RIGHT AND LEFT: A BARREN ARGUMENT

It’s fairly obvious, post 9/11, 7/7, the Cartoon controversy etc etc, that the centuries old dispute between right and left is going nowhere. Both sides accuse the other of being “fascists” or even debate the “socialist” credentials of the nazis. To what end? Rather the dispute should now be re-cast in terms of “authoritarian” and “libertarian”. The Authoritarians follow down the road of the Inner Party in 1984 by demanding “thou shalt”; the Libertarians go down the road of “you can if you must, but you decide”.

Such a reorganising of analysis of political opinion removes the present confusion whereby the left, although uncomfortable in its support of militant Islam and in difficulties trying to underpin a coherent argument, nevertheless is prepared to be anti-feminist, anti-gay and anti-Semitic. The left has always been uncomfortable with philo-Semitism, corrupted as it is with more than a suspicion of pro-Zionism. At last, extremists (eg SWP, BNP and the various Islamic front organisations) and not such loony extremists (elements of the Labour party; Livingstone comes to mind) can conflate their seemingly disparate policies into an authoritarian and unconfused intolerance which, conveniently, includes anti-Semitism.

The libertarian wing of politics would tend to include the “live and let live” tendency: most Conservatives, most Lib-Dems, a fair sprinkling of old Labour and the tolerant left, and the rest of us out here in the real world. This wing would also tend to despise political correctness, patronising politics (whether from Patricia Hewitt, Virginia Bottomley or Sir Ian Blair) and the endless success of single-issue pressure groups in subverting government policy to their agenda.