My political leanings, 2026
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.
Immigration
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
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.
Net Zero
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!
LGBT etc
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.
Overall
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.
Can i just vote for you?
Hah. I'm not even eligible to vote, let alone BE VOTED. But that would be fun
I thought you could, even if you live aboard?
You have to register initially as a resident - I don't have an address there that they could tie me to. It's one of the first things I plan to do when I get back
I agree with @riverflows—you should run! Seriously, what we need is common sense to fix the world. If the two sides of the political spectrum get any more extreme they're going to rip the world apart. I also identify with different policies of both the left and right but not totally with either side. The mass immigration doesn't make sense to me on any level and seems like deliberate population replacement. We've seen the consequences of it here in the Twin Cities (Minnesota). Over the course of the past four decades it's destroyed our cities.
Hah. Takes more than just common sense and even if you had the name recognition, you go into it with the only outcome being everybody hates you. Hard pass!
Isn't Minnesota where all those Somalis scammed you out of like 5% of their entire country's GDP?? hah - wild story either way. But yeah, I guess it's for different reasons; in the UK's case I feel like it's literally to prop up GDP figures. If not for mass migration, the numbers would show a multi-year recession. But instead we have 0.1% growth... sometimes. Nice! -___-
Yeah, that’s the same Minnesota and 5% is probably just the tip of the iceberg. I didn’t know that about the UK’s GDP figures. We live in a crazy world.
I view politics more from a statist/libertarian viewpoint. The problem is, both major parties (in the U.S.) tend to grow government significantly. The easiest way to measure this is probably in terms of spending. For all the talk of DOGE early in Trump's second term, even his administration has seen large spending increases overall.
If I remember correctly Republican Administrations have increased government spending and increased the deficit every time for at least the last 30-40 years.
Edit : This was the graph I was thinking of...
Source
The president is really the wrong person to look at when it comes to the budget as that is ultimately the responsibility of the Legislative Branch (i.e. Congress). While Clinton is often credited for having the only budget surplus in recent history (and it wasn't really a surplus...if you look at the Treasury web page debt increased under Clinton every year too...just less than most) it was the Republican legislature that had the ultimate power as far as the budget was concerned.
Does it not ultimately get signed off by the President? Meaning they can send it back or refuse to sign it if they don't like it?
Also, just looking at this, it looks like the President sets the initial budget proposal before Congress work out the detail. So I think the responsibility and accountability for government spending does lie with the US President.
Not accordimg to the Constitution. It is true that the budget typically starts as a proposal from the Executive branch but Congress has no obligation to base the budget on that proposal. The "power of the purse" is granted to Congress by the Constitution and they bear primary responsibility for it.
The president could veto it. However, with sufficient votes, congress can override the veto.
Two/Thirds of the vote in both the House and Senate yeah? It's so hard to imagine that happening in this modern obstructionist era.
But the result of a presidential veto wouldn't be more money spent, it would be none. So the president essentually has the choice of accepting what congress passes or shutting down government. The president can"t pass his own budget with a veto, only potentially prevent one from being passed. (Unless overidden with that 2/3 majority).
Yeah it seems, pretty much everywhere, all the talk before getting in power is just pointless fluff and it's actually a lot harder either to implement your ideas, or to avoid giving into temptation of being bought/convinced otherwise, to do things opposite to your stated goals.
It's actually really, really hard to UNDO government expansion in most countries. Once a new law is laid out, you generally just add stuff on top of it rather than repealing because there's just too many subversive forces profiting/benefiting from its existence.
Democrats and Republicans work together to increase government by basically agreeing to fund what the other party wants if they'll fund what they want.
It often seems so in the US, yeah. And that whole thing, there's a name for it I forgot, where they launch a bill that's stuffed with 20,000 other things, and given barely a few hours for everybody to read and check. Impossible, so they just let it all pass without knowing what went through. Ridiculous
I truly don't believe that everyone gets more conservative as they get older. When people are younger they'll often want to change systems to be more equitable and fair, and when they got older they had more to lose so they wanted to protect the status quo... but now that conservative movements have been co-opted by the alt-right in a lot of countries - most people want nothing to do with that.
I think it's also become more obvious with more exposure to global news and social media that maintaining the status quo really isn't sustainable, and so less people are happy with that too.
I feel bad for a lot of people that might have naturally leaned conservative that don't really have parties they can align with anymore.
I do honestly think a lot of countries would do a lot better with at least 5 roughly equally sized parties (far left, left, center, right, far right) and I really, really, really, really wish that voters would be really informed on policies of all parties and be ready to punish any parties that don't implement their promised policies once in power.
All that's really saying is the conservative groups have changed to something else. There are a lot of right-wing powers out there which are far more accelerationist than progressive left, want things to change rapidly. This just isn't conservative by definition.
As you described, older people want to protect the status quo - they are, philosophically & politically speaking, becoming more conservative regardless of who starts taking over the labelled entities.
This is true. There's certainly something to be said for those people who point out that it was because of our conservative complacency that we got in this mess to begin with. Putting our heads in the sand, and enjoying life as it secretly and invisibly degrades all around us. Not a concern however, something for future generations to worry about!
Proportional representation pretty much. The problem is that it's about as far the other end of the spectrum as a dictatorship. Say of China what you will but a single party nation can get things done fast. A government of 5 parties generally ends up completely stuck, change is gruellingly slow and ineffective.
I think the UK has a bit of an advantage here compared to EU countries - if only we can get a solid party in power with a solid majority, they can essentially do a 5 year dictatorship approved by the voters, or even infinite years if the voters remain happy.
We actually see this with Labour. Keir Starmer, for all his faults, is getting tonnes done in rapid time. The only reason it didn't happen the last time the leaders had a big majority is because the Conservatives had constant civil war, insider backstabbing, crawling for power.
A previous majority, Tony Blaire, did much the same, an almost infinite number of new laws and regulations, complete transformation of the actual government's inner workings, and more.
Edit: Sorry, didn't realise I wrote so much for a comment!
Sorry... I actually didn't get around to tying my point together.
What I meant was that I don't think people are actually becoming more conservative as they get older anymore because it's becoming very obvious that the current systems are not worth preserving.
If anything myself and almost all of my friends have become more progressive as we've gotten older as we understand the damage that the current systems are doing to current and future generations.
I do very much hope that the pendulum swings back hard against far-right conservative parties once many countries see the damage that religious ideology does to policy.
Far right and left powers are an immune response, the problem is both are fairly confused, I think. But I also think they have a role to play, almost like bartering in a street market.
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If you demand, like some on twitter, to expel everyone with a single drop of non-white blood, then you pull the opponents further in that direction without actually going to that extreme, making, for example, foreign criminal deportation more open for discussion (this is exactly what has happened in recent months in the UK).
Similarly if you demand all billionaires to go to prison, or all politicians advocating war to go to the front lines themselves, neither will ever occur, but you very quickly hear them say 'hey hold on a minute, perhaps we can work something out'.
I think that maybe, without those outer-edge forces pushing the centre, nothing will ever get done. It's just a very dangerous game we've gotten ourselves into...
Yeah, you're essentially describing the Overton window, which I think has been dragged way more to the right in the last 6 years because of billionaires buying up traditional and social media as quickly as they can.
I don't mind the odd sway to the right or left, but it's definitely getting to a point where people might trip on the curb edge!