liv | To veer to the left or to veer to the right

Someone on Twitter linked to this 2019 survey about what political opinions are regarded as "left" or "right" wing. The research is two years old and UK politics has basically imploded since then, but it seemed interesting. Particularly the fact that there is no opinion agreed by more than half of those surveyed to belong on one wing or the other. Pull-quote:

Even for the very most stereotypically left- and right-wing policies, half of the population do not identify them as such.

So the obvious conclusion from this survey, as pointed out by the person on Twitter, is that "left" and "right" are meaningless labels because there is no sensible consensus about which policies are on which side! But I'm also interested in the detail of specific views.

I'm most fascinated by the scatter plot of overlaps and divergences in opinions. At the time of the survey the key division in society wasn't left v right, it was Leave v Remain. I don't know that that would still hold true because the numbers of people of any political views at all who still think Brexit was a good idea are rapidly dwindling. But at the time, two thirds of people who identified as right-wing supported Brexit, whereas four fifths of people who identified as left-wing thought the UK should remain in the EU. Which makes the 2019 election even more incomprehensible; were Labour seriously hoping to pick up Leave votes from people whose political identity is right wingers?

I'm also slightly horrified by the top right of the plot. More than 4 out of 5 people, of any political views, think doctors should have the legal right to kill their patients. I am not going to turn this post into a rant about euthanasia, but that is really scary to me. It's bad enough going through life knowing that doctors are likely to refuse to treat me because I'm fat, mouthy, female but not hot or a mother of cute children, but the overwhelming majority of my fellow citizens want doctors to be able to actively kill me? Let alone people who are even more despised by doctors than I am, such as racially minoritized people and people with intellectual disabilities. Likewise I'm really unhappy to see such a strong consensus for Malthusianism. To me there's no point "saving the environment" unless we can save the humans who live on the planet.

The whole point of the article is that we're looking at left v right rather than the two-dimensional system that includes the authoritarian-liberal axis. And I already knew that pretty much the entire electorate and all the parties are more authoritarian than I am. The so-called left in this country want stricter schools, more punishment for crimes (including even the damn death penalty *sigh*), just more "discipline" and "authority" in general, and the so-called right want these things even harder (though aren't prepared to fund the criminal justice or educational systems properly to achieve it, they just vaguely fantasize about bad people suffering). But I think there's another hidden axis here, which is how much you hate foreigners and minorities. Half of left-wing identifying people think we should restrict immigration, and a third think we should be politically incorrect (ie racist), and shouldn't have schemes to improve the life-chances of ethnic minorities. I'm guessing this may in fact be the tendency underlying the Brexit split.

The people in the survey consider "favour a powerful government over individual freedoms" to be a broadly right-wing view held by nearly half of left-wing people. To me "small government" is a pretty defining right-wing opinion. But like pretty much all the statements, we're as a population almost more split on the classification of opinions as right or left, than we are on the opinions themselves!

I think part of the problem is the tendency for some people to equate 'left' and 'right' with 'good' and 'bad' or perhaps 'nice' and 'selfish'. So people who basically want to make the world a better place consider themselves 'left-wing' but they hold some 'right-wing' views because most people have some element of selfishness / self-interest / cruelty in their politics. Support or opposition to nuclear weapons really doesn't feel like it can be classified on a left-right axis, but people in the survey who think of themselves as left-wing reckon that their support for nuclear weapons is a right-wing view. Right-wingers seem to think that both 'isolationist foreign policy' and 'financial aid for poorer nations' are left-wing views (which many of them agree with anyway).

Part of it is that people form an identity with one of the political wings, and then don't really consider whether any specific political view is actually consistent with that identity. Anyway, the somewhat dated survey is interesting; it sort of reinforces my view that I'm in a right-libertarian minority among a population that is almost entirely left-authoritarian, even though it isn't using the two-axis system. People vote for the party they think is most likely to give them a "strong" government, punish the bad people they don't like, and also provide a decent welfare system and public services. Since none of the existing political parties actually offer that as a platform, people end up voting on factors other than policies, or vote single-issue on non-partisan questions like Brexit (likewise Scottish independence, acceptance of trans people, whether we should have Covid mitigations, and a few other things like that).

I have no idea what this means for the current maelstrom in a shitbucket that calls itself a Conservative government. But anyway.

Moooooood thoughtful
Whereaboooouts England, unfortunately...

