The Politics of Left and Right are Absurd.

"A point of View"
By Brian Walden

In his weekly opinion column, Brian Walden considers the political muddle create by archaic terms such as left wing and right wing.



Of all the confusing expressions in politics, left wing and right wing are the worst. We go on using these archaic terms because they're a kind of shorthand that avoids unnecessary explanations. But we'd be better off with the explanations, even if they took time.

The basic terminology of politics has become misleading. Groping around to discover what's left wing or right wing distracts us from stating what the real issues are. The language of left and right isn't merely irritating and out of date, it's doing harm to our understanding of how our democracy works.

A classic illustration of this muddle, and the confusion it causes, was something I heard at a political dinner. It was about the Conservative MP, David Davis, who's a principal contender to succeed Michael Howard as leader of the Conservative Party.


Eurosceptics: Left or right wing?
The speaker said, quite correctly, that Mr Davis was a Eurosceptic, who didn't want Britain to surrender further sovereignty to the European Union. He referred to this as a "traditional right-wing stance". Of course I thought I knew what he meant, but his way of putting it is open to a string of objections.


To begin with, if taken literally it's saying that being a Eurosceptic is right wing. But that's by no means always the case. The best-known Socialist in the country, Tony Benn, is much more Eurosceptic than Mr Davis. What sort of right-wing cause is it that has Benn on board?

How the terms left and right can throw people off the scent is well illustrated if we think of someone who's not deeply interested in politics and hears that Mr Davis is taking a "traditional right-wing" Eurosceptic view.

It would be perfectly reasonable for the person who's heard this to deduce that the Conservatives - the "right-wing" party - have always been suspicious of the EU. And it wouldn't be illogical to assume that Labour - the "left-wing" party - must traditionally have favoured Europe. But this would be quite wrong, because the very opposite is the case.

Tyranny

It was the Conservatives who took Britain into the Common Market and, though there were dissidents like Enoch Powell, the great majority of Conservatives supported this step. Labour was split down the middle and most of the passionate arguments against joining came from Labour's Tribune Group. Dragging left and right into the argument serves only to obscure the truth.

There wouldn't be any objection to the usage if it meant something and we could all agree on a meaning. That was the case originally. It stems, as does so much else in politics, from the French Revolution of 1789.

When the States-General met in that year, the nobility - most of whom supported the King - stood on his right. The ordinary members - many of whom were republicans or had doubts about the King - stood on his left. Conservatives sitting on the right and radicals sitting on the left became the rule in French assemblies.

Everybody knows where they are with a straightforward arrangement like that. Unfortunately, the clarity of this division didn't last long even in France. The right had supported the unsuccessful monarchy and the majority of Frenchmen didn't want to be associated with this failure. So instead of being neutral terms, left wing and right wing soon acquired a lot of emotional baggage.



Most of the French wanted to be thought of as being just a little bit on the left. Even if their actual views gave no warrant for such an assumption.

When I was at school, and before I'd grasped the subtleties of political names, I used to be deeply puzzled by the fact that every French political party with the word left in its title was conservative, often very conservative.

The modern analogy would be with those states who have the word democratic in their name. The "Democratic Republic of So and So" may not be a tyranny, but usually it is. Its name is meant to give the opposite impression to the world from the grim reality.

This left-right language, though first mentioned by Thomas Carlisle in the 19th Century, didn't catch on in Britain for a very long time. It wasn't until after World War l, in the 1920s, that it began to be widely used.

I suspect it may have been the Russian Revolution that focused attention on this continental way of describing politics. Pundits are very susceptible to fashion and left and right probably seemed an interesting new way of discussing the subject.

In Europe and Britain left wing is a hurrah term and right wing is a boo term. Left wing has a whiff of the people about it, whereas right wing carries the distinct aroma of aristocrats and snobbery.

Barmy

There's no purpose in complaining that this has got nothing to do with the facts of the case. Perhaps it has, or perhaps it hasn't, but the point is we are dealing not with actuality but with the impression certain words make.

Left wing doesn't have this rather favourable, popular sound in the United States and truth to tell, I've never been able to work out why. Possibly the term very early on became associated in the American mind with socialism and communism, which most Americans have always disliked.


But unlike the Americans, the British share the French wish to cuddle up, just a little, to the left. I remember having a completely barmy discussion with Jim Callaghan and Tony Crosland after I referred to a point of view we all shared as right wing. These great men winced at my crudity. They begged me not to use such a term in my speech. If I must use a label, "moderate" was as far as they thought permissible.

Of course the whole idea of a straight line stretching from the extreme left to extreme right is entirely the wrong way to look at politics. If it made sense it would mean the Communists and the Nazis are the two groups furthest from each other in theory and practice.


Tony Benn: Socialist but eurosceptic
Even the Germans under Hitler didn't believe that. A joke current in Berlin during the war went: "What's the difference between Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia? It's colder in Russia."

But what's worse than being unable to see the similarities between totalitarian right and totalitarian left is that the left-right way of looking at events virtually destroys the chance of making important distinctions.

Not all differences between radicals and conservatives are economic. Indeed with the general acceptance of regulated capitalism, economic quarrels have receded in importance. Private ownership versus public ownership and higher taxation to engineer more equality versus an acceptance of diversity and inequality, both remain significant areas of political controversy.

But so does the struggle between liberty and authority. It's almost forgotten today that liberty was for many years the great so-called left-wing cause. Only very gradually did socialism supplant liberalism as the alternative to the doctrines of conservatives.

Foremost among conservative doctrines is the preservation of authority. We've an issue before us at the moment in the proposal to make identity cards compulsory, which perfectly illustrates the conflicting claims of liberty on the one hand and security and authority on the other.

Our left-right language as usual offers no useful guidance. Indeed if we took it seriously we'd be saying that the two major parties have somehow both got themselves the opposite policy to the one they ought to have. To such absurdity does left-right thinking reduce us, because it expects political parties to conform to labels it can't analyse reality.

The French Revolution that started this left-right business offered as its three great left-wing slogans 'Liberty, Equality and Fraternity'. If one day the crucial struggle happens to be between liberty and equality, which will be the left-wing side then?

Source: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/4086892.stm