Thread by @EinsteinsAttic

What I find as interesting about this chart as its contents is the label at the top: "#LIBERAL WOMEN"

Labour may in part* be more 'liberal' than the current Conservative party, but it is not a Liberal party...

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*It still has its more authoritarian, "law'n'order!" tendencies.

https://twitter.com/tomhcalver/status/1538223421716414464

...indeed, the chart itself 👇 suggests that "the women of Wakefield" support the Liberal Democrats LESS than the men.

This rather American(?) conflation of "left" and "liberal" in both language and assumption is a form of #CategoryError - in large part due to the insistence...

...on the all-too #binary 'left/right' framing that fails to encompass many nuances within politics.

That UK-level choices prefer only two 'parties of Government' does not entirely reflect either sentiment or ground reality, as the local government layer in England indicates...

...even more starkly so in Scotland 👇

But back to the "#liberal" thing.

The inadequacy of the left/right single axis is well known; less well appreciated are the flaws with two-dimensional mappings such as politicalcompass.org

Our sorely-missed friend, Chris Lightfoot...

...built a more open and honest approach, labelling the second axis "#pragmatism" - as opposed to Political Compass's more problematic "#authoritarian/#libertarian" - for reasons Chris went into more depth about as he developed his #PoliticalSurvey, here:

ex-parrot.com/~chris/wwwitte…

...noting that what we think and talk of as the 'left/right' axis *is* the strongest #eigenvector, but it's still just a #label:

politics.beasts.org/scripts/eigenv…

Oops! I've gone off on a tangent again.

I suppose what I'm grappling with is the assigning of #labels to people's complex...

...opinions, which may be handy for political commentary but not much else.

Meanwhile, not (defining and) defending a term like "#liberal", that *could* mean something, is a political error for #liberals of all flavours, and for #parties that take the name.

The @LibDems took...

...a hit across the board for their coalition with Cameron's @Conservatives, as shown in the graphs above. And, while it was proximally #Brexit-y, I couldn't help but feel there was also something '#liberal-y' going on in Johnson's pre-election #purge...

news.sky.com/story/ex-chanc…

...sorta like a shedding of #ClassicalLiberal freedom-of-the-individual-ism for a more #libertarian loathing of 'the bloated State' - which, of course, has been directed everywhere BUT Johnson's Government BY Johnson's Government, which lurches ever further into #authoritarianism

No hard conclusions here; at best some intuitions, lightly held.

A final thought, on the emergence of "#innovation" and "#progressive" in political discourse; neither of which *necessarily* result in a more #liberal (or even #equal) society, if they are just #labels for...

...the same old #power games; "new" and "improved" are more about #marketing than #ideology, and if we're serious about our #values and how we manifest them, we need to take them - and to talk about them - in terms more serious than that.