration, possibly due to the fact that many immigrants to Britain hold socially conservative views. Londoners are also dramatically less tolerant of homosexuality than the native population of the United Kingdom. 

“...residents of the capital are over five times more likely to reject support for a gay child. This figure rose to a fifth when respondents were asked about the prospect of their child being transgender.”

Meanwhile, in Birmingham, Muslim parents protested the teaching of “LGBTQ education” to their children, resulting in Parkfield Community School withdrawing the lessons. This comes as little surprise, given surveys showing that zero per cent of the British Muslim community believes that homosexuality is morally acceptable, and half would like to make it illegal. 

When asked about transgenderism, the British public is generally tolerant, with certain caveats that recognise certain fundamental differences between transgender and non-transgender people.

A YouGov poll discovered that half of those asked agreed that a person should be able to identify as a person of the opposite sex, although they did not agree that “trans women are women,” a statement to which 60 per cent refused to assent. This question showed a considerable difference in attitudes toward transgenderism between men and women.

When asked if it should be made easier to change the sex with which one identifies, only 28 per cent of people agreed, while 47 per cent disagreed. This disagreement extended even to left-wing voters. 

“While they are pro-transgender rights on most of the other topics, on this subject Lib Dem and Remain voters, women and 25-49-year-olds tend to oppose making the legal process easier.”

Regarding transgender people using the opposite restroom, the poll showed that people are broadly supportive, provided the person had undergone gender reassignment surgery and is authentically attempting to live life as a member of the opposite sex. 

However, this view only applies to adults. The British public was vehemently opposed to the transitioning of children; only a tiny percentage supported the transitioning of those under 16. 

“Three quarters (78 per cent) oppose gender reassignment surgery for under-16s, and 68 per cent say the same of giving these young people hormone treatment. Only 4 per cent support the former, and 10 per cent the latter. It is possible for trans children under the age of 16 to be prescribed puberty blockers, which help delay unwanted physical changes that don't match their gender identity. This too is opposed by the public, however, by 65 per cent to 12 per cent.”

YouGov found that a majority of people did not think that transgender men should be able to compete in women's sports, with 20 per cent in and 55 per cent against. 

“The proportion of people opposed to transgender women taking part in women’s sports rising by seven points, as well as a five-point increase when it comes to transgender men. Every single social group is now as or less likely than they were in late 2018 to back transgender access to gendered sporting contests. This is especially the case when it comes to transgender women.” 

This view has been confirmed by other, larger polls, indicating this is not a line the public finds sensible due to the inherent physical differences between men and women.

“The More in Common think tank polled 5,000 people on the most controversial aspects of the trans debate. Only 19 per cent of Britons supported allowing trans athletes in women’s sport against 57 per cent who did not. The report found consistent opposition to biological males in women’s sport in every group surveyed, even among groups who backed transgender inclusion in other parts of public life.”

The British public generally seems to have a sensible centrist view on homosexuality and transgenderism: that people should not be stigmatised or discriminated against out of prejudice, and adults should be able to live the lives they wish to within reason, and it is expected that they will behave properly in public. However, it is not seen as appropriate for children to make radical lifestyle changes, particularly regarding transgenderism.

At the root of this view is the understanding that, while these things are still acceptable for adults to do, they are also fundamentally different to a normal heterosexual lifestyle. This is not a judgement, but simply an acknowledgement of a fact of life and should be treated as such. In situations that conflict with or undermine the majority, it should be the minority that takes a back seat, such as in women’s sports.

Free Speech

The British public is generally not well-represented when it comes to the issue of free speech. New Labour’s 2003 Communications Act criminalises any message or content sent on a public communications network that is “grossly offensive” or “indecent, obscene, or menacing” in character. The UK also has several “hate speech” laws, which criminalise certain kinds of political expression in line with progressive politics. 

Needless to say, the unspecified nature of what constitutes a “grossly offensive” message has given rise to a very broad and uncertain spectrum of offences. Politically-motivated prosecutors have found criminal fault in online jokes, rap lyrics, and misgendering, among other things. A 2016 Freedom of Information request revealed that British police arrested 3,395 people that year for offensive online posts. Police even record “non-crime hate incidents” to create a permanent record of people who have said things that are “offensive” but not necessarily illegal.

Offline, things are not substantially better, either. There are numerous examples of people being convicted for “hate speech” graffiti, and one Scottish man was arrested for merely writing “Islam is questionable” on a wall. In 2022 a Belfast man was convicted of posting leaflets critical of a recent influx of migrants into the local area, which had a “threatening, abusive or insulting” character, “with the intention of stirring up hatred or arousing fear.” These are just some examples of the legal state of affairs which render many commentators to declare that, legally, the United Kingdom does not have free speech.   

Outside of the law, free speech is in a dire state. Across many organisations, institutions, and private spaces, what has come to be known as “cancel culture” has severely damaged the careers and reputations of many prominent public figures, as well as numerous lesser-known people whose prospects have been ruined.

There has been pushback on the issue of free speech in the UK, but it has not gone far enough. Despite a ruling that people have the “right to offend,” the UK Government issuing guidance that free speech should be protected in universities, and the establishment of the Free Speech Union, the public is still worried about their ability to express their thoughts without repercussions.

