I have, for rather more decades than I now wish to consider, viewed politics on the left / right spectrum that we are all told exists. That is all too easy when there continual references to that simple, linear perspective of what is suggested to be a political continuum.
But I do not think that spectrum is useful. It leads to linear thinking.
At the moment it is pushing the main parties to left and right when, if there is such a spectrum it is also said that it hides a normal distribution of political opinion, as if there is a golden mean.
That then implies that there is a middle ground that needs filling. The result is that we are offered Change UK, populated by people manifestly for the status quo, who no one seems much inspired by.
And at the same time some people seem surprised that there is significant support for the SNP, LibDems and Greens and go on to suggest that they must campaign with each other because they all think Brexit is wrong. The assumption would seem to be that they, along with Change UK, are simply ‘in the middle' and that's enough to define a political position.
But of course it isn't. These parties have distinct, and separate offerings. They happen to agree on Remain. That's good. But it's only the belief that politics must exist in a spectrum that requires, in the opinion of some, that they campaign together when that might well be inappropriate.
What is wrong is not the politics of these parties. It is the model of politics that we have, which tries to palace them on a single line between two other parties that the UK political system is rigged to favour.
But what if there was no line? Or at least what if there were positions above or below the line? What if some positions were closer to you? And others further away? What if we had 3D political imaging? Better still, 3D imaging capable of morphing with time? Make it 4D.
What then? Because this is what we actually have. Even in Northern Ireland, where voting patterns are deeply embedded, there are signs of change, but that's not necessarily to the middle. That change is to ‘different'. And in the rest of the UK votes for the SNP, Plaid Cymru and the Greens definitely fit that pattern. It would be good if one day I might again believe that of the LibDems too. Those parties are either not on the spectrum that is supposed to exist, or wish (and need) to get off it.
And that is good news, because we need politics nuanced by and to the reality of people's lives.
And we also need politics and politicians capable of seeing overlaps, commonalities and differences, and being honest about them, which the existing spectrum is not.
I can hope for change. But this is a change we can all make. We can refuse to see politics as a linear spectrum. We can reject two party hegemony as a result, even if we continue to support a party that has benefited from it. We can opt for non-tribal, negotiated, nuanced, representative democracy instead.
That is our choice.
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But you are far left and always will be and advocate that for all
Since when was advocating a mixed economy far left?
charlie says:
“But you are far left and always will be and advocate that for all”
I wonder how old you are, Charlie that you think what you are reading on this page if ‘far left’ ?
I’d guess early thirties. I’d guess too young to realise that New Labour was comfortably to the right, in many respects, of Edward Heath’s conservative party of the 70s.
If you’re any older than that, your failure to notice the extent to which ‘the ‘centre ground’ has moved in four decades demonstrates the pervasive power of media propaganda and your total inability to recognise and filter it.
I find the Political Compass (https://www.politicalcompass.org/ ) analysis useful in that it adds a second dimension – although I think this has the potential to be developed further (as in any ‘mapping’ defining the axes is the key step, and the current ‘Economic’ and ‘Social’ scales used in the Political Compass might need refining especially in the current febrile state of UK politics)
Thanks
Look……………….
If Richard (and even myself and others here) have advocated The Left, it is because:
1) The Tories (the Lib Dems too) are certainly not Left. Look at their record since 2010.
2) What is Labour for? It’s policy ideas are limp and self conscious. Its politics seem to be too personal, too tribal and that is even if we do understand what they mean. Which many don’t. Look at BREXIT. Ambiguity abounds. Their policy suggestions amount to tinkering as though not to offend the establishment.
Labour still look as though they are chasing swing voters to me. Sorry – but that is not The Left. To me Labour has the mark of Thatcher scraped into its forehead and does not seem to be able to remove it.
So naturally, those of us who feel ill-served by whatever party calls itself Left will sit here hankering for something to fill the gap.
And lets face it, since 2008, the Left has had a huge opportunity – an open goal – to bring about proper opposition politics and it has failed abjectly.
And look at UKIP; look at Farage. They exist because Labour has forgotten about those people. They have not come up with a cogent and ethical alternative.
However, Richard is not into orthodoxy at all – the sort of orthodoxy that still abounds in both the Tories, Lid Dems and Labour. He has made that clear on many occasions and he has also said that ideas such as MMT, GND PQE are actually just good ideas worth a try that ANY party with the sense (or a sense of decency toward their electors and society) could take up.
Richard has always been consistent in these views I feel and so have many here.
The facts are that Labour is showing its true colours. It is old Left – tribal, limited, personal, a ruling cabal of people too close to each other and cut off from the membership and who bruise too easily when even criticised positively – and I’m afraid to say looking at BREXIT – also traditionally undemocratic in that unique labour leftist way.
The Left as it is in this country cannot deliver what Chantel Mouffe has called for (real politics based on debate, argument, representation, adverserialism and not based on the fact that since the Berlin Wall came – as a good as that was – everyone in politics is in agreement about how life should be ran) so we have to go beyond Left and Right and Richard is right to call that out.