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

From:

cosmolinguist

My experience from the people I know who call themselves lefties (which ranges from old (literally old, people who remember the 60s/70s) Labour people to near-anarchists) is that they think any good opinion is a leftie one and anyone who is a leftie has only good opinions.

Even though this leads to them being shocked when a fellow "leftie" says or does something ableist, transphobic, sexist, xenophobic, etc. Which in my experience are all things that lefties can be! And believing that they can't is part of what makes them so tiring for me to deal with sometimes.

From:

liv

Yeah, I've definitely seen a lot of that attitude: right wing people want minorities to die, but left-wing people only want good things like healthcare and education and welfare. And while I don't really believe the horseshoe theory, and right now there is a much more serious threat from the extreme right than from communism, it's a really dangerous assumption that left wing policies can never be harmful or discriminatory. Particularly the fallacy that, left wing ideas are good, I'm on the left, therefore I'm a good person.

From:

lilacsigil

As a fat, disabled lesbian who had cancer, I was extremely worried by euthanasia laws being introduced in my state three years ago, but in fact they were well-drafted and they've been really good: well-implemented, many protections, and well-integrated into palliative care. The majority of people who qualify and access the service instead choose palliative care. The major problem has been lack of access to trained doctors in rural areas during COVID, rather than all the issues I expected. That said, there was two decades of work put into these laws by doctors, patients, patient advocates, legal ethicists and palliative care nurses, so I would not assume that any given euthanasia law was so well constructed.

https://www.health.vic.gov.au/patient-care/voluntary-assisted-dying

From:

liv

Wow, I'm really, really reassured to hear that you have good euthanasia laws integrated with palliative care. All the other examples I've seen, Netherlands, Switzerland, Oregon, Canada, are just dystopian horror stories. And I know some disabled activists are strongly pro euthanasia; I respect their position a lot more than when it's coming from doctors or environmentalists.

From:

hairyears

I would pick out a problem with a particular axis in the multidimensional chart you're building: economic policy.

Luckily, this does have a reasonable 'left-to-right' axis from full state ownership to full libertarian economic anarchy...

The problem with this policy axis is that there is a yawning gap between policy and perception: voters who consider themselves 'right of centre' or even 'very conservative indeed' on economic policy are supporting politicians (and therefore economic policies) that far, far further 'right' on economics than they realise.

...Even if we allow for the real world, in which voters are offered a limited choice of parties and politicians, each with a mixed bag of policies.

Edited (Edited-out redundant material: added clarification) Date: 2022-10-25 08:25 am (UTC)

From:

liv

Yes, that's absolutely what I said, most of the electorate is economically to the left of almost the entire political establishment. Many of them won't vote for the leftmost parties because they consider them too socially progressive.

If you look at the stats, a clear majority of people who consider themselves right wing, almost 60%, literally believe that the government should manage the economy. And this is a belief which doesn't even make it into the top ten policies that the participants agree are left wing. So people want a managed economy (specifically nationalized utilities and transport are really popular among those who identify as right wing), but they don't regard a state-owned or state-managed economy as a left wing policy. So it's not surprising that they would (bizarrely, but that's what the data shows) somehow expect right wing parties to provide them with a high degree of state ownership.

From:

hairyears

The disturbing part of your answer is that it's right about right-wing voters, and their expectations of a high degree of state ownership.

Specifically, where and when that expectation was implemented into economic policy: Spain under Franco, and 1930's Italy.

I doubt that many of those voters know that: and those
that do are probably unaware that the trains didn't actually run on time there.

Edited (Feral line breaks) Date: 2022-10-26 06:59 am (UTC)

From:

rysmiel

There is an argument to be made that potential for efficiency of state control of aspects of the economy at a "trains running on time" level depends on capacity for handling extremely large quantities of information at speed verging on realtime. And while Franco's Spain and 1930s Italy were nowhere on getting the trains to run on time, &c, it is kind of fascinating to see how well Allende's Chile was doing on that front in the early 1970s (cf. Stafford Beer, the last chapter of Designing Freedom) in ways that involved pushing then-available technology to the limit.

(None of which I am claiming does anything to help with the actual efficiency issues arising from the competence and integrity of the people running any such system.)

Edited Date: 2022-10-26 01:02 pm (UTC)

From:

hairyears

Yes, but arguments framed in terms of 'Efficiency of state control' are subtly deceptive.

