Sunday Politics: An Introduction

One thing I've wanted to talk about for a good while on my blog is politics - it's not always an interesting or engaging subject, but despite that it is an important subject that still affects most things going on. I've hinted at views a couple of times previously, and as Sunday is a relaxing day without much ever happening, it seems like a good day to write some thoughts down.

While my views and political leanings will likely be quite self-explanatory in the long term, I think it's still appropriate to lay them out from the beginning. Traditionally I'd have been described as left-wing, but that's increasingly an inaccurate categorisation. However, I saw an exercise recently which instead placed people on two axes - social and economic, with a liberal to conservative scale on both of these.

This is a much more interesting and accurate outcome - because while social liberalism means one thing, economic liberalism is very different. You will now typically see economic liberalism regarded as both economic orthodoxy, and where there is scope for disagreement, the more liberal wing of economic theory is a conservative position (keeping up?). This is why the traditional linear measurement works badly.

For my part, I end up as socially liberal but economically somewhere neutral - away from a state-controlled economy, but a long way from the 'private good public bad' viewpoint at the other end of the scale. My economic position is more interesting as politically the main parties cover a very narrow spectrum of the economic scale - positions outside of these are viewed as rarer and extreme, despite being held by most people.

There's a fair few subjects I want to explore on this in the future - but that's enough heavy lifting for one blog early on a Sunday, so I'll leave the first of these to next week.