Thanks for that. As you might guess, I don’t actually agree. For a start, the consensus definition can make me racist for trying to keep hold of my own wealth (no one elses – and this would only apply if I had some…) even if I have no concern about race at all (or, in my actual case, if I want all race labels removed as I think they ignore the fact we are all humans). I think that is what is called bloody stupid. Institutional racism (what you are describing) is what produces a racist situtation where people in minorities get different treatment from those in majorities. And discrimination, which is what racism is, is about how you treat people, not about the existing power relationships.

“The flaw in your analysis, and that of many people who are not historians, is the idea that “the left” and “the right” are in some way real things. They’re not. They are mappings on, not one graph axis, but at least ten or twelve different ones, and people use the terms without sufficient care.”

Well, as a historian I know full well the difference between a philosophical concept/movement and a real thing. Hence the fact I ascribe loose values to the movements and do not ascribe them to actual parties. I also know the axes model is just a model, and that it does not actually show left and right but rather an artificially produced comparative political position. You can’t measure everything, especially in politics.

I would also note that your axes are more than a bit biased:

“1. Class: left == interests of the employed, right == interests of the employer.
2. Fiscal: left == government intervention to help the poor, right == government intervention to help the rich.
3. Religion: left == tolerant of multiple faiths and inclined to dialogue, right == One True Way and it’s MINE!
4. Race: left == recognise that the disadvantaged need to club together, right == bloody wogs taking our jobs.
5. Sexuality: left == recognise that the disadvantaged need to club together, right == bloody shirt-lifters taking our cocks. etc, etc.”

Well, that seems to be me being left wing then. Odd that. But obviously you’re correct and the right wing are all evil and selfish. And the left wing paragons of virtue. Strange how socialism has failed to build paradise yet mind…

Bluntly, what you make the mistake of doing is ascribing all the stereotypical evils of the right wing to them, without asking why someone like me (who does not discriminate, and is socially extremely liberal) believes this is the way forward. I could respond by ascribing all the centralising, controlling, petty memes that can be matched with the left wing. I won’t, because I am interested in actual debate, not straw men.

Oh, and liberalism is indeed not a right-left concept. Hence its irrelevance to a sidebar in a debate that is trying to point out right-wing is not racist, and that it is pointless and devisive to assume it is.

*heh* You spotted that, did you?

I’m building a case. It is a case which says that the terminology of right and left has been permanently poisoned beyond utility by the bitter propaganda of the Cold War. It also suggests that the rhetoric of right and left is useless now that we are no longer in the industrial era: that paradigm spawned from the effects of industrialisation on British politics, and is ineradicably infected with industrial-era thinking.

My thesis is that we need to move away from that terminology all together. If we can negotiate a new paradigm, in which we set liberal and progressive values as one end of the political spectrum with traditional [1] and conservative values at the other, we might be able to get some actual work done.

I will admit I pitched the previous comment as though my thesis was already demonstrated, but that’s partly because I was talking to Watchman.

[1] I mean in the sense of valuing actual traditions, like May Day, or Parliament, or Wogan.

But I think we’re going massively off-topic.

Racism is an act of deliberate discrimination (as in BNP…) not conserving the status quo unless to do that you deliberately exclude people by race.

Er, no. Racism = prejudice + power.[1] Conserving the British status quo is, as Gwyn points out, by definition a policy of privileging white people over People of Colour. When coupled with power, that prejudice becomes racism.

[1] A note, as I can’t remember if you were about last time I had to go through this. This is the current consensus definition within the field. It is therefore the correct one to use in a formal political debate. I’m aware that lots of people use inadequate, deliberately obtuse or just plain wrong definitions of the concept. They are not really my problem.

Right-wing is not about racism – it is in fact about personal freedom and generally less state responsibility, and therefore is generally ignorant of colour.

This is very debatable indeed. The terminology of the wings is both sufficiently badly used in general debate as to be almost meaningless, and increasingly irrelevant in a post-industrial country [1], but this claim here is bloody dangerous.

