If I Were an Englishmen .:. grubbykid.com

If I Were an Englishmen

I love taking political distribution quizzes - those online questionnaires which try to place you into a nice box of left/right - partially because I am curious about charting my views and looking at what some of the underlying assumptions of the quiz. This time it is the special MP General Election edition via Tom Coates.

If I were an Englishmen and was able to get away with poor grammar, and was set to voting in the May 5th election, the above image would show where my political views lie with my alternate-universe brethren. See the results here & test yourself here. What is quite interesting is that due to my views, 89% of Britons are to the Right of me on the x-axis - which charts views on crime and punishment, Europe, and other transnational issues including immigration and international law. But I am right smack dab in the middle on the y-axis which charts the private involvement in the economy, international trade, redistributive taxation, and views on Iraq. Per my views I should be reading The Guardian - which I do. My economic views are, according to the quiz, "fairly internationalist and rehabilitationist." Which sounds about right due to my Midwestern upbringing, where small-C conservatism holds sway. While there isn't a 1:1 match of issues and problems re: America-United Kingdom, our shared problems and issues are similar. So without any due regard to the intricacies of intra- and inter-British politics, let me try to analyze these results.

These results are fairly astounding (to me) for two reasons: how far left I am of the British which the x-axis (crime & punishment) shows, and how centrist on the y-axis (economics) compared to the British people. The Conventional Wisdom I've held is that the views across the Pond are more left of my own. The more I think about this, the more I realize just how apart British sensibilities are from the Continent. I guess ideas sometimes can't make the Channel crossing either.

What is fascinating is that x-axis - why am I so far left of those in the UK? I think it comes down to different perceptions and history with immigration, international issues, and crime & punishment. I'm not privy to the huge undercurrent of immigration and demographic changes which is happening all over Europe. As an American, I guess I'm just more accustomed to the changing demographics that my Anglo-Saxon cousins. I think that immigration influxes/the melting pot is more ingrained in American (most of them, anyway) than Britons. The UK is quite a bit more homogenous than America, but that is changing as we speak and is causing quite a stir.

How the British deal with crime is quite different than in the US: I've heard London described as a short jump from a Police State due to the huge amounts of closed circuit cameras and police procedures. This is all pretty much hearsay, so I don't know the validity of it. I was in London for a few days four years ago, and it was smashing - but I have no baseline to evaluate the police state charge. Also what would push me farther to the left of many Britons is the inclusion of the UK in the European Union. I'm all for it really, I can understand the UK's fear of France and Germany using the EU to regain lost power, but it makes so much sense politically, socially, and economically I wonder if it will breach British Nationalistic tendencies. Finally, my views on crime and punishment are (apparently) way to the left of the UK: I don't think the Death Penalty works and I think punishment without rehabilitation is just wasting money.

So there you go. I hope not many people are offended by my armchair analysis of complex British politics and policies. The sad part is that there were about five or eight questions I had to not answer due to the fact that I didn't know what the question was asking. I mean, who knew there was a shortage of nurses in the NHS - which I assumed was the National Health System?

Just for fun, I retook the Political Compass Quiz. This year my results are:

Economic Left/Right: -6.13
Social Libertarian/Authoritarian: -6.00

Which means I have moved slightly rightward and a bit more authoritarian - but not by much. All so interesting.

See previous Political compass results here on 06 Jan 2003 and 30 Jul 2004.

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Comments

Tom Coates says:

These things are always really interesting. I mean - you're on the left of the British people as was I, and we get a sense that the survey shows us that the British people are more to the right than we expected. But then again, in the UK we don't have the death penalty, we tax more than the US and the war in Iraq was enormously unpopular - much more so than in the US. So it's a weird one for me. I sometimes wonder whether popular opinion in the UK actually correlates at all with our government.

Posted by: Tom Coates at April 18, 2005 3:33 AM #

plemeljr says:

Tom, that is exactly what I was thinking - that there were way more issues which I was in harmony with what I thought the majority of British people held - especially Iraq, Death Penalty, progressive taxation, etc. I always want to find out how this quiz was constructed and what assumptions are built into it, but I can't find any information on it. Again, I wonder if not having to deal with immigration issues, the foundation of a new nation-state (EU), and about a thousand more years of history makes this Yank's score a bit skewed.