- entry 2026/03/19

What sort of world do you want to live in?

There is a persistent thread that runs through modern political discourse. No, not the one where everybody seems to hate everybody else. Not even the one where "shutting down" the opponent is the winningest move. It's one that is rarely stated but is frequently felt: the tension between "mine" and "ours".
In its more moderate and everyday form, this tension often maps neatly onto the divide between left and right leaning politics. Strip away the slogans, the campaign posters, and all carefully scripted soundbites, and what remains is a philosophical disagreement about obligation: who we owe, what we owe, and whether society itself is a shared project or merely a useful arrangement.

Right-wing politics tends to emphasise individual possession and responsibility. Success is personal, failure is personal, and the role of the state is to interfere as little as possible in the transfer, accumulation, and preservation of wealth. When systems strain under pressure (economic downturns, housing shortages, wars, pandemics, or simply stagnating wages), the instinct is often to look outward or downward for explanations. Foreigners, globalisation, outsourcing - these all become convenient culprits. When those explanations fail to hold up to scrutiny, attention shifts to those at the bottom, those portrayed as not trying hard enough, not contributing enough, not deserving enough. The language can become quietly dehumanising: "feckless," "scrounger," or the particularly unpleasant suggestion that homelessness itself is a "lifestyle choice".

As much as the left-leaning author of this piece would like to disagree, one must understand that this perspective is not without its internal logic. If one believes that the system is fundamentally fair, then disparities must arise from differences in effort, talent, or decision-making. Seen like that, redistribution can appear not as justice but as punishment - an erosion of the rewards that were rightfully earned. It becomes easy, then, to see taxation or social spending not as investment in a shared society, but as an imposition on those who have already "done their part".

By contrast, left-leaning politics begins from a different premise: that the system is neither neutral nor fair, and that outcomes are shaped as much by circumstance as by effort. In this view, society is not a loose collection of individuals but an interdependent network, where the starting line is uneven and the rules are often written by those already ahead. Housing costs spiral beyond reach, childcare is a logistical and financial obstacle course, and education too often delivers qualifications without opportunity. A degree does not guarantee employment; a handful of GCSEs may open no doors whatsoever.

Seen like that, inequality is not simply the byproduct of individual failure but evidence of a greater structural fault. Therefore, the logical response is not to withdraw support but to expand it: to share resources, to invest collectively, and to create conditions where success is not just for those who began closest to it. The idealistic end goal is not merely to reduce hardship but rather to reduce the likelihood of it happening in the first place.

Of course, at the extremes, these distinctions blur. The far left and far right, despite their opposing rhetoric, can converge on remarkably similar policies such as centralisation of power, restriction of dissent, and an eagerness to override or remove individual freedoms in pursuit of ideology. However in the moderate space where most people actually live and vote, the divide remains meaningful. It is the difference between seeing society as a competition with winners and losers, or as a collaborative effort that should, in some way, benefit everyone.

The housing crisis offers a particularly notable example. Policies such as the mass sale of public housing created opportunities for ownership in the short term, but also contributed to a long term shortage that now drives prices ever upward. Those who benefited are often those most invested in maintaining the status quo, while those locked out are told to try harder in a system that offers them less and less chance of ever achieving home ownership. What began as a redistribution of assets has, over time, helped create a whole new imbalance.

And yet, for all the weight of these questions, public debate too often treats them with a bizarre shallowness. The past decade has offered a pointedly clear illustration of this tendency: complex issues reduced to three-word slogans, sold with the promise of simple solutions. It is now many years on from the Brexit referendum and the ensuing withdrawal, and the idea that there might be some sort of easy fix (maybe even an oven-ready one) should have been thoroughly dispelled, yet the same people responsible for the mess keep on talking about "Getting Brexit done". The problem is that large and complex systems such as economies, labour markets, housing, education, and entire countries simply do not bend quickly (unless in a wartime situation, but that's a nightmare you don't want to have), and they do not respond to wishful thinking. The gap between rhetoric and reality ought, by now, to be clear.

At the same time, the political centre, the place that was once the default position of compromise and trying to keep both sides happy, appears to be thinning out dramatically. Voters drift toward more forceful positions, and parties that attempt to introduce policies from one side or the other to try to appeal to these drifting voters tend to lose even more voters - after all, why go for pretend-right (or left) when you can have the real thing?
The result of this is a gradual polarisation, where "mine" and "ours" are no longer points on a spectrum but banners to rally behind and flags to wave. In such an environment, nuance becomes a liability, and acknowledging trade-offs or even thinking about compromise can be mistaken for weakness.

This is where a big danger lies. A functioning society won't survive at either extreme. History has already shown where both extremes can lead, and none of them ended well.
Too much emphasis on "mine" and the social fabric falls apart. Fewer opportunities, more resentment, and those without are left to drift. It has been said that the most dangerous person is the person with nothing left to lose.
On the flip side, too much emphasis on "ours" and the link between effort and reward can weaken. This will erode the idea that personal striving leads to tangible, meaningful outcomes.