Most people who fall into the deception don't even realise, and embark upon an earnest discussion about forms of organisation, the bureaucratic burden of 'state cntrol' and the miraculous efficiency of private enterprise...

And nowhere, in those erudite arguments, do we hear about purpose and ethos.

We've been tricked, by clever framing of the argument, into missing the point that a service to the community and an economic infrastructure required by all other enterprises, might be better run with a 'service' ethos for the common good; and if it's used by everyone, everywhere - individuals and businesses - and we all need to use it, we would do well to remove it from the economic conflicts of competition, and run it for the common good.

Libertarians will deny that there is any concept of the common good, scoff and chuckle at our deluded idealism, and will now stop reading.

But there are, nevertheless, human activities where the service ethos excludes the urge to maximise profit and personal gain, wherever this would conflict with moral imperatives and a fundamental human urge to serve.

Healthcare. Education. Law enforcement.

The commercial imperative to extract as much money as possible is in direct conflict with resourcing the 'front line' of actually providing these services.

And if the commercial imperative displaces the service ethos in the managerial ethos of the organisation, it becomes the amoral monster of America's healthcare system, debt-peonage umiversities with million-dollar managers and starvation-wage adjuncts, and for-profit prison labour.

...And there's infrastructure.

Railways and roads and power supply are the obvious ones, and they are 'natural monopolies' which always fold into the most efficient form of 'single provider whose economies of scale displaces all competitors'.

Which, when dominated by the commercial ethos of maximising profit, degenerate to the parasitic extraction of monopoly rents and a drain on the entire economy.

...When the infrastructure can and should be run to facilitate and maximise economic growth, in all enterprises equally, at-cost.

All examples of succesful private-sector infrastructure exist as regulated monopolies that are so closely-controlled in their management, strategy, and day-to-day service-delivery that they are de facto organs of the state.

And even then, they are explicitly structured to suffer a continual diversion of resources from the services into dividends and bond coupons for their investors.

And they're inefficient. Monopolies have no competition and no externally-imposed commercial discipline. In fairness, neither do state-owned enterprises: but they do, at least, have accountability to the electorate and government. Again, that's an arguments rooted in ethos, not in oganisational form.

So: why not manage it from top to bottom with a service ethos, and reframe the state's regulator as a supervisory board with explict democratic accountability to the elected legislature?

Europe and the developed parts of Asia have many, many examples of successful state-owned 'economic infrastructure' utilities run as public services.

There's no shortage of examples of unsuccessful ones: but the worst ones, the disasters, are private enterprises where the service ethos has been lost.

Britain's worst example culminated in the Hatfield Rail Disaster: but the diffuse failures of infrastructure mismanagement are invisible until they reach a widespread crisis, not a 'point failure' .

The current example is the economic disaster of Northern California's power supply companies, where excessive profit extraction and underinvestment have turned it into a widespread fire hazard and a haphazard third-world lottery of rural blackouts.

Could state ownership prevent that? There are examples of failure there, too: but we have governments for a reason, and one of them is, explicitly, that there are economic and social activities which are best organised as a service for the common good, rather than arising and existing as competing economic enterprises pursuing profit.

But all of this is 'out of the frame' when we are misled into the 'state-owned vs private enterprise' arguments about forms of organisation, without considering ethos.

Edited (Unclosed html tag, spelling) Date: 2022-10-27 08:51 am (UTC)

From: (Anonymous)

Monopolies have no competition and no externally-imposed commercial discipline. In fairness, neither do state-owned enterprises: but they do, at least, have accountability to the electorate and government.

Except when they’re producer-captured by civil servants who are effectively impossible for the democratically-elected politicians to sack.

There are examples of failure there, too: but we have governments for a reason, and one of them is, explicitly, that there are economic and social activities which are best organised as a service for the common good, rather than arising and existing as competing economic enterprises pursuing profit.

Actually it’s because there are goods which are non-rivalrous and non-excludable.

But the main thing you miss is that you some the ‘service ethos’ is absent from the private sector when in fact it is the bedrock of the private sector. The aim of a private company is to make money for its owners. The way it does that*, presuming its customers have a choice, is by proving a better service than any of its competitors. A private company which provides poor service will quickly go bust; a government department which serves its customers poorly will continue to do so indefinitely (examples too numerous to mention).

