The question is wrong. People don’t think in terms of left-wing versus right-wing. We think of values and ideas which we believe in (like equality or welfare state) than we say left-wing. I know for years I denied either because I could not see politics ever being a simple as a spectrum.

The fact that women describe themselves as further to the left than men is interesting. Previous studies I’ve seen showed that men are more likely to be lefties. I also think more women vote Tory and more men vote Labour.

@2 – That’s interesting, got a link? It would be the opposite of the States, I think – pretty sure the Democrats are heavily reliant on women voters.

It’s pretty meaningless without a liberal-authoritarian axis. I’m libertarian-socialist: I believe in shared ownership but personal liberty: I feel little ‘comradeship’ with state socialists.

@ 3 Sean

“That’s interesting, got a link?”

Not to hand. I’ll try to find one when I’m not meant to be working! I remember it because it surprised me; I would have guessed it was the other way around.

“It would be the opposite of the States, I think – pretty sure the Democrats are heavily reliant on women voters.”

Possibly because the key issues in the states are different – and a BIG one is abortion. Obviously women have more of a reason to support the US left on abortion than men.

As for why British females and males would vote differently, I suspect motherhood may be involved. My guess is that more mothers than fathers become extra-responsive to the “fear, uncertainty and doubt” type of political message, which is popular with the conservative right.

@1 – “The question is wrong. People don’t think in terms of left-wing versus right-wing…”

@4 – “It’s pretty meaningless without a liberal-authoritarian axis…”

It’s a hopeless survey. Perhaps the greatest revelation is the extent to which ‘left’ and ‘right’ appear to have lost all meaning (or relevance), particularly amongst the younger generation – a majority (51%) of those aged 18-24 “don’t know” (or don’t care?) where they sit on the traditional axis and 42% of the 25-39 demographic feel the same.

Those who remember the struggles of the 70s and 80s are far more likely to have an opinion!

“and Scotland, which is not a region but a country”
Someone has to say it so it might as well be me. A lot of us believe that Wales is also a country and lumping it together with the Midlands is not fair on either of them statistically.

“the majority of people do not describe themselves as left or right-wing, even a bit.”
Bit simplistic, actually. Given a tick box and I would tick ‘left wing’. Given a multiple choice list of words I would underline ‘Socialist’. As I was taught, and in turn taught in Sociology, the importance of a survey is not necesarily the answers but the way the questions are posed. Like the ‘Answer yes or no’ in court the answer one is required to give is not always the answer one would like to give. Thus any suvey/quiz/questionnaire has to be taken with a metaphorical pinch of salt anda lot of real mitigating factors.

Hrm – these statistics tell us an awful lot…

…about statistics.

@ 7

We had ourselves a bit of a flamewar with a certain group of Mumsnet users awhile back on this site. It wasn’t pretty.

Then again, the site and its contributers overall seem pretty cool from what I’ve seen. It’s just that an abrasive and vocal minority seem to congregate there.

I’d love someone to dig into this data a bit. How many of the people who describe themselves as broadly right-wing, for instance, would fiercely defend such leftie innovations as universal state-provided healthcare, education, pensions, child benefit etc.? How many would oppose such right-wing pet projects as deregulation of the banking sector, privatisation of the Post Office, and the shift from direct taxes on corporations and wealthy individuals to indirect taxes on the general public? We shouldn’t take people too seriously when they say they’re ‘right wing’. It doesn’t really tell you much about what they’d make of a proposal to tax the banks more highly, renationalize the railways, etc.

@ 12

…and liberals tend to think that censorship is right-wing while libertarians think it’s left-wing. I think the Nazis were right-wing because I associate fascism and racism with that side of the spectrum, but others call them left-wing because they used big government.

I’m (broadly) socially liberal and financially more socialist and therefore consider myself left-wing on both counts, but others might feel otherwise. Ultimately they’re names for sides.

This is a very interesting article. One thing to take into account though is that the ‘centre’ in Scotland is to the left of what the rest of the country is. We never really saw the effects of New Labour as such in Holyrood and even the Tories are watered down in relative terms.