The headline principle of conservatism is that the status quo ante favours the conservative, and thus clearly it should be conserved. Conservatism is by definition the political philosophy of vested interests. [2]

Since the status quo in northern Europe defaults to racism, misogyny and homophobia, the idea of conserving it has always been racist. Conservatism has always been about protecting privilege from those who do not share it; Thatcher had no problems with the state interfering with the unions. The Tories were entirely happy interfering with the Stonehenge free festivals, or with people’s sexual autonomy, or their choices of recreational pharmaceutical.

Now we come to the Left:

Left-wing is also not about racism – it is more about collective responsibility for society and state-led action to ensure equality of outcome/opportunity.

Again, I understand the talking points you’re quoting, but no. The left (in 20th Britain; we’re clearly not talking here about “the left” in 19th century Germany or early 20th century Russia, and yes those did mean different things in each instance, nor are we talking about Parliament in the 1680s) is about supporting the interests of the working poor against the diametrically opposed interests of their employers. It is by definition an urban, industrial political movement.

The single largest opinion bloc on “the left” in the 20th century was the rank-and-file membership of the trade unions, who have been, as a class, overwhelmingly bigoted and small-c conservative all the way along.

The flaw in your analysis, and that of many people who are not historians, is the idea that “the left” and “the right” are in some way real things. They’re not. They are mappings on, not one graph axis, but at least ten or twelve different ones, and people use the terms without sufficient care.

A non-exhaustive list of the axes include:

1. Class: left == interests of the employed, right == interests of the employer.
2. Fiscal: left == government intervention to help the poor, right == government intervention to help the rich.
3. Religion: left == tolerant of multiple faiths and inclined to dialogue, right == One True Way and it’s MINE!
4. Race: left == recognise that the disadvantaged need to club together, right == bloody wogs taking our jobs.
5. Sexuality: left == recognise that the disadvantaged need to club together, right == bloody shirt-lifters taking our cocks. etc, etc.

And yes, I know I’m being forced to over-simplify the two extreme positions, it’s hard to talk about the ends of a continuum without doing so.

If one intends the rhetoric of left and right to be treated as technical terminology with an actual meaning, then one must clearly state in each instance which of these continua you are currently comparing points on.

In this instance, you are attempting to disclaim the authoritarianism and pre-Enlightenment values of the Right by pointing out that some of the people who align themselves with the right are actually libertarians. That really doesn’t help; ‘the right’ as a whole most certainly are not. The British Right wing are not defenders of liberty; nor are the British ‘left’.

The Left is about the interests of the industrial poor (which are in many senses conservative: think about what the miners were actually striking in favour of, i.e. the conservation of the status quo) and the Right is about the interests of business- and land-owners. To describe the right as being about personal freedom would be to call them liberals.

Liberalism is about personal freedom for all. The right and the left are both about trying to rig the system so that only some are privileged by it. Liberalism does not really feature on the right-left spectrum at all.

[1] “The Left” in the 19th and 20th centuries became so solidly associated with the interests of one specific class, the urban working poor, that there’s an argument for saying that Britain no longer has a left and right at all. It would make much more sense, in a post-industrial era, to categorise the two wings as selfish versus compassionate, or (indeed) Conservative versus Liberal. This has the added advantage of allowing the Labour Party a dignified and quiet death behind closed doors, instead of the current bear-baiting and cock-fighting.

[2] Side note; this is why Clegg’s comments about Thatcher are interesting. While he does not clearly enunciate it in the Speccy, and neither would I, his thesis highlights the way Thatcher had no problem with vested interests in the Square Mile but would resort, quite literally, to war and starvation in order to combat vested interests who weren’t our sort of people. Clegg is defining a position which says any vested interests that have gotten out of control should be dealt with by a responsible government; which sounds like common sense to me.

It’s not a slander of Portillo, it’s a joke about the BNP leader. It’s a pretty good joke, in fact. I might win a Perrier award for it. Just saying.

And breaking up monopolies betrays the principle of private capital ownership which defines the right. You can’t reasonably say something’s a stereotype just because it’s true, and you can’t reasonably say that state intervention in private enterprise has any place in the ideological right. Not that I want to get bogged down in philosophy.