The operation of the market forces private companies to have a service ethos if they want to survive. There is no such pressure on services run by the government, which will continue to be funded no matter how poor a service they provide (& indeed providing a poor service can even get them more funding if they claim that the reason the service is poor is lack of funding; of course they then absorb the additional funding and the service remains as bad as ever because the unsackable civil servants in charge have no incentive to make it better).

There are such things as ‘natural monopolies’ where the criterion that ‘customers have a choice’ is not satisfied, but they are much fewer in number than proponents of state intervention claim. They do not include, for example, health, where many countries like France, Germany, Australia, etc, managed perfectly well with no state monopoly on healthcare.

* well, one way. Another is by capturing the regulatory body in order to raise the barrier to entry to its sector to the point where competing with it is uneconomic. Constant vigilance and periodic deregulation is needed to ensure that doesn’t happen.

From:

hairyears

Take two statements about economics:

"...There are economic and social activities which are best organised as a service for the common good, rather than arising and existing as competing economic enterprises pursuing profit."

And, (say):

"Actually it’s because there are goods which are non-rivalrous and non-excludable.

There's a lot overlap between these two remarks: your non-rivalrous and non-excludable categorisation catches most and maybe all of what we call 'the common good' which, in most successful economies, is provided as state-owned or state-directed services.

But the elephant in the room is that I say "economic activity", not "goods".

Much of the economy consists of activity which is difficult, or impossible, to capture in observable flows of goods and services.

Services, in particular, are difficult to observe and measure. Or even define.

And:

Not all economic activity is denominated in terms of monetary exchanges.

But far, far too many economic commentators have fallen into the trap of framing 'Economics' in the limited terms of "A science concerned solely with observable monetary exchanges".

And you can't exclude activity involving non-monetary exchanges and not even motivated by pursuit of monetary gain from 'economics'.

Even, or especially, when there's an observable monetary exchange, too.

The American healthcare system only works, at all, because millions of people who aren't monetarily motivated are working, day and night, to subvert or circumvent the damaging commercial 'incentives' and constraints imposed by managers and insurance accountants: and the end result is that frustrated and overworked and underpaid people actually provide health care.

Much of it is altruistic. Arguably, all of it that's beneficial to the patient, is.

It's still economic value.

Arguably, the only creation of value in the entire disastrous enterprise.

And they get paid a wage which is not, at all, aligned with the value they create in the economy.

Their motives are not 'pure' in any sense; 'service ethos' does not exclude a need for money and you can, indeed, work your way from healthcare to any number of public enterprises and find very, very self-serving people who are entrenched in a 'producer capture' process.

And that, too, is economics: it's just harder economics to analyse and reframe in a workable view of the incentives - monetary and non-monetary - that facilitates effective management and maximises all forms of value.

'Harder' is no reason not to try: and a shallow shuffle-around of the 'forms of organisation' argument is just one of many, many ways to fail.

I work on a trading floor in London's largest bank. It is most difficult place that there can possibly be, to stand and formulate an integrated view of 'monetary' and 'non-monetary' economics: but, even here, the altruistic 'service ethos' coexists with mathematically precise and perfectly-modelled profit maximisation.

There would be no value-creation at all, here, if both were not in play.

This is true where you are, too.

Reframe your economic analysis to include this, and set to work with a richer model that looks more like the real world, and the real people who are economic actors in it.

And then you'll understand why seeking a service ethos and centering 'the common good' in the frame may be the key to achieving a functioning, value-creating economy in those non-rivalrous and non-excludable goods.

Edited (Bad grammar) Date: 2022-10-30 08:29 am (UTC)

From: (Anonymous)

Yes, I didn't mean to exclude services; I hoped that was obvious both because the definition of 'public good' includes services (see for example https://www.investopedia.com/terms/p/public-good.asp ) and because one of the main non-rivalrous, non-excludable goods that a government exists to provide is the defence of the Realm, which is literally called 'the Services'. But apparently is wasn't obvious. Still, glad to clear it up.

Likewise I am aware that 'the economy' is just the name given to the whole sphere of life in which individuals transact with each other, and that it doesn't always involve monetary compensation. For example in a socialist country the inevitable shortages of goods in the official channels will always bring into existence a black market where people exchange goods on the basis of non-currency trades like corrupt favours, etc, and this just as much part of the economy as the part which is denominated in currency.

