I've been pondering this for a while now. For a long period, I refused to call myself left or right because living in China, that simple dichotomy makes very little sense.
So when I look back to England and I look at all the political choices, none of the parties make any sense to me if you look at them from the perspective of a political spectrum. I might like some right-wing policies from Reform, while also preferring some elements from the Greens in the left.
I think people who are drowned in politics in the country get themselves boxed in through allegiances, tradition, and social pressures more than they'd like to admit. The only reason I see myself as somewhat different is because I'm so geographically detached; my own opinions have become isolated from all three pressures.
It's true that, as I've gotten older, I've gotten more conservative. On the whole this happens to everyone, especially once they've had a kid or two. I love the idea of protecting our land, architecture and heritage, and yet I can't stand the NIMBYS out there, rendering all potential development and progression dead in the water.
I love the idea of slashing, Milei-style, government to the size of a pea, or as close as humanly possible. I wish it would stop interfering with everything and turning us into a nanny-state, driving the entire population to be completely dependent on hand-outs. At the same time, I loathe the privatisation of things that obviously shouldn't be privatised; water, trains, Steel manufacturing (or anything necessary for defense), (Royal) mail, buses, maybe even the internet? And I celebrate that Labour have moved to end those train contracts, some of which have already been nationalised and many more to come.
On the flip side, I strongly disagree with the attempted destruction of private schools, while wishing the majority of Universities get shut down and converted into something more useful - Education Inflation has become completely untenable.
I'm so skeptical of either side, and usually rightly so. Today I saw the right wing piss and moan about Abortions being decriminalised up until birth. This is seemingly a very deliberate redirection from the truth which is up until birth... for self-inflicted abortions.
Think about it. How many people have an 8-9 month old baby inside them, decide to abort it themselves with a pill, or a coat hanger or whatever, have it die inside them, pull it out, and then dispose of it in the trash, presumably?
The answer is about 3 convicted cases since the mid-1800's to recent days, and then about 60 suspects being investigated since 2018. Are these women criminals, maliciously murdering a baby with a big grin on their faces, or are they in an absolutely horrific state of unimaginable fear, panic and/or pain?
The law makes sense when reading beyond the first paragraphs. And yet, 70% of women in the UK want the actual 24-week legal limit to be reduced, to protect viable babies. This, I also think, makes sense. 24-weeks seems way too late. Then again I'm also a man so I refuse to die on any hill, here.
The left are also constantly lying, largely about the economy, showing deliberate and performative misunderstanding of how the economy works, completely oblivious to the fact that "Billionaires", meaning the top 1% (which in reality is only an income of £230,000), pay the vast majority of tax, even if it's not an equal share. Chase them away as we already have done (more millionaires have left the UK last year and the year before than any other country on earth), and you lose your tax.
Now - no surprises here - we have acquired £331 billion in taxes from working people while paying £333 billion to people on welfare. For the first time, working taxpayers provide less money than non-working (typically, retired). Debt per person has now reached £41,000. Great.
On immigration, I am strongly against the mass immigration that has been inflicted upon us. Not only has it been greatly damaging to our economy and people, but we democratically voted against it time and time again for decades, so it is a decision that has gone against the people repeatedly, and then we're punished for complaining about it. This used to be the position of the left - Bernie Sanders of the far-left USA, and Jeremy Corbyn of the far-left UK, both are on camera against it, stating that it's a right-wing agenda to create cheap labour at the cost of the working class people.
It's no surprise there were a surprising amount of Bernie voters who, when seeing him lose, jumped on the MAGA wagon - because, ideology aside, there's a surprising overlap nobody wants to admit. Perhaps even more contradictory was famously when Elon Must fell out with Trump because Elon - considered right-wing, even a Nazi (lol), wanted to open borders to skilled migrants from India, against Trump's desire. In recent days, even Trump has flipped on this and started talking about opening borders to some degree.
Again, make the political spectrum make sense.