People need both: the shared investment that creates opportunities, and the personal stake that makes those opportunities feel worthwhile. The whole "why I bother to go to work" angle.

This isn't an abstract balance, either. I have touched upon this in a past blog article about whether families feel able to have children. When two people working full time struggle to pay the bills and don't think having a family could even ever be budgeted for, something is clearly out of whack - the balance is out of alignment.

It is also about whether work is that which provides stability, or whether it's that which allows one to survive. The future, that nebulous entity so hard to predict - is this something that you can try to plan for, or is it something that you feel a need to brace against?
Somebody once put it as "do you work to live, or do you live to work?".

As much as one might want to paint broad strokes and try to categorise people on the right as inherently selfish, or those on the left as purely altruistic, the truth is that people are far more complex than their voting habits might imply. Most people are, actually, a bit of both (altruistic and selfish), and where we fall on the political spectrum is as much "mine" versus "ours" as it is worries and fears about the future. As I write this, the problems in the Middle East are sending the price of fuel through the roof and up somewhere into the mesosphere. Electricity will follow, and then so will everything else, and before you know it we'll be right back at that post-pandemic/Russian aggression state of inflation where everything goes up except wages. These are very real and justified fears, and sadly ones that don't have any easy answers no matter what demagogues may say.

However, these underlying philosophies (the mine and the ours) do shape the direction of policy and the tone of public discourse. One leans toward preservation, of holding on to what has been gained and defending it against perceived encroachment. The other toward distribution and asking how resources might be shared more equally to alleviate burdens and create opportunities.

And perhaps that is the real question here. We should not be asking which side is right or wrong in some absolute sense, but rather what kind of society we want to build. Will it be one defined primarily by ownership where success is guarded and scarcity is explained away? Or will it be one defined by inclusion, where the aim is to widen access, even if it requires those with more to accept a little less? So perhaps the question should be less about which party supports the views that we believe in, and more about which party is trying to create the sort of world that we wish to inhabit?

Between "mine" and "ours", there is no neutral ground. There is only the persistent illusion that we can have the benefits of both without ever paying the cost of either.

Your comments:

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jgh, 20th March 2026, 03:14

Good post, and some points to reply to.    "Policies such as the mass sale of public housing created opportunities for ownership in the short term, but also contributed to a long term shortage that now drives prices ever upward."    It wasn't the mass sale of public housing that caused the shortage, it was the ceasation of building any replacements of what was sold. Selling a council house to a private owner does not reduce the housing stock, it is still there, it just has a different owner.    Before the 1980s (very very vague numbers) the private sector were building 60 lumps of housing per year, and the public sector built 40 lumps per year, so the housing stock was increasing by 100 lumps per year. Within that houses were changing ownership between the two groups, but the housing stock was still increasing at 100 lumps per year.    In the 1980s the public sector stopped building houses. That's what caused the shortage, not who owned them. So housing stock increase dropped from 100 lumps oer year to 60 lumps per year, creating a year on year shortage of 40 lumps per year. And the magic of compound interest means that 40 years later there's a gafloogle lumps shortage.    And 40 years of increasing regulation means the private sector are no longer building 60 lumps per year as it takes years to fill out the paperwork, so now they're building more like 40 lumps per year.

Rick, 20th March 2026, 07:49

I can't help but wonder how much of the lack of building is intentional policy to create artificial scarcity to push prices up.  For some reason people seem obsessed with their house price, despite that not being any form of liquidity, not being guaranteed, and only really being a factor when selling to move. I suppose one could raise a loan against a house, but that's just kicking a potential problem down the road.    Mom bought a generic mid-terrace council house for, once all the deductibles had been done, something daft like 6K. She did very little to it, no double glazing or porch or any of the usual things that people do to mark it as theirs. She sold it a few years later for 56K (was on the market for 58 but she was willing to drop to get it sold in order to buy the pile of loosely organised rubble I call home.  I think the current valuation is something on the ballpark of 450-500K. Half a million. What the actual f.....!    A friend in the UK keeps on going on about how much she lost, blah blah. Well, I've had nearly a quarter of a century here. I'm happy here. And that quarter million means nothing if I'm moving from a home that costs that into another that costs the same. You're only winning if moving someplace where property costs less, like quite a few Brits tended to do until You Know What.    By building and having less homes built, those with will see their values rise. Councils can charge more in rates because of this artificial figure, taxation on capital gains can profit, and the only losers are those without homes but since they're at the bottom of the pile...

jgh, 20th March 2026, 17:31

My great-grandmother bought her first home for £450. £150 down and a three-year mortgage. :)    Yeah, my town council has been able to keep its precept down as the county council has given permission for so many new houses to be built that there are more properties to tax so the individual taxation doesn't need to go up to raise the same amount. The downside is they're priced outside the ability of locals and they get snapped up as second homes or holiday lets.

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