This is part of a series about measuring political concepts. This one is about classification of parties.

Introduction

In May 2022, SNP MP Mhairi Black said that the Government was “sleepwalking closer to fascism”. This engendered discussion about whether she was right, and that conversation fell into distinct grooves. Events since then have kept this discussion fresh, with various bodies being characterized as fascist or not, reaching its zenith or nadir in the recent essay by former PB contributor @SeanT in the Spectator. There is no way I can decide these issues definitively – and you wouldn’t listen if I did – but I can look at the methods used. So let’s do that.

The Axis: the single graded line

The single graded line is I think the predominant and simplest version of English politics, and arguably GB and even UK politics prior to the Conservative/NI Unionist split. It is easily understandable and allows concepts such as the swingometer. But it is limited: the 5-point-line allows for far-right, centre-right, centrist, centre-left, far-left and I think it is too oversimplified, resulting in miscomprehensions like “Farage is far-right” and “Corbyn is far-left”. You can expand it to 7-points and 9-points, but that only gives you nine points. Can’t we do better than that?

The Cross: the political compass

The political compass is the first step in real political statistics. It feels a bit dirty, like licking a battery, and is the statistical equivalent of first base, shared by furtive first-year students like their Myers-Briggs grading (“Yes I know you’re ISTJ. Everybody here is. Please go away.”). It’s great for American politics – Authoritarian vs Libertarian, Democratic vs Republican, it can be rendered as a graphic, and 9×9 gives you 81 points, yay! But American politics is forced to agglomerate by FPTP and other axes are salient in UK or European politics. So for that we need something else…

The Multi-Axis: multiple axes

UK politics used to be left-vs-right, but the different polities and the passage of time force the creation of new axes: Green-vs-Not-Green, Pro-Europe-vs-Eurosceptic, Nationalist-vs-Unionist and so on. These multiple axes are useful and I like them, but they are not easy to display graphically and people shy away, so unfortunately it degenerates into its simpler form, the – retch – checklist.

The Boxes: the checklist and the graded checklist

The checklist, or its slightly more sophisticated offshoot the graded checklist, is simple, easy to mark, and widely popular, being used for many use-cases. But it is subjective and depends on the existence of agreed criteria. They are used in real life – google “HRQoL” – but their subjectivity makes them more suited for internal qualia (“How bad do you feel today? 1=very bad, 2=bad,…”) and their use can degenerate into arguing about the criteria. In the case of fascism, the use of Umberto Eco’s checklist has descended into cliche (see the video above) and other checklists tell you more about the grader than the graded. We need to do better, or at least differently.

The Group: group analysis

The EU was great for statistics. The existence of the European parliament, political groups and Europarties meant that things could be grouped easily, and the voting records of MEPs were public. Group analysis – the analysis of groups of people voting together – can be objectively measured, reduced to numbers, and depicted by animations or graphs. But UK voters for some baffling reason felt that independent self-governance was more important than statistics, and left the EU. Now we are reduced to scrabbling thru US Congressional voting records, which can still provide interest but are less fun

Endpiece

The popularity of checklists will continue, but not because they serve the graded, they serve the grader. You can write essays like “Why I think Doctor Who is fascist” for fanfic, or similar for other concepts from less serious publications. But regardless of this, we have to ask ourself: what is the applicability? How does this work thru space and time? Were Henry VIII, William The Conqueror, Caligula, Octavian, Cleopatra, fascist? If lighter-than-air jellyfish float thru Jupiter’s atmosphere, can we describe them as fascist?

I contend that we cannot do so with a straight face, and that the further away in time and space a category becomes, the less useful it becomes. Recall group analysis – the characteristics do not define the group, the group defines the characteristics – and when the group dies the category dies with it. The Conservatives and the by-extension Trump-Johnson-Meloni-Modi axis that Ms Black was so scathing about needs a new name for itself, not to resurrect a category from the 20th Century.

Next time: the concept of political parties

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