I was reading this morning and the book mentioned a character who was right wing and I started wondering to myself how the whole left wing/right wing denominations had come up and mainly how unlikely it was that everyone came to accept these terms as descriptions of various political standings.
Because people from the right and left wings of politics generally don't agree about anything (and I will avoid making the trite point that in the UK nowadays it is hard to tell the difference - oh maybe I won't then) and yet they both seemed to accept this convention of socialists being left and conservatives being right, which struck me as odd. Mainly because it is surely best to be called right, with its alternative meaning of correct, but also because the left is historically seen as being sinister and strange and evil. Of course in the 21st century only the most reactionary of people would still think that left-handed people are human devils, but they definitely are and any argument against this position is simply political correctness gone mad.
I guessed that the terms must have derived from some political chamber and the positions of where the parties sat (when I brought up the subject on the penultimate Andrew Collings show, some listeners did email in to say it derived from the French revolution).
Evenso there was no need for the socialists to accept the left nomenclature, as they could simply have argued that it depends which way you looked at it. Because they might have been on the left as you looked at them, but from their own perspective they were on the right (or vice versa). It seems ludicrous that there wasn't a massive argument about this, an argument that should still be going on to this day.
In fact I don't believe that old Tony Blairs should step down until he has successfully changed this system so that Labour are judged the right wing party. Of course many people would say that he has already achieved this. Damn I've done it again.
