Does anyone know what's left?

Enjoying a beer at a seafront hotel in Brighton, colleagues and I were chatting of left and right. Could I ever be friends with somebody on the right? I'm not sure, I answered. With Party politics occupying a blurry centre ground, and with left nipping over to right on the economy and right nipping over to the left on social policy, it's a tricky balance. Is anyone even still on the left, in real political terms I mean? Perhaps not.

We then got onto the common question: do you get more right wing with age? I believe not, staunchly. I refuse to accept that I will, all of a sudden, have no tolerance for any difference; that my money will be mine, all mine; that those less privileged than me need to pull their socks up and get a job; no, I refuse to believe this will happen to me.

But something does happen with age, according to colleagues, and I guess I would agree, that cynicism sets in. A disdain for all things. But the next question really made me think: can you be cynical and still be left wing?

Immediately I say 'absolutely, why not?' You can still disagree with the policies of the right, you can still believe that welfare is important, that the person curled up in a sleeping bag on the streets got there for reasons not always in their control. 

But, colleagues countered, to be cynical is to accept the status quo; to see the world as it is and find that no more can be done. To be right wing (or is it to be conservative?) is to be wary of change. I don't think the two meet here, one is to be against change, and to want to preserve the status quo (right wing or, potentially more correctly, conservatism) and the other is to simply hold your hands up to the fact - political Parties occupy a centre, there is no more to be done.

I got the sense that for my colleague, there is an activism inherent to being left wing, essentially it seems like he understood the left to be somehow connected with Marx's theory of the permanent revolution. For him, to be on the left is to actively strive for something else, something more, something better. To be on the left is to take on the struggle.

Of course, definitions got lost in this conversation: right wing and conservatism became interchangable; we didn't get to the bottom of what it means to be cynical; the left seemed to be necessarily revolutionary while the right was just anything else; in short, it was a casual, not particularly clever, conversation over a beer or three.

But it did make me think nonetheless. Because, the real issue here is not whether you can be cynical or on the left, but whether you can accept Party politics as they stand in the UK, participate in democratic elections between the Conservatives on the 'right' and Labour on the 'left', and still believe yourself to be left wing. It's long been an issue that Labour is no longer on the left; but does that mean that to be on the left in this country you become necessarily radical? And to then not be radical, or participate in political activism means you are - what?

It becomes a question of ideology and individualism; about living your life one way but purporting to believe another. All along accepting what is, and not believing in the possibility of change but getting angry at what is being done. If being left wing should, necessarily be about collectivism, then it needs to be about action, doesn't it?