It is fashionable to the point of cliche to intone wisely that the political terms ‘left’ and ‘right’ no longer have any meaning. Let’s call this the Disappearing Left/Right Hypothesis - DLRH.

Supporting argument for DLRH goes something like this: in western democracies, which tend to have a two-party system, both major parties try so hard to appeal to average voters that they converge on the centre, with a set of policy prescriptions bland enough to offend no-one.

Additionally, there is meant to be a consensus on economic management. There is no longer any real debate between which is better, a market-based economy or a state-run one, the former having crushed the latter in the debate of acceptable ideas. So we have ended up with rough agreement on the fundamentals, with some differences around the edges as to how big the safety net should be.

No more towering arguments about Communism versus Capitalism: we are all smug, mixed-economy aficionados now, the very splitting of the difference, with its soft landing on the sweet spot between the two extremes, being proof in itself of our un-left/rightedness.

Throw in the fact that the terms associated with this argument, terms like ‘average voters’, ‘political centre’, ‘fundamentals’ and ‘safety net’ are each vague enough to warrant the sort of unpacking likely to fill an honours thesis, and it is pretty tempting, when someone lets slip the seductive phrase “the terms left and right no longer have any meaning” to concede the point. We nod sagely — or with the sort of laziness that passes for sagacity — and agree that the terms really are meaningless.

And it all seems pretty straightforward.

Except when something like the UK riots happen. Or when Tony Abbott shows up on TV. Or when you read the latest figures on the concentration of wealth amongst America’s richest one percent. Or you start reading The Australian. Or somebody declares excitedly that they’re a libertarian. Or you pass a person begging on Elizabeth Street. Or another boat floats into view near Christmas Island. Or some git lucky enough to have landed on the right side of every benefit our world confers — white, rich, male, straight, not ugly, not handicapped, employed — announces that gay people shouldn’t be allowed to marry, or single mothers shouldn’t get benefits, or that people like them are being oppressed, or that kids today are ruining the world with FaceTwitter. Or some other everyday or exceptional political moment arises and you suddenly realise that you want to take sides.

In other words, the notion that ‘left and right no longer have any meaning’, is an attractive proposition right up until the point that you think about it.

Not that I want to pretend that it’s simple. The hypothesis is attractive in the first place because we know somewhere not very deep inside us that we are rarely just left or right. Our opinions and our politics don’t neatly fall into symmetrical piles called left and right and we cannot, therefore, easily choose which one to add our identity to. What’s more, we know that the person who can do this, who instinctively leans one way only, no matter the issue, is likely to be a fanatical pain in the arse whose very certainty renders him or her if not outright insane, then at least the sort of person you don’t want to be stuck with at a party.

When I first heard what was happening in Tottenham and other parts of London, and I watched the footage of the rampaging, my first thought was about the small businesses being trashed. Hardly what you’d call a conventional lefty response, but having owned a couple of small businesses over the years (shops, not unlike those being ransacked in London), I couldn’t help but feel for the poor bastards whose hard work was crashing down around them like a plate-glass window. When I then heard some women involved in the riots describing these small business owners as rich, as a way of excusing their own behaviour, I just laughed at their ignorance. Maybe some were rich, at least relatively, but the more likely profile was of people in debt up to their bald patch, paying themselves less than a minimum wage and working 120 hours a week while succouring themselves with the incantation that at least they were their own boss.

Regardless, as the riots continued and the discussion unfolded and I heard more and more self-identified conservatives and people of the official right opine that there was nothing to consider but lawlessness writ large, and that to try to understand what was going on was to condone it, I discovered, or rediscovered, that my politics do really lean left. Fiercely so, as it turns out, because the explanations of the rightwing commentators seemed not only delightfully self-serving, but demonstrably wrong.

The point is not that the world neatly divides into left and right political positions, but that there are positions that are usefully identified as left and right and that they are meaningful because they have real-world consequences. Britain after the riots will be a different place depending on whether the conservative theory of lawlessness is applied or the progressive regard for social services prevails.

Just as in Australia, no matter how inconsistent Tony Abbott or Julia Gillard are in regard to left- or right-wing orthodoxy, the country will be changed slightly by whoever wins the next election.

We may never be truly consistent in our political beliefs — and thank goodness for that — but eventually we end up choosing. To pretend otherwise, to subscribe to DLRH, is to wish the world to be more simple than it really is. The paradox is that it is our tendency to never be entirely left or right that gives the terms continued relevance. By struggling to decide our position on a given issue we are admitting that there is a still a meaningful contest between the ideas embodied in each.

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Tim Dunlop writes regularly for The Drum and other publications. You can follow him on Twitter: @timdunlop and at his blog, B-Sides: http://tjd. posterous. com/

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