And please – let’s not mention the ‘c’ word – (centrist) right? It does not exist. Nor should it. And here’s why…….
How can centrism justify its existence when during its short time, a huge increase in the wealth of the wealthy has been achieved at a cost to the majority of people in the world? When the environment is in danger and WE as species are in danger? So much for the Third Way. So much for ‘consensus politics’.
So what is it? Well…………….pardon me but PQE, MMT, GND etc., are just ‘new’ to me; ‘innovative’; ‘imaginative’; ‘heterodox’ even.
And they are something else: Hopeful. Meaningful. Exciting.
What we need is either the Left or Right adopting these ideas (unlikely) or a new vehicle to take them forward. A new party.
The Left has had its chance and to me it has blown it big style.
We need something new – and it ain’t TIG either.
PSR
Thank you
Someone asked me late last week what I was about
I might almost send them some of this…
Richard
If you look at policy in terms of time scale and geography, one can see different people seek to optimise for a different geography. Some have short time horizons, some longer,
Some look to a small geography ( Family, community, nation) others look at large ones – Mankind, Nature.
I’ve concluded that there is NO right place in these continua, one makes a choice, ( often varied according to the decision and the circumstances)
Comic relief…
I’ve always looked at other dimensions.
Forward and Backwards can be used to describe a lot of politics
My preferred is up and down. As in Up the lot of them!
I’ve just read a thorough report that blames FPTP for the current mess the UK parliament is in. Preaching to the converted, but still a good read:
https://www.makevotesmatter.org.uk/news/2019/4/24/devastating-new-report-demolishes-case-for-first-past-the-post
Thanks
I find the left-right is at best a poor euphemism and so blunt as to be meaningless. How can brexit or remain fit in left-right thinking? The same is true for political parties, often voting for things you may want also means voting for things that you don’t.
There are so many aspects to politics that simply don’t fit into these categories. I prefer equal-unequal, kind-unkind, compassionate-cruel, emancipatory-oppressive, and so on.
The problem stems from the idea of representative democracy – it’s not representative and so ends up not being democracy.
If only decisions were so black and white… equal today or equal to those in the future? Kind to your family or kind to a stranger at their expense?
Democracy is “great” when your views are held by the (apparent) majority,”failing” when they don’t!
It was ever thus! since the ancient Greeks it seems
A contemporary review of Smollett’s then newly published ‘Complete History of England’ (1757-8) commented on the problem of writing about “a nation, divided as we are, into two inveterate factions”. As someone once said of British politics, ‘nothing has changed’, but unfortunately there is also nothing in the predicament of factionalism that guarantees some kind of sanctified immunity to disaster for the country. In Britain wisdom has too often been confused with inertia.
I have never understood the obsessions of Left or Right, but have always believed that ‘principles’ in a democracy can and should be reconciled with utilitarian pragmatism, that borrows something from the subtlety of Hume, and recognises that for politics to function in a civilised way we may require to tolerate intolerable people, with whom we share the constitution, but without succumbing to intolerant factionalism.
I do not believe in narrow majorities for changes to the Constitution either, as in Brexit (as if we were voting, short-term for a Government; here-today, gone-tomorrow, and not – in the case of Brexit – voting for all our tomorrows, including those unborn); but it is the nature of faction in Britain that such a novel proposition is now obviously beyond realisation in the UK, solely because of ‘faction’ (although the 1787 US Constitution would forbid it, not least because the Americans used Britain as the proof of the destructive power of faction; so the democratic principle is not new); the die is cast only because Britain always chooses faction.
The false dichotomy of Left and Right is perhaps best deconstructed for our contemporary predicament by Mariana Mazzucato ‘The Value of Everything: Making and Taking in the Global Economy’ (2018). Mazzucato draws attention to the reliance of the biggest Global corporate players, like Apple, Alphabet (Google) or Microsoft, in a long back-story of US Government innovation in technology, or through procurement power, or investment, on which such private sector corporations often depended in their early days (see Mazzucato Ch.7; ‘Extracting Value through the Innovation Economy’, p.189-228). The core of this point is that the public sector often takes the initial high-risks the private sector is not prepared to make.
The corollory of the private sector relying on high-risk public investment is that some will fail, and the cost falls on the public purse; but on the other side, save indirectly, there is rarely substantial reward to the public sector for the vast profits created by private firms piggy-backing on public sector risk-taking: Mazzucato records the elaborate efforts made by Global firms which have benefited from public sector risk-taking, moving vast profits from the US (for example), to very low-tax domiciles, which had no part in the innovation or early support. Similarly, the private sector often does things in the public sector, badly; PFI contracts for example (see Mazzucato, Ch.8, p.256-8 on Scottish Infrastructure Outsourcing).
Economic growth is not, or should not be a matter of ‘all Public’ or ‘all Private’. JM Keynes put it rather well: “The important thing for Government is not to do things which individuals are doing already ….. ….. but to do those things which at present are not done at all” (‘The End of Laissez-Faire’, 1926).