A 2021 poll of the British public revealed that 50 per cent of people felt free speech was “under threat” in the UK, compared to 24 per cent who disagreed. 49 per cent of people felt their freedom to speak had been diminished, while only 12 per cent felt it had been increased. Additionally, 43 per cent said they were afraid to speak their minds on matters such as immigration and 42 per cent said they were afraid to speak openly on the topic of transgenderism. Another poll found that 54 per cent of people did not believe speech that challenged religion should be restricted. 

Studies from King’s College London have shown that only 18 per cent of the British public are vocally opposed to free speech (what they term “freedom-from-harm fighters”), whereas 62 per cent of the public consider themselves to have some level of concern for free speech. It is not surprising to find that the issues around which people are most sensitive and most polarised are progressive hot topics such as race, gender, and sexuality: 

“The public are most likely to say people should be careful not to offend others when discussing race (50 per cent), transgender issues (41 per cent), sexuality (39 per cent), and gender identity (39 per cent), while the public are comparatively more relaxed about other potentially controversial topics—for example, 20 per cent think people should be careful not to offend others when discussing the British empire.”

It is apparent that the problems Britain faces with freedom of speech stem from a radical left-wing politics that seeks to criminalise speech which challenges their narratives and wishes to ostracise those who would speak it. The view from the sensible centre on this issue is clear: words are not violence and should not be criminalised as such. If spoken or written statements are libellous or slanderous, they should be dealt with by the civil courts, not the criminal courts. As such, all laws pertaining to “grossly offensive” or “hate speech” should be repealed, and anyone who has been criminalised under them should be pardoned.

The Death Penalty

Nowhere is the British public less represented than in their desire to have the death penalty reinstated for severe crimes. Capital punishment, which is usually reserved for the most heinous offences, has been seen as just recompense by society against the perpetrator of vile deeds since ancient times. The use of the death penalty to punish wrongdoers was a historic Mediaeval inheritance greatly expanded under the period of ‘Whig supremacy’ in the early 18th Century and applied to a wide range of property crimes. So broad and frivolous were the applications of the death penalty, it subsequently became known as the Bloody Code. While there had been fifty offences worthy of capital punishment in English law in the 17th century, by the end of the 18th century this had ballooned to 220.

This unreasonable expansion of the death penalty by the ideologically-possessed Whigs resulted in a series of reforms in the 19th century, reducing the number significantly. Further reforms were made in the early 20th century and, after WWII, the use of the death penalty was further restricted to only six offences by the 1957 Homicide Act. 

After the victory and installation of Harold Wilson's Labour government in 1964, Sydney Silverman, the Labour MP for Nelson and Colne, introduced a bill to abolish capital punishment in the United Kingdom. This passed in the House of Commons on a ‘free vote’—in which members are not obliged to vote along party lines—with 200 votes in favour and 98 against. With that, the death penalty was abolished. 

This decision was not particularly democratic, as it did not represent the will of the British public. This should not come as a surprise, however, as Sydney Silverman was not representative of the public himself. Silverman was the son of a Jewish immigrant from Romania and a devoted socialist. He was a member of the Fabian Society and fled to Helsinki to avoid conscription in World War I, only returning to Britain after the war. He was from Liverpool, but unable to get elected there, so he was parachuted into the relatively safe Labour seat of Nelson and Colne to enter parliament. He was so extreme in his left-wing views that Clement Attlee, the father of the NHS, refused to offer him a cabinet position.

The abolition of the death penalty was controversial at the time, and the idea “ran ahead of public opinion,” as Silverman put it in his speech to Parliament defending his bill. In fact, Silverman rebuked and abandoned any pretence of a democratic mandate and repudiated the idea entirely:

“In this, in my view, they were right. We do not govern ourselves in this country by a referendum. We do not govern ourselves by a Gallup poll. We do not, in matters of life and death, think that it is right to decide what is just or unjust by a spot, unconsidered reaction taken on the street corner or in a club or in a “pub”. Indeed, no part of our criminal law has ever been so determined…we in Parliament must be very conscious that we are responsible to those who send us here and must answer to them for what we do here. This is what we are not merely ready but anxious to do. But that does not mean that we must subordinate our judgement, still less that we must distort our consciences, in order to do something we believe to be wrong because if we do not we might lose a vote or even an election.”

To justify this anti-democratic perspective, Silverman invoked Burke’s dictum that the MP does not have to abandon their own conscience and should instead follow their own moral compass. However, he seems to have ignored Burke’s view that political representation could not merely be “virtual” and should have “some basis in the actual.” That is to say, while MPs are expected to use their judgement, they should not go directly against the interests and wishes of the public. Indeed, the concept of abolishing the death penalty itself appears to be a foreign innovation originating in Italy and spreading across Europe before finally being applied in Britain by the son of an immigrant who himself subscribed to a foreign ideology. 

The question of whether we should consult our own judgement is an important one. It brings us to the issue of Silverman's moral sentiments, which were informed by his left-wing extremism, making him a controversial and often disagreeable figure. His views were not representative of the British public, yet this bill was passed by MPs despite public opposition.