I can’t work out the geographical split they’ve used. If Wales is included with the Midlands I suppose those of us on the East coast are Midlands too? It’s bizarre.

Everybody thinks that they’re reasonable centrists, be it slightly left or right. That’s what makes the poll meaningless.

Take the carpet-chewers over at Conservative Home, for example. They are convinced that because the BBC is left wing compared to them, it is also left wing in absolute terms. Or take all of the lefties who think that Blair was a right wing PM.

Al this poll shows is that people have a solipsisitic streak.

@13 Problem with those who call the Nazis left wing is that they seem to be using the more modern libertarian version of “right wing” to assess the Nazi regime. By that litmus test any totalitarian government cannot be described as right wing, because they will ultimately interfere with the economy at some point and expand the state in order to control the populace.

Ergo all leftys are megalomaniacs, stormtroopers etc ad infinitum

@ 17

Exactly. While the problem with doing the opposite is that fascism and racism may be associated with the right, but mainly with the far right, and are increasingly unlikely to be relevant to a right-winger picked at random.

And also the fact that Hitler was, y’know, a dictator, which very few people on either side of the spectrum are advocating these days.

So most people are in the middle and all the main political parties get criticism from their activists for trying to appeal to people in the centre. The war on arithmetic goes on. Anecdotaly, I’ve always found political activists more extreme in their views than the median voter so that is probably why they get frustrated with their tribe. What pigeonholing people on a left to right political spectrum does not capture is lots of people have a range of views. A lefty view one minute and a few sentences later a right-wing reactionary view is typical. In my opinion, the liberal-authoritarian axis is more meaningful than the outdated ideas about left and right.

My guess is that more mothers than fathers become extra-responsive to the “fear, uncertainty and doubt” type of political message, which is popular with the conservative right.

And with the current Labour opposition.

It depends where the “centre” is….

Although obviously the real story is that a majority of people in every area “don’t know” what their politics are. That says more about political discourse in this country than any number-crunching ‘n’ left/right axis-ing does.

@ 18 Tim J

“And with the current Labour opposition.”

Absolutely – which led to accusations of them “attacking the Tories from the right”. By the common definitions of “left” and “right” in the UK (insofar as they exist and I understand them), New Labour were well to the right of the coalition on crime and civil liberties.

On the other hand, doesn’t the opposition always want the government to be tougher on crime, regardless of who’s in and who’s out?

Well, I thought it was interesting!

I think it *is* the right question for what they want to find out – but it doesn’t tell you everything about people’s politics, what poll does?

Some of the comments saying that it doesn’t actually tell you whether people think the war in Afghanistan is right or we should renationalise the rail are right – but what it does tell you is how people view themselves, which in itself is interesting.

One thing it tells us is that for almost a third of people asked they didn’t know how to answer the question – that’s a lot more than the number of people who know who they may vote for, for example. That may indicate public apathy to politics, a rejection of traditional politics in favour of something ‘fresher’ or something else entirely…

@Tim J 18 – True, but not exactly unique to this particular opposition. It’s always an easy front to attack from.

@Chaise – I’d certainly like to see cross-sectional polling data on income, geography, gender, and parenthood all together. Although I guess you have to do fancy statistical things to figure out what’s going on when you get that fine-grained.

Absolutely – which led to accusations of them “attacking the Tories from the right”.

I didn’t actually mean on Control Orders and law’n'order – which would certainly be an example of Labour outflanking the Govt on the right. What I meant was that the tone of the anti-cuts rhetoric in general has been explicitly based in fear, uncertainty and doubt.

Essentially I suspect that it’s simply a function of whether an opposition is being reactionary or radical. If it’s being reactionary, then the whole thrust of opposition will be “Don’t do it – it’ll be the end of the world if…” with the gap filled in by child trust funds, ema, the Forestry Commission or whatever.

If an opposition is being radical then the tone of opposition tends to be more ‘it’s time for a change’, ‘the govt is stale and timid’, ‘we have new and better ideas’ and so on. Not so much a question of right and left, unless you believe that the left is always radical and the right is always reactionary (in which case you’re wrong, obviously, but I can’t help that).

