History of Left & Right in politics
January 24th 2012 07:35
At the pub one Friday night, my friend started talking about the Left and Right. You know, Communist, Capitalist, Centre Left, Far Right stuff.
Who the hell thought of Left and Right anyway?
My friend who went to art school came up with this gem: “Right, like everyone uses their right hand, it’s fairly conventional, but nobody uses their Left, it’s unconventional. Everything pure is white, or like right, and everything bad is black, the same as left.”
Luckily, politics majors will realise that she is referring to extreme left as "unconventional", those green anarchists who hate the state but seem to all like its support. What is described as "everyone" is actually moderate conservative and Labour voters, who would actually be closer to the Centre than Right wing in their views.
The real answer I discovered in a book called The Doubters Companion. Remember women waving breadsticks in France on 5 October 1789? A mob walked to Versailles in protest against high bread prices, stormed the palace and dragged the king back to Paris. King Louis XVI was put in a cage and the national Assembly had no choice but to follow.
The nearest building capable of seating several hundred elected representatives in the same room was the palace stables out in what are now the Tuileries Gardens. Carpenters were called in to convert stables into an assembly forum, but the large number of horses imposed a particular sort of structure, semi-circular, horse shoe shaped forum.
Naturally those who hated each other most sat as far away from each other as possible to the extreme right and left of podium.
It is unproven whether at that meeting the group on the left were the revolutionaries representing the people and on the right were Assembly who represented the aristocracy but left has come to equate with socialism and right with a laissez faire attitude to market forces.
In modern government, the party in power sits on the right of the Speaker and the opposition on the left.
Who the hell thought of Left and Right anyway?
My friend who went to art school came up with this gem: “Right, like everyone uses their right hand, it’s fairly conventional, but nobody uses their Left, it’s unconventional. Everything pure is white, or like right, and everything bad is black, the same as left.”
Luckily, politics majors will realise that she is referring to extreme left as "unconventional", those green anarchists who hate the state but seem to all like its support. What is described as "everyone" is actually moderate conservative and Labour voters, who would actually be closer to the Centre than Right wing in their views.
The real answer I discovered in a book called The Doubters Companion. Remember women waving breadsticks in France on 5 October 1789? A mob walked to Versailles in protest against high bread prices, stormed the palace and dragged the king back to Paris. King Louis XVI was put in a cage and the national Assembly had no choice but to follow.
The nearest building capable of seating several hundred elected representatives in the same room was the palace stables out in what are now the Tuileries Gardens. Carpenters were called in to convert stables into an assembly forum, but the large number of horses imposed a particular sort of structure, semi-circular, horse shoe shaped forum.
Naturally those who hated each other most sat as far away from each other as possible to the extreme right and left of podium.
It is unproven whether at that meeting the group on the left were the revolutionaries representing the people and on the right were Assembly who represented the aristocracy but left has come to equate with socialism and right with a laissez faire attitude to market forces.
In modern government, the party in power sits on the right of the Speaker and the opposition on the left.
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