This problem of MPs not representing their constituents is a problem that has persisted to this day. As evidenced by the Mind the Values Gap study, the average Conservative MP is to the left of the average Labour voter on the issue of the death penalty.

The British public has always been in favour of the death penalty. Polls often show that more than 50 per cent of people are in favour of its reinstatement, with this support mostly found in England. Even in Scotland, 41 per cent of people wish for a return to capital punishment. These polls don't represent an archaic opinion either; in 2011, half of people favoured the restoration of the death penalty, which rose to 60 per cent of people in cases of the murder of a child or police officer.

In 2021, it was found that a majority of people (51 per cent) favoured the restoration of the death penalty for criminals convicted of terrorism, with only 26 per cent of Britons in favour of abolition. Even a plurality (42 per cent) of young people (18-24) supported the reinstitution of the death penalty, while 45 per cent of Labour voters stood in support. More generally, 48 per cent of those polled said they would support reinstating the death penalty for other serious crimes, while 28 per cent said they would oppose bringing back the practice.

Even online polls, which have a notorious self-selection bias, have found that the majority of the public support capital punishment for offenders who commit the most serious crimes, such as multiple murder, terrorist acts, or the murder of a child, with only approximately a third of respondents in opposition. 

The issue seems to revolve around what, in fact, constitutes justice in such cases. It is often argued that capital punishment is not a deterrent; this may be true as it is likely that few people commit a crime while imagining they will be caught. This was not, however, Silverman’s argument in his 1964 speech: 

“What I have denied, and what I have not denied alone, is that the death penalty is a deterrent to murder in any sense that is more effective than other existing or imaginable deterrents.”

While Silverman's argument is that we should look for more effective methods of deterring criminality, this does not prevent him from expressing the underlying utilitarian and materialistic view of why he ultimately aimed for the abolition of the death penalty: 

“I am in favour of abolishing the death penalty for any crime, whether it be treason, cowardice, desertion, sabotage in a dockyard, piracy, or anything else, because I do not believe—and this is the gravamen of the whole argument—that we have any right to pursue and carry out this callous, brutal, coldhearted ritual unless we are satisfied that a useful social purpose is thereby attained. I do not believe that it is attained.”

Silverman, from his socialist and utilitarian perspective, shifted the debate from questions of justice to ones of utility. However, this ideological view ignores what appropriate recompense for evil deeds actually requires. 

While Silverman had successfully campaigned to abolish the death penalty, the brutal Moors Murders were committed by Ian Brady and Myra Hindley. Brady and Hindley were convicted of kidnapping, raping and murdering five children, but it was Silverman’s campaign to abolish the death penalty that prevented the pair from receiving the punishment the British public felt they deserved. Instead of abstractly and ideologically raising concerns about “social purpose,” when presented with this very real and monstrous case in which capital punishment would have been obviously appropriate, we are forced to ask: Why should our concerns about the death penalty be grounded in questions of utility, instead of grounds of justice? 

If justice means that each person gets what they deserve, how can it be that a murderer is allowed to avoid the full force of society's laws and not receive the most final punishment? It does not deliver to the murderer that which he deserves to say that society more broadly is not served by his execution. This externalisation of the question avoids the true heart of the issue, one which the British public still recognises and desires to see at the forefront of the debate. There is an intrinsic moral worth in providing those who willfully commit the most heinous crimes, who revelled in the agony they inflicted on an innocent victim, who took perverse joy in their ability to make another human suffer the grimmest and agonising of pains, with the moral recompense that their actions deserve.

Whether this materially benefits wider society is simply not the issue at hand. When someone rapes and murders a child, for instance, that person deserves to have the most brutal and fatal punishment that society is capable of inflicting. There is a deep and ancient moral imperative that is going unfulfilled when the leftist makes an appeal on behalf of the murderer on the grounds of a hypothetical utility to society.

The person who committed such evil acts should be subject to the most righteous penalty: they should be put to death. They should not be kept alive at the expense of a public which they attacked; they should not benefit from a moral order they sought to overthrow. They should be used as an example to the rest. They should be used to show that this is what we do to such villains. 

The question of the power of our society to enforce a just moral ordering of the cosmos is at stake here, and it seems that this is what the British public feel when they ponder the question and find that, yes, of course, the death penalty should be applied for the most severe crimes. People who commit terrible acts on purpose should not receive any quarter on the issue; murderers, terrorists, and child killers should be given what they deserve. 

It appears that the question of capital punishment was a product of ideological possession in both directions. In the 18th Century, the Whigs, driven by their ideological obsession with property, took capital punishment to extreme and unjust levels, and in the 20th Century, the socialists, driven by their ideological obsession towards society, opposed capital punishment to extreme and unjust levels, as well.

The sensible position on capital punishment, then, appears to be a position of moderation between these two extremes, in which injustices are the norm. The British public rightly understands that for most crimes—including property crimes—the death penalty is inappropriate. However, when dealing with the most severe of crimes, such as murder, terrorism, or infanticide, justice requires the death penalty.