You're Left, Right?

As we enter into a period of politics in which political labels and affectations seem to be as concrete as the promises we are offered in leadership manifestos - I.e. generally empty of substantive meaning - the grasp we have on our political identity is slipping away rapidly from our weakening grip.

The phenomenon of party affiliation losing its substance has actually been a rather recent one; Pre-1990's, the dichotomous divide between Tory and Labour, Left and Right, was more or less clear cut. However, since Tony Blair experimented with Britain's largest leftist party to form New Labour, the left-right party scale saw a major renovation. With Blairite policy measures that would not have necessarily looked amiss in a contemporary Tory party manifesto, the left and right scale was clearly losing the polarised clarity it once offered ; when a Labour Party policy agenda is just as right as it is left, is all hope for substantive policy labels lost?

Shifting to a more recent political context, taking the coalition as an example, it is no great challenge to see left-right convergence becoming the prevailing modus operandi of modern government. The historic coalition that formed in 2010 under Clegg and Cameron with Conservative and Lib-Dem camps signalled a major reshaping of party politics in the political trajectory of Britain and the corresponding electorate affiliations; had the liberal democrats become more right or the Tory party more left? Evidently, both of these can be argued to have taken place. The former liberal left agenda that the Liberal Democrats enjoyed and espoused had undergone a major neoliberal transformation, mostly absent of any social democratic vein. Of course, tracing the liberal party back to it's historical Whig roots puts the yellow party shade back into the blue, so to speak. However, the modern agenda that the liberal democrats came to champion - free education, free healthcare and opposition to preponderant, aggressive market forces - has undeniably undergone a retrenching shift towards the right.

Furthermore, With voices such as Peter Hitchens (in a familiar polemical tone) during an interview with Owen Jones disdaining the once conservative Tory party as an essentially 'socialist party' - and therefore fundamentally cloaked in falsehood - the modern consciousness of lucid party identities is clearly dissipating into vague ambiguity. Cameron was perhaps famously known during his election campaign as somewhat aloof from party politics (or at least professing to be); a man who wasn't 'particularly ideological' at all. The media reaction to a leftist agenda under Jeremy Corbyn and the arguably pessimistic sentiments he has awoken clearly highlights the fact that, until recently, the Labour Party had been hovering over party cleavages like an ambivalent political wasp. With Jeremy Corbyn being elected - albeit unexpectedly - to lead the Labour Party, what is to be made of hitherto ambiguous party identities? Has the Labour Party under Corbyn reinstated its fundamentally socialist heritage roots, Or is it simply promising something politically untenable to the people in the modern British economic climate ? The neoliberal agenda that has long dominated party politics has taken a proverbial backseat under a Corbyn manifesto. Perhaps the pessimism generated around Corbyn from a predominantly right-wing media press has stemmed from the very fact that ideological stances are no longer sustainable, or indeed desirable, in this era; we may indeed have moved beyond ideology.

A potential corollary of this narrative may be that Theresa May has been able to appeal across party lines due to the very fact that she, like Cameron, isn't 'particularly ideological'. This all bears fascinating implications for the consciousness of voters who are looking for clear party identities; is one futile to search for the seemingly undefinable definitions of left and right in the 21st century? On the one hand, the political pathway towards neutral ideological labels creates a greater focus on policy and pragmatism, highly conducive to effective democratic representation. On the other hand, the husk that party political labels have faded into risks creating a political society empty of ideological moral backbones and an electorate whose identity stitches are breaking at the seams; the question is, who has the tools to make the necessary repairs ?