But the laws of the market apply just as much to the black market (hence the name…) as to the open market. And none of this seems to make any difference to my point, though, so I'm not sure why you bring it up?

For example, you can't base a society on the assumption that there will always be enough people willing to provide a service out of a 'service ethos' to fulfil demand. But the market, if it is allowed to operate freely, includes a feedback mechanism to deal with that, which is that whenever demand exceeds supply the price goes up, so people who would not provide the service out of a 'service ethos' will do so out of self-interest. This is clearly superior to relying on a 'service ethos' because that will inevitably lead to a shortage in the service when not enough people are willing to do it just out of a 'service ethos'.

I wouldn't deny that such an altruistic 'service ethos' exists. But you can't base a society on it.

And to try, is like someone who says 'democracy is inefficient; we should just have all decisions made by a beneficent dictator, or perhaps some kind of committee of experts that we could call a 'political bureau'. It seems fine in principle; but quickly runs into the problem that most people are lazy and stupid and venal, so even if you were to find one industrious and clever and virtuous person to be your dictator, you'd be unlikely to find enough to fill a committee; and even if you did, what would you do when that person retired or died? Chances of you being able to find someone else with the qualifications to take their place are virtually nil.

The greatness of the market is that it works with flawed, corrupt human nature to make a society which more-or-less works, rather than trying to build a Utopia by pretending that human nature is perfectable — a project which, every time it has been tried, has ended in famine, killing fields, or (more usualy) both.

From: (Anonymous)

Mr Chesterton put it in his usual pithy style in Herestics ('Mr Wells' is Herbert George):

'Mr. Wells, however, is not quite clear enough of the narrower scientific outlook to see that there are some things which actually ought not to be scientific. He is still slightly affected with the great scientific fallacy; I mean the habit of beginning not with the human soul, which is the first thing a man learns about, but with some such thing as protoplasm, which is about the last. The one defect in his splendid mental equipment is that he does not sufficiently allow for the stuff or material of men. In his new Utopia he says, for instance, that a chief point of the Utopia will be a disbelief in original sin. If he had begun with the human soul—that is, if he had begun on himself—he would have found original sin almost the first thing to be believed in. He would have found, to put the matter shortly, that a permanent possibility of selfishness arises from the mere fact of having a self, and not from any accidents of education or ill-treatment. And the weakness of all Utopias is this, that they take the greatest difficulty of man and assume it to be overcome, and then give an elaborate account of the overcoming of the smaller ones. They first assume that no man will want more than his share, and then are very ingenious in explaining whether his share will be delivered by motor-car or balloon.'

From: (Anonymous)

Sorry, Heretics.

From: (Anonymous)

Or to put it another way: any system which relies on the fundamental goodness of people will inevitably fail because people are fundamentally not good.

The market puts in place invectives that force people to provide what their customers want, regardless of whether they are good or not.

The market is therefore resilient in the face of human moral failure in a way that the state apparatus is not.

(Of course the fact that the market forces people to provide what their customers actually want and not what patronising busybodies think they ought to want drives those patronising busybodies mad, but this is a feature, not a bug.)

From:

rysmiel

The market puts in place invectives that force people to provide what their customers want, regardless of whether they are good or not.

I presume you meant "incentives" there, though I sympathise rather a lot with the notion of the market inducing invective.

I find this line of argument generally specious because the market does not force, or even encourage, people to provide what their customers actually want. It merely encourages to them to provide what their customers want more than any other readily available option. Markets force things into terms of winning and losing rather than any other metric of success or failure.

Edited Date: 2022-10-27 11:24 am (UTC)

From: (Anonymous)

I presume you meant "incentives" there

Yes, thank you for being understanding about my typing errors.

It merely encourages to them to provide what their customers want more than any other readily available option.

But that is the same thing, because if there’s something that customers want more than any currently available option, and it’s economic to supply it to them, then someone will enter the market to supply it, and steal everyone else’s customers — providing the current providers haven’t been able to rig the market by getting the regulatory body to impose conditions that raise the barrier of every.

So your objection falls.

From: (Anonymous)

But these exchanges about meeting customer demands take no account of the extent to which [dominant] suppliers can (and do) manipulate customers' expectations to create a demand.

Southernwood

From: (Anonymous)

But these exchanges about meeting customer demands take no account of the extent to which [dominant] suppliers can (and do) manipulate customers' expectations to create a demand.

