The words have stopped working

There is a defence of the old political labels, and it deserves stating at full strength before anything else is said about them.

Left and right still do one job well: they tell you which team someone is on. Politics is coalitional - millions of people must somehow act together - and a one-syllable flag that coordinates a coalition is not a small thing. Ask a pollster: self-placement on the left-right scale still predicts how people vote better than almost any other single question. By that standard the words work fine, and the complaint about them is a pedant's complaint.

We think that defence is true, and that it concedes the whole problem. A label can work perfectly as a team jersey and fail completely as a description - and it is the descriptive job that public argument depends on. When the jersey is all that remains, disagreement stops being about the world and becomes about membership. You can watch this happen in almost any political exchange in Britain today: positions are not examined, they are placed.

What the words used to describe

For most of the twentieth century the labels earned their keep, because they compressed two real questions into one syllable: what should happen to wealth, and what should happen to tradition. Left meant redistribute and reform. Right meant protect and preserve. Crucially, the two questions travelled together - knowing someone's answer to one, you could usually guess the other. That compression was the labels' entire usefulness.

There was always a third question hiding underneath: roughly, liberal or illiberal. Individual rights or group authority; open argument or managed speech; one law for everyone or different rules depending on who you are. For a long century it lined up neatly enough with the other two that nobody needed a separate word for it.

It no longer lines up. It is now perfectly common to meet a self-described progressive who regards free expression as a harm to be managed and equal treatment as an obstacle to justice - positions that are internally coherent, but not liberal ones. It is just as common to meet a self-described conservative whose whole politics consists of defending the classically liberal settlement: free speech, equality before the law, secular institutions. The scales have come apart, and the labels, which only ever worked because the scales moved together, now point in arbitrary directions.

Why this is worse than a dictionary problem

An emptied word does not retire; it gets repurposed. A label that has lost its descriptive content keeps all of its social force, which makes it an ideal weapon - call a position far-right and you are excused from answering it. The emptier the term, the more efficiently it ends the conversation. And so a country full of people with ordinary, checkable concerns about how institutions spend, police and report finds those concerns unsayable - not answered, unsayable - and the resentment that follows is then offered as proof that the label was deserved.

The honest candidates

What should replace the broken compass? We hold no settled answer, and we are suspicious of anyone who does. But three candidate axes seem to describe today's arguments better than left and right do.

Principle or ideology. Does a person apply their stated principles to the awkward cases, or only when their own side benefits? The test is what someone does when principle and tribe point in opposite directions.

Performed virtue or real empathy. One is aimed at an audience, the other at a person. A society can drown in the first while starving of the second, and most people can tell the difference in their own lives long before they can name it in politics.

High trust or low trust. Perhaps the deepest. Institutions that state their rules and follow them build trust; institutions seen saying one thing and doing another burn it. Much of what is called polarisation looks, up close, like the rational behaviour of people who stopped extending trust they kept watching being spent badly.

Our decision

Nuance granted, a choice still has to be made, so here is ours. We will go on using left and right as history and as team colours, because that is all they still are. For analysis - for the actual work of describing who wants what and why - we will use the plainer questions above, and we would rather name a position precisely than place it conveniently. The reader who disagrees is welcome to; the votes and figures on this site will look exactly the same whichever vocabulary you bring to them.

An opinion of the house. The argument is ours; the record beneath it belongs to no one.