@11: “I think the Nazis were right-wing because I associate fascism and racism with that side of the spectrum, but others call them left-wing because they used big government.”

C’mon. By government spending on public works such as autobahnen, sports stadiums and civic offices, the Nazis brought down unemployment in an economic climate which Keynes had described as “the most powerful deflation any nation has experienced . . ” [DE Moggridge: Maynard Keynes (1992) p.539]

” . . from 6 million in October 1933 to 4.1 million a year later, 2.8 million in February 1935, 2.5 million in February 1936, and 1.2 million in February 1937.”
[CP Kindleberger: The World in Depression 1929-1939 (Allen Lane, 1973) p.240]

The Nazis created a state-owned enterprise, VolksWagen, to make a “people’s car” . .

“In the long run, the Nazis aimed essentially at an economic system which would be an alternative to capitalism and communism, supporting neither a laissez-faire attitude nor total planning.” [ Hardach: The Political Economy of Germany in the Twentieth Century; University of California Press (1980), p 66 ] They introduced administrative controls over investment through licensing and direct allocation of raw materials. But their brand of socialism emphasised central control over economic activity rather than public ownership of firms. Instead of dispossessing private owners, the Nazis severely circumscribed the scope within which the nominal owners could make choices by currency controls, taxes on profits and direct allocation measures of the state.”
Peter Temin: Lessons from the Great Depression: The Lionel Robbins Lectures for 1989 (MIT Press, 1989) p.117. The author was a professor at the MIT.

25 – This argument comes around and around on LibCon (and elsewhere) and is usually a proxy for both sides wanting to smear the other as being responsible for/related to/associated with the Nazis.

Totalitarian systems of government are on an entirely different plane to conventional political ideologies and it’s simply unhelpful to insist that they belong on the left or on the right. Oswald Mosley (who started as a Tory, then became a Labour MP before starting the BUF) described fascism as belonging on “the radical centre” of politics – and I doubt that centrist is a good way of describing it either.

But then, to support you, he also said “I am not, and never have been, a man of the right. My position was on the left and is now in the centre of politics.”

@ 24 Tim

When I associated scare tactics with the right, I was more thinking of the press than politicians and individuals. It’s a tactic most used by tabloids, and there are far more right-wing than left-wing tabloids, with broader circulation (defining a tabloid by function and journalistic manner, I’m including the Mail and Express there).

So you’re correct, the right doesn’t have a monopoly on this sort of thing. But people who are swayed by it are more likely to be swayed to the right regardless of the tactics used: for example, someone who votes for a party with a harsh but rational approach to immigration after reading too many Asians Will Eat Your Children stories in the Sun.

I should also point out that I’m talking about the convervative right here, not the whole caboodle.

What if I am left on immigration, social issues like gay marriage, civil rights and the environment, but rather right or conservative on the economy and foreign including military policy?
This left-or-right pattern simply doesn’t work.

Shatterface @ 4; “I feel little ‘comradeship’ with state socialists.”

Fair enough Shatterface each to his own – but how would you feel about ‘fellow travellership’ status with state socialists? – a shade less/more left wing depending on how you categorise left, fairly left and very left – or even extremely left. Personally – after reading this article I’m extremely ‘confused left’ .com

@ 28

Then you’re basically a libertarian.

@26: “Totalitarian systems of government are on an entirely different plane to conventional political ideologies and it’s simply unhelpful to insist that they belong on the left or on the right.”