People's psyches aren't malleable plasticine, and suppliers aren't supernatural hypnotists like the Hood out of Thunderbords or the Master out of Dr Who. They can't cast spells to make people want things that they otherwise don't want.

And even if they could, it is — frankly — just easier and cheaper to make money by giving people what they already want, than trying to manipulate them into wanting something they don't.

What I think has happened here is that you have noticed that people don't always — in fact possibly often don't — want the things that you think they ought to want, and rather than accepting that people aren't required to explain themselves and their wants to you, you have made up some fiction about them being brainwashed into wanting things they don't really want. But that is not in fact the case.

From: (Anonymous)

(Another possibility is that you've been misled into thinking that what people say they want is what they actually want, and so when people show by their actions that they want something that they said they didn't want, or that they don't want something that they said they did, you think that this is because they have somehow been manipulated. But it is actually because people often either lie or are mistaken about what they really want. It is people's actions and choices that reveal their true preferences, not what they say or the answers they give to questions or opinion polls or customer surveys.)

From: (Anonymous)

Well said.

Southernwood

From: (Anonymous)

If you look at the stats, a clear majority of people who consider themselves right wing, almost 60%, literally believe that the government should manage the economy.

With opinion polls especially it’s important to distinguish between expressed and revealed preferences; that is, what people say they want when asked may not be what they actually vote for. For example policies may be popular individually and yet not voted for as part of a full policy platform; people will generally respond positively to any policy that involves free stuff, for example, but when they come to actually choose a party to run the country they also take into account that we really oughtn’t try to live beyond our means.

And there are other policies that people say they support not because they actually support or would vote for them, but to send a signal: ‘if I say I want X, even though I don’t really want it, and I know it will never happen, maybe parties will get the message and give me Y instead.’ There’s an argument that this applied to, for example, leaving the European Union; that most people who said they wanted to leave the European Union didn’t actually want that, but instead wanted the UK to remain in the Union but with significant rolling-back of EU competences, and it’s only when the EU refused to offer any such in response to Cameron’s famed ‘renegotiation’ that the desire to actually leave solidified.

So I wouldn’t necessarily take these bizarre results at face value: they may be telling you something other than what they naïvely might seem.

From:

rysmiel

In discussing this, I have found Ken MacLeod's nomenclature of "black planning" (as the mirror image of a black market in a nominally planned society such as the former Eastern bloc) useful at least for being a clear, concise and pithy referent for an otherwise largely undiscussed concept.

From:

naath

As someone facing a possible future filled with pain, I want the option to be assisted to die as painlessly as possible. The consent issues are clearly hard to solve. but the pro euthanasia argument is not about people who want to kill others, its about people who want (the choice to) die

From:

liv

I really hope the option is available for you to die painlessly. If it were purely up to me I would like there to be better pain relief so that you could stay alive and not be filled with pain, but I appreciate that if that option isn't on the table then assisted dying may well be a more attractive option.

I know a lot of people who believe in euthanasia don't in fact want to kill off the useless eaters like intellectually disabled people, but the medical establishment does. Look at how medical ethicists were salivating over the prospect of rationing care during the worst Covid waves, the way that non-consensual DNR orders were imposed on lots of low status people. Personally, I would want a DNR in a lot of circumstances, but I really really don't want doctors deciding that I'm not worth saving without asking me (or my relatives if I'm not able to discuss the question).

From:

naath

I'm not currently in pain but I might be in the future

From:

sfred

I usually work on the assumption that there are two axes -
socialism (left) to low-tax, everyone for themself (right)
and
liberal to authoritarian
...
and the vast majority of my social circle is lefty liberal.

I've heard/read you describe yourself as right-wing before, but I'm interested to know your reasoning if you are willing to share.

From:

liv

Yes, I seek out the liberal folks and many of them are also lefty. But we're a tiny minority within the electorate as a whole!

Why am I right-wing? The soundbite answer is that I care more about freedom than fairness. Though I'm not against fairness, just it's a lower priority. I don't really believe that wealth redistribution should be an economic priority. As liberal, I want individuals to have the highest possible degree of autonomy, not have the state intervene to keep everybody the same so that nobody has an unfair advantage. I mostly think the role of the state in markets is to keep them free, not to direct them towards political goals. I don't think the state should own or run most businesses (though I'm easily swayed on transport and utilities). I don't believe the state is capable of caring for people; care is something that happens in communities and depends on interpersonal relationships.