War? Obviously against it. strongly. And yet, the EU seem hell-bent on it, while acting all righteous, condemning the entire population of Ukraine (and, really, Russia) to their early graves by allowing the war to be pointlessly extended for years, for a patch of land populated almost entirely by Russians, or Pro-Russians, due to some strategic access to water, or worse, out of principle. Fuck principles, thousands of people are dying every day. You want to pretend Russia's next target of military invasion is the UK? Fuck off. Ukraine's population distribution is absolutely disastrous, the only solution of which will be to flood the nation with the infinite supply of Indians.
Here's how it looked right before the war - still bad (soviet days), but so much worse now:
And, wtf do we have to do with Iran, other than being forced to accept yet another wave of millions of refugees we simply can't afford? Keep out of it, keep out of everything Israel and USA get involved with.
On Green energy, I strongly opposite Net Zero, but I also think only morons prance around insisting Climate Change is a hoax, or somehow think it's not done by humans. Even if they're correct and it's actually done by volcanoes, don't we still want a world with fewer natural disasters?
I am super pro-nuclear energy, and not anti-renewable per se, though I think it needs a lot of work when it comes to shouldering off expired, non-recyclable materials to places like India to deal with, wholesale pricing methods and so on.
Net Zero is untenable at the rate they are driving it, rendering the entire British population impoverished. First they encouraged EV's, then they decided to start taxing people with EVs to... discourage them?
If the UK vanished with the click of a Thanos glove, it would reduce emissions in the world by less than 1% - briefly, before being ramped up even worse because places like India and China fill the void of manufacturing left behind.
There is nothing the UK can do on its own soil to make a blind bit of difference when you can't even click onto Indian Street View without seeing a pile of trash, soon to be escorted into their sewage-saturated rivers. Look at the plastic run-off map:
And, hell, given the immense population density of the UK, we still have among the cleanest air quality in the world:
We simply don't need to accelerate it - at home. If we want to intervene we need to work with the global stage to sort out the real culprits - something they themselves openly desire, too (easier said than done). And, most importantly, not at the cost of our own people.
On the flip side, I despair at our country being among the most nature-depleted in the world, and I celebrate Scotland's attempt to be the first fully re-wilded country. Bring back the red squirrels!
Literally don't care. There's people all around me my whole life that are one of the letter or other, who even thinks about it anymore outside of the very religious? Just stop getting in my face. Mostly, this is just corporations taking advantage of social movements for profits, but can we stop spending £45,000 (no joke) on singular road crossings that are nothing short of embarrassing? If I was gay I would absolutely loathe this:
The more you push it on people, the more they push back. This is demonstrably evident, and I doubt any community appreciate corporations taking advantage of their cause for profits, or to prevent protestors breaking their windows by quickly putting up one flag or another.
I feel instinctively this means I'm somewhere centre-right. I don't like being called centre because it implies someone who has no strong opinions.
Even uttering the word 'Right' casts people into being Literal Nazis now, while whispers of the left are Communist Scum. Personally, although my opinions on these things are pretty strong, they all come across are pretty damn reasonable, I reckon.
So who would I vote for? Reform are probably Centre-right, but I wouldn't vote for them. Farage is not to be trusted as far as you can throw him. He has a history of following, not leading. He's a clown. They're all clowns.
Labour's Starmer is the least clownish, somehow. I do think he's evil in a LOT of ways, but then, I hear several things coming out of his government that are pretty decent. They're renationalising things. I like that they're doubling down on Wind energy - but totally acknowledge a lot of its failings (unreliable, almost impossible to manufacture enough energy storage for when it's not used, etc). They've even reduced immigration to... well, still way too high numbers, but more than the right-wing conservatives did. I like what they did with renting and housing (the right to have a pet bill is solid, no-fault eviction limits, the goal to upgrade housing quality (Awaab's Law 2025), though I strongly disagree with building infinite housing supply when we can just reduce the demand instead of bulldozing the entire landscape.
So, am I a right-wing Labour voter??
Make it make sense.
