This is the second time in my life that Labour have gained power after a long Conservative tenure, only to dive straight into enacting policies that were more right-wing than their predecessors.
if i had a nickel for everytime a labour government came into power after a prolonged tory government and immediately started governing further right id have two nickels which isn’t a lot but it’s weird it happened twice in a row
It’s less of a left - right thing (that’s mainly economics). It paternalism Vs liberty thing. Labour have always had a very strong “we must protect the populace” theme to their policies. Conservatives have it too, but they want to do it in a different way.
Sadly it’s a really difficult thing to stand against. Who wants to be labelled the person enabling paedophiles, when all you want is the right to private communication.
Part of that is allowing labels to be so powerful. Someone doesn’t have to watch kiddie porn or molest children to be branded a pedophile, but when you have that label for someone, it’s implied that’s what they did. We saw this same shit during the Bush years with the “terrorism” label. We’re actually seeing it again with Luigi Mangione and people protesting at Tesla dealerships. People don’t care about reality if there’s simple branding that wipes critical thinking away.
The full spectrum is really more like “authoritarian vs libertarian”. Political policy should really be split into two different spectrums. On one spectrum, you have financial policy. On the other, you have social policy. The two normally get lumped together because politicians campaign on both simultaneously. But in reality, they’re two separate policies. So the political spectrum should look less like a single left/right line, and more like an X/Y graph with individual points for each person’s ideology. Something more like this:
On this graph, as you go farther left, the government has more ownership and provides more, (and individuals own less because the government provides more for their needs). As you go farther up the chart, social policy gets more authoritarian. So for example, something on the far right bottom corner would be the Cyberpunk 2077/The Outer Worlds end-stage capitalist where megacorps inevitably own everything and have their own private laws.
Once you separate the two policies into a graph (instead of just a left/right line) it becomes clear why “small government” doesn’t necessarily correspond to “fewer laws” when dealing with politicians.
I guess one potential axis would be ‘stagnation’, in the sense that social mobility between classes stops changing. That could be anything like straight up caste systems, or informal stratification from wealth getting locked up by the 1%. I hypothesize, that such an axis would be a measurement of how ‘elderly’ a society is becoming. When politics become too locked in due to unchanging political critters, the ability for a society to recognize and properly act in a situation becomes compromised.
My parent, they lost mental acuity and flexibility with the years, alongside their bodily agency, and have become quarrelsome. IMO, such dementia is what we are seeing in a aging America and the UK.
This is the second time in my life that Labour have gained power after a long Conservative tenure, only to dive straight into enacting policies that were more right-wing than their predecessors.
The OSA was brought in by the tories. Labour agree with it as well. Both of them are authoritarian bastards.
if i had a nickel for everytime a labour government came into power after a prolonged tory government and immediately started governing further right id have two nickels which isn’t a lot but it’s weird it happened twice in a row
It’s less of a left - right thing (that’s mainly economics). It paternalism Vs liberty thing. Labour have always had a very strong “we must protect the populace” theme to their policies. Conservatives have it too, but they want to do it in a different way.
Sadly it’s a really difficult thing to stand against. Who wants to be labelled the person enabling paedophiles, when all you want is the right to private communication.
To be honest I don’t think much of this is about catching or preventing paedos, and is just straight up authoritarianism.
You’re right. It’s not, but that’s what you’re labelled when you stand against it.
Part of that is allowing labels to be so powerful. Someone doesn’t have to watch kiddie porn or molest children to be branded a pedophile, but when you have that label for someone, it’s implied that’s what they did. We saw this same shit during the Bush years with the “terrorism” label. We’re actually seeing it again with Luigi Mangione and people protesting at Tesla dealerships. People don’t care about reality if there’s simple branding that wipes critical thinking away.
Paternalism vs liberty. Tell me more. I haven’t heard of this comparison before.
The full spectrum is really more like “authoritarian vs libertarian”. Political policy should really be split into two different spectrums. On one spectrum, you have financial policy. On the other, you have social policy. The two normally get lumped together because politicians campaign on both simultaneously. But in reality, they’re two separate policies. So the political spectrum should look less like a single left/right line, and more like an X/Y graph with individual points for each person’s ideology. Something more like this:
On this graph, as you go farther left, the government has more ownership and provides more, (and individuals own less because the government provides more for their needs). As you go farther up the chart, social policy gets more authoritarian. So for example, something on the far right bottom corner would be the Cyberpunk 2077/The Outer Worlds end-stage capitalist where megacorps inevitably own everything and have their own private laws.
Once you separate the two policies into a graph (instead of just a left/right line) it becomes clear why “small government” doesn’t necessarily correspond to “fewer laws” when dealing with politicians.
That’s a political compass, and it’s still missing several political axes.
I guess one potential axis would be ‘stagnation’, in the sense that social mobility between classes stops changing. That could be anything like straight up caste systems, or informal stratification from wealth getting locked up by the 1%. I hypothesize, that such an axis would be a measurement of how ‘elderly’ a society is becoming. When politics become too locked in due to unchanging political critters, the ability for a society to recognize and properly act in a situation becomes compromised.
My parent, they lost mental acuity and flexibility with the years, alongside their bodily agency, and have become quarrelsome. IMO, such dementia is what we are seeing in a aging America and the UK.
Realistically one can come up with any number of axes and still be wrong, because the domain of politics isn’t a metric space.