Yeah, the ‘exclusively’ bit is a remnant of something else I was going to say but didn’t fully delete. It’s totally wrong. All I meant to say was that the majority of wealth (real serious wealth, not corner shop chump change) starts in the hands of families like Mr. Cameron’s and Mr. Osborne’s and stays in those hands.

“The right wing isn’t racist in the KKK sense, but it does push for a society that favours entrenched social and capital wealth – which exists exclusively in white families. The effect is a racist one, however one might argue the benign intentions.”

Racism is an act of deliberate discrimination (as in BNP…) not conserving the status quo unless to do that you deliberately exclude people by race.

Anyway, I don’t actually recognise the society you imagine, which appears to have no Asian business owners for example, because all social and capital wealth is owned by white families. I assume you actually live in an area somehow ruled by the BNP?

The right wing does not always favour entrenched social and capital wealth, but it generally does not favour direct redistribution. The right wing for example has no problems with destroying corporationist monopolies, and socially would oppose any attempt to allow companies to operate private law. I appreciate this may not fit in with your stereotypical views, but actually go and look at the evidence rather than the propoganda.

“I’d be surprised if Portillo never dined with Edgar Griffin, with little Nicky sullenly flicking peas at him when Daddy wasn’t looking.”

It might have been mentioned by now. Michael Portillo (of Spanish descent) is not exactly a fan of the BNP.

I’d be surprised if Portillo never dined with Edgar Griffin, with little Nicky sullenly flicking peas at him when Daddy wasn’t looking.

The right wing isn’t racist in the KKK sense, but it does push for a society that favours entrenched social and capital wealth – which exists exclusively in white families. The effect is a racist one, however one might argue the benign intentions.

Actually the landed classes were very fond of inviting the Nazis to dinner, all the way up to 1939. Politically speaking, the only thing the Nazis did wrong was take our oil.

I can be left and unliberal, thankyouverymuch.

Left-wing is also not about racism – it is more about collective responsibility for society and state-led action to ensure equality of outcome/opportunity. It is also becoming increasingly small c-conservative nowadays. Some supporters in the past have been racist, but mainly through ignorance and fear of those outside what they perceive as society.

The BNP have elements of both, and neither. To assume they are extreme right-wing would have to make libertarian thought (which is totally opposed to BNP ideas – at its purest it believes in unlimited immigration) something else. Likewise, they are not extreme left-wing, in that there is no concern for equality of outcome. The danger of labelling the BNP as right-wing is that you encourage those already on the right of seeing them as part of their movement and not condemning them (as actually happened to some extent with the National Party in South Africa). It also suggests to the reader that you are more concerned with the split between left and right than with that between racist thugs and human decency.

Oh, and for those making Nazi comparisons – the Nazi party was ignored and passed over (other than by security services) in 1920s Germany. That worked well…

This bizarre idea that you can appease racist fuhrers… well. In WW2 we had to confront and destroy the Nazis. We didn’t invite them to interviews on daytime TV.

Address the concerns of their voters, talk about immigration, talk about national culture, talk about integration – but why do all of that only to undermine it by letting the BNP drag the whole debate into the gutter?

If you want to win back their voters, the worst thing to do is to give them more time to hold onto those voters.

Like Sunder, I believe that progressives shouldn’t provide the BNP with a platform so I would never interview Nick Griffin or any other his acolytes for Left Foot Forward and would be disappointed if someone else on the left did so. But I also respect the decisions of other organisations and publications to provide a platform (and believe that a magazine interview is a lot better than an event given the public safety issues associated with the latter).

I happened to bump into Iain Dale this week and he told me a bit about the interview. I reserve judgment until I read the piece but he was in no doubt that Griffin had provided a series of eccentric arguments and turned every issue back to immigration in a way that is unlikely to provide any additional support for his cause.

All the best,

Will

How “liberal” of you!

How is this in keeping with his current postion that granting Griffin this exposure doesn’t legitimise him?