After his visit to Bertesgarten to meet with Hitler in August 1936, Lloyd George – Britain’s last Liberal PM – wrote a glowing assessment of the Führer’s leadership for the Daily Express of 17 November 1936:

“I have just returned from a visit to Germany. In so short time one can only form impressions or at least check impressions which years of distant observation through the telescope of the Press and constant inquiry from those who have seen things at a closer range had already made on one’s mind. I have now seen the famous German Leader and also something of the great change he has effected. Whatever one may think of his methods – and they are certainly not those of a parliamentary country – there can be no doubt that he has achieved a marvellous transformation in the spirit of the people, in their attitude towards each other, and in their social and economic outlook. . . ”

http://www.icons-multimedia.com/ClientsArea/HoH/LIBARC/ARCHIVE/Chapters/Stabiliz/Foreign/LloydGeo.html

The valuable insight is that knowledge about about the “concentration camps” in Germany was already in the public domain in Britain as we can see from the entry of 16 March 1936 in George Orwell’s research diary for the book that was to become: The Road to Wigan Pier (1937):

“Last night to hear Mosley [founder of the British Union of Fascists in 1932] speak at the Public Hall [in Barnsley], which is in structure a theatre. It was quite full – about 700 people I should say. About 100 Blackshirts on duty, with two or three exceptions weedy looking specimens, and girls selling Action etc. Mosley spoke for an hour and a half and to my dismay seemed to have the meeting mainly with him. He was booed at the start but loudly clapped at the end. Several men who tried to interject with questions were thrown out . . . one with quite unnecessary violence. . . . M. is a very good speaker. His speech was the usual clap-trap – Empire free trade, down with the Jew and the foreigner, higher wages and shorter hours all round etc. After the preliminary booing the (mainly) working class audience was easily bamboozled by M speaking as it were from a Socialist angle, condemning the treachery of successive governments towards the workers. The blame for everything was put upon mysterious international gangs of Jews who were said to be financing, among other things the British Labour Party and the Soviet. . . . M. kept extolling Italy and Germany but when questioned about concentration camps etc always replied ‘We have no foreign models; what happens in Germany need not happen here.’ . . . ”
George Orwell: The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters, Vol. 1 An Age Like This 1920-1940 (Penguin Books) p.230.

Note the passge: “M[osley] speaking as it were from a Socialist angle”. Evidently, Orwell had no doubts at all about the “leftist” stance of the fascists in Britain.

Richard W/17: So most people are in the middle and all the main political parties get criticism from their activists for trying to appeal to people in the centre. The war on arithmetic goes on.

There’s a difference between expressing your policies in terms which will appeal to voters around the current centre (which is rarely a problem), and changing your policies so that they’re at the current centre (which is usually a problem).

There may appear to be a sound mathematical reason for doing the latter, but it is based on a rather major assumption.

Chaise guevara, Racism and Fascism are’nt right wing thins, fascism is anti democracy inposing your views on someone and using opression to do it,Like the Closed shop when people were asacked not entitled to unemployment benefit when they refused to join unions and told they had no one to blame but themselves, racism if its anti white racosm in Britain would be considered left wing

As for hte Nazis beig big state, Volvo and Volkswagon were private buswiness subsidised by the Nazis ,so they were right wing industries.

In some ways we are straying from the original blog in that we are not discussing the way that those anwering the survey place themselves politically.
I agree with the comment that perhaps we should be more worried about the “don’t knows” than anything else. If these translate into ‘I don’t vote’ – which is a possibility – then we have to face the fact that an awful lot of people are turned off politics – and may be literally turning off the TV rather than become bored with politicians and there yah boo discussions.
Which was why it was so refreshing last night on Newsnight to see the young Tony Smith from UkUncut making the older spokesperson from the Institute of Directors seem pompous and arrogant. Perhaps the next generation of voters are becoming more politically engaged due to the inadequacies of the present government – something we can thank this government for, for once!

Mosley regarded his politics of the 1930s as left-wing but then he had been a cabinet minister in Ramsey Macdonald’s Labour government of 1929-31 until he resigned in 1930 saying the government was doing too little to tackle unemployment. He wrote a letter to The Times of 26 April 1968: “I am not and never have been a man of the right. My position was on the left and is now in the centre of politics.”

