I was once told by an American state governor that in politics, if you stray too far from the middle of the road, you end up in the gutter of politics. I passed on these words of wisdom to someone not so long ago and he said “that’s as maybe, but if you spend all your time walking in the middle of the road, you’ll get run over!” It just goes to show that for every proverb, there is an equal and opposite point of view.

This summer has been marked by examples of extreme politics. Recently, in the US, we have the controversy of the extreme right campaigning, with tragic outcomes, in Charlottesville and, last weekend, in Boston. The international press has been full of stories criticising President Trump for not distancing himself from these demonstrations and the far right. Meanwhile, in Venezuela, we have seen how extreme socialism has failed a population with the outcome that free speech and protest is being clamped down on. The world is still trying to analyse how a country so rich in natural resources can so badly let down its population.

From my travels on the campaign trail over the last decade and a half, I have found that most people are more or less centrists. The Blair government was left of centre whilst we have a right of centre government now. I remember doing a school assembly in 2005 and being asked by a 17 year old what the difference between Labour and Conservatives was. I struggled, in words that an A level student would understand, to explain what the differences were at the time. I would have less trouble now, but nonetheless in a country like the UK, people tend to stick to the broad, middle ground. People expect to be able to start a business that has the protection of government, but that government gets out of their way as they progress. People want to work hard and want next year to be better than last year, whilst expecting all our public services to be the best in the world and for us to strive to continually improve our services. This seems perfectly reasonable.

Extremism is not something that I condone, on either side of the political spectrum. The far right and the far left are things I dislike intensely. We can see, from Charlottesville to Venezuela just what extremism looks like and it isn’t nice.