From time to time on this site there has been reference to the limited usefulness of left and right in terms of describing political parties and the boundaries between them – including Roz Savage’s recent piece. In a less fluid political landscape I can remember the Huddersfield West Liberal MP wrestling with this in the 1960s. One of the curious features of left/right models is that parties find it easier to use the tags to describe their opponents than to define themselves. So what alternative labels are there? Are progressive and conservative any use? The former tends to be more slippery than the latter. What “no change” means is usually easier to recognise than what “change” means because you cannot discuss serious social and political change without facing the question “what sort of change?” Is ”progressive” somewhat susceptible to Lewis Carroll’s Humpty Dumpty doctrine: “When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean”?
In the aftermath of the Gorton and Denton by-election I want to have a go at seeing if “non-conservative” can help us. It seems to me that the Greens managed to defeat two conservative political entities – Farage’s party and the part of the Labour Party that is in government. Reform UK may or may not be seen as a replacement for the Conservative Party. What the billionaires do with their donations will be a factor. My hunch is that the story will not be like that of the Ulster Unionists who were caught up in a process of parties being replaced in turn by slightly more extremist parties until power finally came to rest with the DUP. There is a chance that what is left of the present Conservative Party could end up with some sort of deal with whatever Reform looks like when Farage’s dictatorial style leads to his own demise.
Labour’s internal tensions have been there from the beginning but there are forces at work which will eventually count for more than who becomes Prime Minister and Leader of the Labour Party. One is the steady erosion of automatic support for Labour amongst public sector workers, many of whom now find themselves working for private sector agencies. Another is the gradual replacement of trade union funding with alternative large donations from the private sector.
Commentators tell us that voting patterns and elections are getting more complicated. They no longer have easy notions of a clear left/right spectrum to play with. The important issue for me is how the non-conservative parties exist and, where necessary, co-exist. We now operate in a “complicated” scenario in which parliamentary constituencies may throw up a whole variety of voting patterns across the country. Of course it is complicated, and needs hard work and hard thinking. The existing voting system for Westminster nurtured the “simple” Conservative/Labour duopoly which more and more voters are giving up on.
At the parliamentary level it shouldn’t be too difficult to work out when co-operation with other non-conservatives is appropriate and when it is not. On many issues some Labour dissidents will be searching their consciences on what to do when Lib Dems and/or Greens are reflecting their own priorities. Look out for occasions when they defy the whips in favour of abstention. I hesitate to comment on the SNP and Plaid Cymru from this side of the borders! The Corbyn/Sultana party remains something of a mystery. Come what may, Lib Dems should welcome the complications and work within them.
* Geoff Reid is a Methodist minister who spent the first twelve years of retirement from the day job as a Bradford City Councillor but has lived in Barnsley since 2024.
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6 Comments
Interesting article, Geoff. Whatever terms we decide to use to describe ourselves and other parties, we do need to think about which parties we share sufficient common ground to make political cooperation worthwhile. My view is that we probably have more in common with the Greens, the SNP, Plaid and Your Party than we do with Reform and the Conservatives. We can see elements within Labour with whom we share some ground though Labour itself in now a conservative Party – to our right using the left/right spectrum.
Geoff is right…we need to embrace where politics finds itself now and deal with it..the two party system is at an end. The prospect of a future progressive alliance beckons united against the hard right and the Marxists.
Urgh why do so many people in this party struggle with this, our position has never been remotely difficult to map onto a simple left right spectrum.
We’ve never been economically left but culturally conservative or culturally liberal but economical right. Sometimes we have been economically in the centre and culturally liberal but people with that set of views don’t normally have a problem with claiming to be in the centre.
There are some things that a left right spectrum doesn’t capture like centralisation Vs decentralisation, but it’s not really supposed to. And unless such issues were the only thing we cared about its not enough to stop left and right labels from applying to us whether we like it or not.
It is an old dictum that “he/she who stands in the middle of the road soon gets run over” (a principle I unfortunately put to the test on a busy road in the 1960s!). The history of this is that parties who position themselves in the “centre ground” pf politics end up by fracturing or moving away to right of left. Those who seek moderation in politics find little depth to whatever electoral support they initially receive.
But essentially Geoff is correct. The terms “right” and “left” were useful in the days of two-party politics, when bothy parties were re-assured by the rotation of “Buggin’s turn” – if they were the party out of government they had only to wait their turn when the existing government party fell out of favour. It cannot work that way when we have a pattern of at least five major parties (six in Scotland or Wales). Sadly the media and political commentatrs have yet to comprehend the inevitable consequences of this change. Of course it means first that the chances of any single party winning a majority of Commons seats has shrunk to virtually nothing. So what does “winning an election” mean in this new environment?
“Non-conservative” is negative. How about Liberal?
No one label or measure accurately represents political position on a range of issues. Left/Right, though lazily applied to everything, is useful for divides over the equal or unequal distribution of resources. Paddy Ashdown’s Open/Shut or “drawbridge down/ drawbridge up” is useful for divides over immigration, minority rights, right to protest, sexual orientation etc. Neither accurately represents divides over green values versus growth at all costs, though I don’t know of a good short name for the anti-green position.
Current commentators and “analysts” are trying to preserve some variant of the two-party duopoly by creating the concept of political families, with a right wing family comprising Reform UK and the Conservatives and a left wing family comprising Labour, the Greens, the Liberal Democrats and the Scottish and Welsh Nationalists. At present these comprise about 45% and 55% of the electoral support respectively. Sadly this is not going to work for long as the situation is both more complex than this and also more fluid. There is overlap between the differences not only in terms of economics (wealth vs poverty) but also in terms of social attitudes (conservative vs progressive, although these labels are open to interpretation), and of centralisation vs decentralisation. Where do historic class differences fit into this (or is the historic Marxist theory of class distinctions finally to be put to bed, as Liberals would argue)?