Also I'm really quite conservative. I fear social upheaval and revolution, I think traditions should be upheld. I believe strongly in the rule of law rather than relying on people in positions of power to behave ethically.

From:

sfred

Thanks, that makes sense to me (even though there are bits where your and my opinions differ). I appreciate your taking the time to explain.

From: (Anonymous)

I am highly disturbed that I agree totally with all of that. My greatest regret about the outcome of the Truss government is that it has probably lost us our best chance of getting rid of the sugary drinks levy.

From:

ewt

I don't want an authoritarian government, but I yearn for a trustworthy one.

From:

liv

Yeah, I think that's one of the ways authoritarianism gets in, if the government is corrupt and incompetent, authoritarian leaders look attractive because if they exert lots of control over everything surely they will be able to improve things. But I don't think it's true, authoritarian approaches just make it easier for those with power to get away with being corrupt and incompetent. A trustworthy government needs accountability, which ironically means a government that is easier to depose.

From:

ewt

I agree.

I certainly don't currently see a party in the UK that I feel happy about voting for. (In practice I'll probably tactically to keep the Tories out of the local seat, but I kindof have to hold my nose to do it.)

From: (Anonymous)

A trustworthy government needs accountability, which ironically means a government that is easier to depose

'No matter how imperfect things are, if you've got a free press everything is correctable, and without it everything is concealable.'

From:

silveradept

That certainly tracks gets in the States, as well, although our base for where the center is would normally be considerably farther to the right economically and more authoritarian than libertarian than an actual center.

Political campaigns these days seem to run on "I'm going to get the government to hurt the people you want to see hurt" more than specifically about policies to improve lives and improve accountability.

From:

rysmiel

Chewy stuff, thank you.

Support or opposition to nuclear weapons really doesn't feel like it can be classified on a left-right axis, but people in the survey who think of themselves as left-wing reckon that their support for nuclear weapons is a right-wing view.

The "should Britain have an independent nuclear deterrent?" question is one I have only recently realised that there are people here assessing in terms of "could it make a positive difference to Canada's safety in the case of an aggressively hegemonic US government", including support for said deterrent from the kind of self-identified lefties I am very used to otherwise strongly correlating with being strongly anti-nuclear weapons.

From:

yrieithydd

Someone commented the other day that the UK tends to left on economics and conservative/authoritarian on social stuff, so the Tories big up their authoritarian streak in order to have their way with the economy...

From: (Anonymous)

conservative/authoritarian on social stuff, so the Tories big up their authoritarian streak

'Socially conservative' and 'authoritarian' are very different things, though; it's possible to be both, of course, but it's also possible to be either one and not the other at all.

The Conservative party doesn't tend to 'big up [its] authoritarian streak' so much as there are (as in all parties) competing factions within the internal coalition, and sometimes one lots gets the other hand, and sometimes another. Recently the paternalist/authoritarian faction has been in the ascendency, it's true, hence abominations like the sugary drinks levy or the online safety/censorship bill, which thankfully seems to have been stopped in its tracks. But all of those have faced vocal opposition from other factions within the Conservative party, and when Truss was elected it seemed that the pro-liberty faction had finally taken over; noises were made about abandoning anti-obesity measures, and the Online Safety Bill's progress was stopped and it was announced that it would be overhauled. We have yet to see where the Sunak government will land on the issue; his previous statements and vote give little clue as to where his instincts are on this (although, of course, Boris's previous statements would have put him firmly on the pro-liberty side, and yet he oversaw hugely authoritarian measures, even flirting with things like vaccine passports; so perhaps past records are no guide to future performance).

The thing, though, is that on this the Conservatives are better than the alternative because at least there is a pro-liberty faction of the Conservative party, which is willing to speak out, argue and even when it comes to it vote against such measures. But everyone in Labour is anti-freedom; I can't imagine a Labour government proposing to, say, ban entirely all foods over X% sugar from sale in supermarkets, or requiring all internet companies to censor any content decided to be 'harmful' by some regulatory quango, facing any internal opposition whatsoever.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Not sheepish, but individ-ewe-al

Soundbite

Page Summary

Active Entries

Links

Expand Cut Tags

Subscription Filters