SO, left wing and right wing, what do they mean now?

The terms originate in the National Assembly of the French Revolution, which was formed in 1789 to overturn the ancien régime and usher in a constitutional monarchy, and did a pretty decent job until Europe’s kings began an invasion, the Parisian mob began to get a little feisty, and things generally went awry.

In the assembly, the more radical and even Republican delegates sat to the left of the king, and expressed a broad desire to move towards wider suffrage and liberalism, while those to Louis’ right were more conservative in their outlook, seeking a more gradual process of change.

These labels persisted after the fall of Napoleon in 1815 and the restoration of the Bourbon monarchy, with right eventually becoming attached to Europe’s reactionary forces - the origins of the conservative movement which favoured tradition and solving problems ad hoc as they emerged.

These ‘Tories’ were isolationist and in favour of state protectionism, although this gradually changed as 19th Century conservatives moved in the direction of the left, which favoured nationalism, foreign intervention, free markets and democracy.

Later that century the left remained attached to radicalism, with socialists now joining the party with a new template for society and the ideal man and woman, and the emergence of internationalism.

The 20th Century gave us a couple of prominent ideological movements - the fascists were labelled extreme right wing, the communists were to the extreme left. Many have pointed out both ideological and practical links between these philosophies, and joked that if one goes too far in one direction one tends to come around to the other side.

At any rate, these movements heavily coloured our usage of these terms, with left now being associated with the big state and government intervention, right with free markets and liberalism, as well as nationalism and racism.

Through the lens of the historian these labels, free from judgement, are fairly easy to assign, but what of the UK here and now?

Some believe the right is the dominant force in this country. Typically, to back this up, they will cite Thatcher’s TINA consensus, the New Labour years and widespread privatisation, the supposed hostility of the popular press to socialism and the Labour party, and bizarre claims about rampant and widespread prejudice among the population.

Unsurprisingly many other people believe it is actually the left that has won the battle of ideas, citing the creeping influence of the state into ever more aspects of life, the semi-but-not-really privatisation of services and utilities where contracts are awarded by civil servants rather than the market, and the technocratic tendencies of our politicians and those in the European Union.

This is why Jeremy Corbyn is a hard left Bolshevik and a moderate centrist, and why May’s Tories are neoliberal fascists and authoritarian social democrats. It really depends on whom you ask.

One might be tempted to think it is the widespread consensus among the political class that is the reason for this range of extreme interpretations, little differences give rise to more hyperbolic insults. Either way, I would suggest it is high time we ditched these labels, which now only serve the purposes of political tribalism and online virtue signalling.

My preferred alternative would be a scale from anarchy to autocracy, taking in libertarianism, liberalism, social democracy and state socialism on the way, measuring the quantity of individual rights and freedoms we as a society are prepared to relinquish to the state for the goal of equality and peace.

Everyone is on that scale. No one position is objectively more valid than another.