The words have stopped working

Left and right still work perfectly - as team colours. They have almost stopped working as descriptions. And nearly every rotten argument in Britain now happens in the gap between those two facts.

The old words earned their keep, and the defence of them is real. Politics is coalitional: millions of people have to act together somehow, and a one-syllable flag that lets them find each other is not nothing. Ask a pollster - where someone places themselves on the left-right scale still predicts how they vote better than almost any other single question. As a jersey, the label does its job.

But a jersey and a description are different things, and public argument depends entirely on the second. A word can rally a coalition flawlessly and describe the world not at all - and when the description drains out, disagreement stops being about what is true and becomes about who is on your side. You can watch it happen in almost any political exchange in the country. Positions are no longer examined. They are placed.

What the words used to describe

For most of the twentieth century the labels earned their keep, because each compressed two real questions into one syllable: what to do about wealth, and what to do about tradition. Left meant redistribute and reform. Right meant protect and preserve. The trick - the entire usefulness - was that the two answers travelled together. Know one, and you could usually guess the other.

Underneath sat a third question nobody needed to name: liberal or illiberal. Individual rights or group authority. Open argument or managed speech. One law for everyone, or different rules depending on who is in front of you. For a century it tracked the other two closely enough to stay invisible.

It does not track anymore. It is now entirely ordinary to meet a self-described progressive who treats free expression as a harm to be managed and equal treatment as an obstacle to justice - coherent positions, but not liberal ones. It is just as ordinary to meet a self-described conservative whose entire politics is the defence of the classically liberal settlement: free speech, equality before the law, secular institutions. The three scales have come apart. The labels, which only ever worked because the scales moved together, now point in whatever direction the user needs.

An emptied word is a better weapon

Here is why this is worse than a pedant's complaint about dictionaries. An emptied word does not retire. It keeps every ounce of its social force while losing all of its meaning - which makes it the perfect weapon. Call a position "far-right" and you are excused, on the spot, from answering it. The less the term describes, the more efficiently it ends the conversation.

So a country full of people with ordinary, checkable worries - about how institutions spend, police and report - finds those worries not answered but unsayable. And the resentment that follows is then produced as proof that the label was deserved all along. It is a machine for manufacturing the very thing it claims to detect.

Three questions that still cut

If left and right have stopped sorting people, what sorts them now? We do not claim a finished map, and we distrust anyone who does. But three questions describe today's arguments far better than the old compass.

Does the person apply their principle to the hard case, or only when their own side gains? Principle or ideology. The test is simple and merciless: watch what someone does the moment principle and tribe point in opposite directions.

Is the virtue aimed at an audience, or at a person? Performed virtue or real empathy. One plays to the room; the other shows up when no one is watching. A society can drown in the first while starving of the second, and most people feel the difference in their own lives long before they can name it in politics.

Does the institution follow its own stated rules? High trust or low trust - and this may be the deepest of the three. Bodies that say what they will do and then do it build trust; bodies caught saying one thing and doing another burn it. Most of what gets called "polarisation", looked at closely, is the entirely rational conduct of people who stopped extending trust they kept watching being spent badly.

Where we land

So here is ours, plainly. Keep left and right for the football - the history, the team colours, the tribal shorthand - because that is genuinely all they are now. But for the actual work of saying who wants what, and why, we will use the plainer questions, and we would sooner name a position exactly than place it conveniently.

The reader is free to bring the old words. Just notice what they are doing on arrival. Anyone still reaching for "far-right" to avoid answering a question has, in that one move, told you the only thing worth knowing: they cannot.

An opinion of the house. The argument is ours; the record beneath it belongs to no one.