In 1928, the franchise in Britain was extended to include all women over the age of 21, which left the suffragette movement without a rallying cause. Many took to other political activism as a substitute. Sylvia Pankhurst became a founder of the Communist Party. Others went and joined Mosley’s Fascists instead:

“Julie Gottlieb’s Feminine Fascism would disabuse them. Its brilliant analysis of the place of women in Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists does much to change our preconceptions. Where women played comparatively little part in the fascist movements of other European countries, more than 25 per cent of the BUF members were women, many of whom were prominent in the movement’s activities. All this, despite the macho image, so similar to that of continental fascism, displayed by the leader and by so many of his acolytes.”
http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?storyCode=157840&sectioncode=6

Hmmm. Me…

Crime: Right-wing

Immigration: Left-wing

Foriegn policy: Left-wing

Education: Left-wing

Employment: Left-wing

‘Everybody thinks that they’re reasonable centrists, be it slightly left or right. That’s what makes the poll meaningless.

Take the carpet-chewers over at Conservative Home, for example. They are convinced that because the BBC is left wing compared to them, it is also left wing in absolute terms. Or take all of the lefties who think that Blair was a right wing PM.

Al this poll shows is that people have a solipsisitic streak.’

Blair was objectively right-wing though. By pretty much any standard.

I’ve heard fascism described as ‘socialism of the right’.

“Blair was objectively right-wing though. By pretty much any standard.”

Hmm… he certainly had a fondness for “markets” and is hardly likely to go down in history as having pursued a liberal-left agenda on justice, foreign policy etc., but his general approach to taxation and public spending was hardly ‘right-wing’, surely? (Generally speaking, he was inclined to increase spending on public services where a right-winger would have been inclined to cut taxes, and generally speaking he was inclined to change the tax and benefits system in ways that benefited the poor (tax credits, most obviously) where a right-winger would have been inclined to change it in ways that benefited the rich.)

@37: “Blair was objectively right-wing though. By pretty much any standard.”

Not so. Tony Blair’s vision was the Third Way. When he first made that speech back in 1998, someone online posted that the Third Way had a fascist provenance.

Surely that cannot be, I thought. Blair’s academic advisers and Alastair Campbell would have checked even if he didn’t have the time with all the pressures of being a New Labour prime minister an’ all. They would have checked, woundn’t they? But I thought it best to check, just in case.

The second book I picked up was by Martin Clark, an academic historian at Edinburgh University, on: Modern Italy 1871-1995 (Longman 2nd ed. (1996)). On p.250, where the author writes about the policies of Mussolini’s fascist government, I came across this revealing sentence:

“They seemed to offer ‘a third way’, between capitalism and Bolshevism, which looked attractive in the Depression. …”

Mussolini was editor of the Italian Socialist Party’s newspaper before he was expelled from the Party and went on to found the Fasci di Combattimento in 1919.

@40 Did Blair actually have a vision? I was always under the impression that his governing by headline chasing had more to do with egotistical narcissism that any actual idea of how he would like the nation to function.

@41: “I was always under the impression that his governing by headline chasing had more to do with egotistical narcissism that any actual idea of how he would like the nation to function.”

There’s a lot in that IMO too. But then I came upon this entry for Fascism in the Oxford Companion to Politics and for some unfathomable reason as I read it I thought it was a good fit for Blair:

“Fascist ideology also included a romantic, an antirational allure, an appeal to the emotions, to a quasi-religious longing for a mystic union of peoples and their prophetic leader. In reaction to a utilitarian liberal state, fascism revived aspirations towards a normative or ethical state. According to this view, the community existed not merely as a practical convenience but in order to fulfil the individual’s ethical and moral potential. How people perceived these themes depended on the eye of the beholder. Conservatives viewed fascism as a bulwark against Bolshevism or as a middle way between worn-out liberal capitalism and the communist horror. Radicals viewed fascism as a genuinely revolutionary ideology that would sweep away discredited ideals and institutions and replace them with a new disciplined and cohesive society.”

@38
The only trouble with that assessment is the fact that there was no common ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange under fascism. It was a corporatist state. Trade unions were banned and socialist deputies like Giacomo Matteoti were killed. Economically,.Mussolini followed a classical liberal model which resulted in mass privatisations and the scrapping of a variety of taxes.

That doesn’t sound very socialist to me.

