This Things I Believe

It’s the silly season self-indulgence special! This week: what exactly is the soft left? And why are tube maps clickbait?

Please forgive the fact I’m about to write an intro which is self-involved even by my standards, which really, I know, takes quite some doing, but: what do you imagine my politics are? Where do I fit?

Answers on a postcard (or preferably in the comments). The reason I ask is I have absolutely no idea. I mean, I can list policy preferences in some areas with confidence, and in others with rather less of it; but what name to give the resulting package I don’t know. Maybe this is just because I’ve never been an activist, and thus have never got into the sort of factional battles that result in you defining or being defined as one thing or the other.

But maybe it’s because the boxes don’t actually fit – because what labels people have given me have jumped all over the shop. At school, I was considered left-wing, by virtue of the fact I went to private school in Essex, so almost no one else was; at university, I was political, by virtue of the fact I cared, a bit, in a deeply apolitical age. (I was not so political I actually bothered to do any politics.) For much of the noughties I hated the Labour government for being too right-wing; by 2015 I was a Blairite/centrist/liberal/something because I hated the Tories but didn’t rate Jeremy Corbyn. By 2019, some were calling me a fellow traveller because I still, on balance, wanted Boris Johnson to lose, and if you wanted that there was really only one other game in town. 

More recently, people have largely stopped calling me a Blairite/centrist/something – liberal is still in the mix – because I don’t much like Keir Starmer either. At first glance, all this might suggest I’ve been on one of those “journeys” that politicians often bang on about, but actually I don’t think I’ve moved at all. My politics has been almost entirely consistent. I want a Labour government; I just hate the Labour leadership.¹

If someone on Twitter tries to tell me what my politics are these days, the label I’m most likely to get is “soft left”; and for the first time, I think I’m comfortable with it.² I’d like a bigger, more interventionist state that exists to make people’s lives better; I am disappointed and underwhelmed by Keir Starmer, who seems determined at all costs to avoid being mistaken for a progressive. On the other hand, though, I think you need to win an election to actually do anything³, and so have at least some grasp on why the Labour leader has turned himself into the living embodiment of the “better things aren’t possible” meme. I hope he is lying about at least some of this vacuum of ambition, and since he’s been so comfortable lying about so many other things in the course of his career there is at least a chance, I think, that I’m right; but I can’t bring myself to feel happy about any of it. All in all, I am neither hard left, nor Labour right, neither Corbyn nor Blair. Hence: soft left, the leftover sock drawer of progressive politics. 

There’s another, more philosophical reason why “soft left” feels the right label. Something that unites hard left and Labour right – unites Corbyn and Blair – is their confidence, if you are being kind, or zealotry, if you are not. Both sides believe their way is the right way; both, also, that the other is the enemy, possibly even more than the Tories, and that there is something approaching a moral imperative to smash it. This is a simplification, and may not apply to every individual that makes up those factions; but it’s true enough, I think, of them as movements.

I’m sure there are those in the soggy centre of the British left of whom you could say much the same – people who, like certain actual centrists, feel smug about their moderation, convinced that the very fact they can see good points on both sides must in itself make them right. 

But there’s another, separate group who end up lumped in with those people, I think: those who just don’t feel that confidence. Maybe they do draw ideas from both sides; maybe they find their policy preferences clash with their views on electoral strategy or about what it’s plausible to expect the state to actually achieve. Maybe they have a vague preference for a more socialist state but don’t have the faintest idea how to get there. These guys, too, get called soft left. So perhaps it isn’t just about ideology. Perhaps it’s about temperament, too. 

I got in trouble once for making this point on Twitter, which some interpreted as a sort of irregular verb: I am nuanced; you are ideological; he is a fanatic. Maybe. I don’t think so, though, because there are times when I genuinely can’t work out what I think, and feel almost jealous of those who can.

What I am sure of, though, is that the neat little categories we dump people in are not always a good way of thinking about their actually existing political beliefs. For one thing, these vary not just along left/right or liberal/authoritarian axes, but in the fervency with which they are held, too. More than that, as I’ve argued in the past, we all have a mix of opinions, and some of the resulting bundles align better with easily labelled predefined categories than others. Some of the time, perhaps, named ideologies or other group identities can be instructive: I am X, therefore believe Y. A lot of the time though they’re merely descriptive, a model for splitting the mass of people in all their messy complexity into easily comprehensible groupings. 

So sometimes, when we’re confused or angry that someone in group X believes not Y, but Z, the problem is not with them at all: it’s because we’ve confused the map with the terrain.

Anyway, this is why I am more comfortable with the label soft left than any of others that have been applied: because it is not so much a set of beliefs, as a way of looking at the world. 

Which is not the same as it being better, of course. And maybe the people who read that tweet as just another smug moderate being smug and moderate about things were bang on the money. But it’s worth noting that, on Saturday night, I attended the annual drinks for The Social Review, a soft left journal if ever there was one. At one point, at this gathering of the soft left, someone gave a speech announcing the death of the soft left and all the soft left types in attendance cheered.

It just feels to me like this may have been the most soft left thing ever to have happened. That’s all. 

Harry Beck has a lot to answer for 

Sticking with our theme of self-indulgence – look, it’s silly season; if the papers can just literally make shit up then I can do this – here’s another personal anecdote, as a way into asking a question I’ve been pondering for some years now.

The original R25 map. Image: TfL, 2014. 

In late July 2014, after the immense stress of launching CityMetric and discovering, the hard way, why “beta testing” is generally a thing, I decided to spend an afternoon doing something silly and fun that I could, just about, still justify as journalism. I read Boris Johnson’s London Infrastructure 2050 plan, found the dreadful map someone had made of the bullshit “R25” orbital rail plan and identified which lines it showed; then used this information to make a sort of in-carriage line diagram of it to show all the stations, including those which I thought TfL might, in its generosity, add. Here it is now, via the magic of the Wayback Machine.