Before we begin, a link to the planet's most boring podcasts: the manifestos by the various candidates for Mayor of London. Yes, you too can wander round Regents' Park, listening to what the candidates propose to do about it.
Once more around for the local elections, this time plotting parties on the economic / social axes proposed by Political Compass. The principal UK parties have been plotted, but not all of them. Besides, we think it's easier to put the various parties in their European Parliament boxes, and divvy up the compass into regions, a bit like a stained-glass window.
Those European Groups in Full
- EPP-ED European People's Party - European Democrats, contains the traditional rightist parties, including the Conservatives and Fine Gael.
- PES Party of European Socialists, contains the traditional leftist parties, including Labour from the UK and Ireland, and the SDLP.
- ELDR-EDP European Liberal Democrat and Reform Party - European Democratic Party, contains the centrists, including the Lib Dems.
- UEN = Europe for the Nations, a mostly nationalist grouping including such characters as the Northern League (Italy), Law and Justice (Poland), but also Fianna Fáil (Ireland).
- GUE/NGL = European United Left / Nordic Green Left, includes former communist parties from across the continent, and Sinn Féin.
- EG-EFA = European Greens - European Free Alliance, includes the Greens from outside Scandinavia and groups seeking independence from their countries, including the SNP and Plaid Cymru.
- ID = Independence and Democracy, basically the UIP and sundry hangers-on.
MEPs who do not wish to join any of these groups are described as Non-Inscrit. They appear to be spread across the political spectrum.
During 2007, there was a short-lived Identity, Tradition, Sovereignty (ITS) group consisting of the Front National (France), Vlaams Block (Belgium: Flanders), and sundry others including Ashley Mote (UK Jailbird). This group collapsed for reasons that made even less sense than its policies. For the purposes of illustration, we propose to let it continue.
Of the parties standing for the top-up list in the London election that are not represented in the European Parliament, we reckon the following mapping works:
- BNP to ITS. This was simple.
- Christian Voice to UEN. After glancing at their bit in the Mayoral candidates' booklet, we find ourselves thinking of The Kazyncski Brothers. This is not a compliment.
- English Democrats to UEN. The name suggests that they could fit into EFA, the policies sound more like the Legia Nord.
- Left List to GUE/NGL
- Respect (George Galloway) to GUE/NGL
- Unity for Peace and Socialism to GUE/NGL None of these detained us for more than a moment.
- One London (Leader Damian Hockney) to ID The Unitedkingdom Independence Party and its various splinter groups do give us pause for thought. At heart, they're mostly people who wouldn't think twice about voting Conservative, if it wasn't for the matter of Europe. Most, but not all: Robert Kilroy-Shaft appeared to present a policy that had elements closer to the UEN, and One London started out as a breakaway from his Veritas party. Even so, their election literature sees them competing with UIP more than ED. It's a tough call, and we make no claim to infallibility.
All of which leads us to propose the following graph:
Obviously, the exact boundaries are far more blurred than we've put on the diagram, most of the straight lines and angles are curves. We're particularly unsure about the top-left and bottom-right corners, where there is very little data either present or historic.
There's not a lot of gap between the acceptable socialism of PES, the disguised xenophobia of UEN, and the blatant racism from ITS. Perhaps this explains why Labour is so worried about the rise of the BNP: it's liable to attract their voters, particularly those left behind by the party's dash towards economic liberalism. Readers will be able to note how almost all political discussion in Great Britain (though not Northern Ireland) is framed in a tiny space.