@2

>>>I also think more women vote Tory and more men vote Labour<<<

This is only historically true (the explanation being that at the time men were far more likely to work and were therefore more likely to belong to a trade union, etc). There have been massive changes to the Labour market since and in fact women have both been more likely to vote Labour and more likely to describe themselves as left-wing, ever since the mid-90s.

These points have already been made many times, but I think that there are 2 big issues with this poll: Firstly, people generally like to regard themselves as reasonable, moderate and average, putting them near the ‘centre ground’ or undecided/apathetic in so far as placing themselves on a spectrum goes. This comes down to the old debate – where is the centre ground? How do you define it?

Secondly, people often think on an issue by issue basis. They may be furious at bankers, dislike the EU, think that they are getting a raw deal with the balance of cuts, support rail renationalisation and be unconcerned about anti-terrorism law, ID cards and the role of the police. They may want to severely restrict immigration but come out voting Labour.

I think that what is interesting about these figures is that people think that the Tories are more right wing than Labour is left wing. Is this a sign that the ‘centre ground’ of politics is shifted a bit to the right of the centre ground of public opinion? Or is it down to right wingers having more confidence in their government/party than left wingers do in theres?

@Bob B #31:

“Note the passge: “M[osley] speaking as it were from a Socialist angle”. Evidently, Orwell had no doubts at all about the “leftist” stance of the fascists in Britain.”

True, that; he was quite clear that they were not “leftist”, or rather “socialist”. That “as it were” is highly significant…

Try this from the Road to Wigan Pier:

“If you present Socialism in a bad and misleading light – if you let people imagine that it does not mean much more than pouring European civilization down the sink at the command of Marxist prigs – you risk driving the intellectual into Fascism. You frighten him into a sort of angry defensive attitude in which he simply refuses to listen to the Socialist case.”

@Bob B #31 (contd):

In fact, read the whole of chapter 11 of The Road to Wigan Pier; it’s online and free:

http://www.george-orwell.org/The_Road_to_Wigan_Pier/11.html

Another couple of choice quotes:

“Fascism as it appears in the intellectual is a sort of mirror-image–not actually of Socialism but of a plausible travesty of Socialism. It boils down to a determination to do the opposite of whatever the mythical Socialist does.”
(which immediately precedes the quote in my earlier post)

or:

“Everyone who has given the movement so much as a glance knows that the rank-and-file Fascist is often quite a well-meaning person–quite genuinely anxious, for instance, to better the lot of the unemployed. But more important than this is the fact that Fascism draws its strength from the good as well as the bad varieties of conservatism. To anyone with a feeling for tradition and for discipline it comes with its appeal ready-made. Probably it is very easy, when you have had a bellyful of the more tactless kind of Socialist propaganda, to see Fascism as the last line defence of all that is good in European civilization.”

or:

“We have got to admit that if Fascism is everywhere advancing, this is largely the fault of Socialists themselves. Partly it is due to the mistaken Communist tactic of sabotaging democracy, i.e. sawing off the branch you are sitting on; but still more to the fact that Socialists have, so to speak, presented their case wrong side foremost. They have never made it sufficiently clear that the essential aims of Socialism are justice and liberty.”

or:

“At present the situation is desperate. Even if nothing worse befalls us, there are the conditions which I described in the earlier part of this book and which are not going to improve under our present economic system. Still more urgent is the danger of Fascist domination in Europe. And unless Socialist doctrine, in an effective form, can be diffused widely and very quickly, there is no certainty that Fascism will ever be overthrown. For Socialism is the only real enemy that Fascism has to face.”

Still convinced that Orwell took the view that fascism was actually leftist, as opposed to merely presented as such?

a reason more women vote tory, is older people vote more and men die before women ,

@ 33 John P Reid

“Chaise guevara, Racism and Fascism are’nt right wing thins, fascism is anti democracy inposing your views on someone and using opression to do it”

Agree to an extent there, and I made a similar point at post 16. The right has, historically, made more use of racism and fascism, but that doesn’t reflect on modern politics. And it’s a rule of thumb: the left are capable of these things too.

@ 48

“a reason more women vote tory, is older people vote more and men die before women”

Extremely good point, that, and one I hadn’t considered.