The problem of faction is deep-rooted in Britain; not just among politicians, but in the wider public realm; among the electorate. British faction has never before been so raw and excoriatingly revealed to public view (around the world); a consequence solely of Brexit. Yet that curious anomaly is only because in Britain, Brexit is deeper than Brexit.
John
I agree with your highlighting of faction-ism. And yes – BREXIT has highlighted that a lot.
Chantal Mouffe talks of ‘agonism’ in ‘On the Political’ (2005) – Wikipedia definition here:
‘Agonism is a political theory that emphasises the potentially positive aspects of certain forms of political conflict. It accepts a permanent place for such conflict, but seeks to show how people might accept and channel this positively. For this reason, agonists are especially concerned with debates about democracy’.
Mouffe says that what is important is that both/all sides see their existence as legitimate and that they share some common ground by association. Instead of being enemies, those involved are ‘adversaries’.
Mouffe suggests that the task of democracy is to turn antagonism into agonism.
I like what Mouffe says because it could very well be the right place to start to reform our politics. She also says that it is the Left that should do this because it would help identify and underpin it with democracy once again.
If Labour were less tribal, they could start an agonistic trend by reaching out to the Greens, SNP and the other NI parties to turn the tables on May & Co.
Instead it is unfortunately the other way around, with the smaller, newer parties making this suggestion upon mostly ignorant Labour ears.
But I am hopeful because BREXIT has seen the green shoots of potential renewal pop everywhere (and for me this has nothing whatsoever to do with referendumbs) as people – MPs, Councillors and lay people work out how to try to something different to get a more meaningful politics.
The question is however, Who is going to be the focal point for bringing these (agonistic) groups together?
I like this idea….
Political tribe terminology is fraught.
I recall at one stage (now many years ago) listening to Douglas Hurd… he was talking specifically about penal policy and was expressing the sort of sensible observations that ‘lefties’ think are their exclusive property. So in some respects Hurd was socially very well left of the mythical ‘centre’. Economically he seemed to me from his utterances to be extremely ‘hard right’.
Go to the labour ‘left’ and you find ideas of economic …illiteracy actually…. but a principled expectation of fairness if not actual equality, and this contrasts starkly with a vengeful instinct for vile punishments and general intolerance of people who are ‘different’ in some way. This is at times extremely conservative. This was Thatcher’s electoral power base, this was where she found HER swing voters.
The morons currently challenging MMT and wanting Congress to declare it illegal (WTF !!) call themselves ‘libertarians’. That makes no sense to me…they are elite anarchists.
‘Populism’ is another political term which has morphed into meaningless by being used to describe diametrically opposite political philosophies.
We need to repaint our political parties with ‘Ronseal’ so that they do what it says on the tin.
I like that idea….
Although there are some broadly living up to that mow
“I have never understood the obsessions of Left or Right, but have always believed that ‘principles’ in a democracy can and should be reconciled with utilitarian pragmatism, that borrows something from the subtlety of Hume, and recognises that for politics to function in a civilised way we may require to tolerate intolerable people, with whom we share the constitution, but without succumbing to intolerant factionalism.”
I agree with this, but the trouble is that ‘utilitarian pragmatism’ never inspired anyone much, hence the survival of Left/Right over centuries, which have unreconciliable conflicting principles…
Left/Right is what evolved as a result of the formation of Democacy, it is as old as Ancient Greece, even though it wasn’t called Left/Right then.
That survival has been challenged many times, but never beaten, so we need to ask why, and be very creative if we are to ever phase it out.
I was brought up with this Left/Right dichotomy, I’d even call it sectarianism, as it included a degree of intolerance towards ‘intolerable people’.
Many who have an interest in politics still are, to some degree, in a similar frame of mind, both on the Left and Right sides of the spectrum.
Changing that is not easy, and utilitarian pragmatism is not a vision for anyone’s future, only a means to achieve a working government.
Might a common interest and vision be a strong enough driving force to beat conflicts of interests, and even the most self-interested and powerful factions in a country? We have some way to go…
Looking at Greta Thunberg, how she managed to reach and inspire so many young and not so young people to challenge governments throughout the planet, helped by good communication machines…it may be a flash in the pan, but it doesn’t have to be. It may be the common base/ground which enough of us are looking for to stop the rot.
“I agree with this, but the trouble is that ‘utilitarian pragmatism’ never inspired anyone much”.
Inspiration may be necessary, but it is not sufficient; at least to achieve anything significant in an adverbial British politics. Utilitarian pragmatism is not glamorous; but it is how to ‘get things done’ without division and confrontation. It is a skill, an accomplishment necessary to succesful politics (presuming that the purpose of politics is actually to do things – things that work); an accomplishment that is required to be learned by political practitioners, but too often is passed over: indeed, everything else, sooner or later, but eventuallyand inevitably: just turns into faction, and faction achieves precisely nothing.
Adverbial? Adversarial. Why is auto-correct always wrong?
It’s a neoliberal construct?
[Autocorrect]’s a neoliberal construct?
Lol !
There are some interesting graphics on this topic here:
https://flipchartfairytales.wordpress.com/2019/02/19/do-people-want-a-new-centrist-party/