From there I got disillusioned. Around about this point, I met my [future] wife. She’s from Ukraine. It was a combination of being very close to a woman, talking about female perspectives on things and seeing how the world treats women differently, then Ukraine specifically. The right become anti-Ukraine for no apparent reason. If there’s anything the left cares about, you have to not care about it, there was no logic.  

It was like pulling out Jenga pieces. They’re wrong on Ukraine, they’re wrong on women, at some point all the foundations broke. I had much more of an open mind, and from there I progressively got into leftist politics. 

I get a lot of comments and messages [on my videos] saying, you helped me out of the right. Sometimes it will be women – I showed your videos to my partner or brother, and slowly their mind changed, or I can see their mind changing.

Read more:

The real political divide 

The political compass makes sense, attitudes on the economy, individualism versus collectivism, authoritarianism against libertarianism, they’re useful when used specifically, but people don’t.  

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The problem is – and this is the problem with all of these terms – they get baggage attached to them. Once an idea is coined as being woke or being this or that, then it becomes very easy, from an identity perspective, to place yourself on the opposite end of that. There are left-wing ideas, like Gary Stevenson often puts across, that right-wingers agree with, but the moment you tell them they’re left-wing ideas, they stop agreeing with it. 

Fundamentally, I see the political structure split between people who own things and people who don’t own things. The people who benefit from the system are obviously giant capitalists and very wealthy people, but they’re able to have tag alongs, which is middle-class homeowners and boomers. There is a tied interest between those two groups. If there’s no tax on property and wealth that’s good for both giant capitalists – obviously a tiny fraction of people in the UK – and middle-class homeowners.

Then they find ways of recruiting extra people who might vote against their own interests. That’s where you get stuff around identity politics. You’ll have people that on nine out of 10 things agree with left-wing parties, but on this one issue of immigration they disagree and therefore they’ll vote for the right-wing party. 

People want to feel superior to someone else. If you’re at the bottom of the social hierarchy – you live in a rough area, you identify as a poor person – you can feel better if someone else is suffering more. It’s a clever way of making people who have nothing feel like they have something because they’re connected to something greater than themselves, which could be being British or being white, or whatever. 

New old politics 

None of this is new, it goes to show how powerful that story is, viewing the world as this dog-eat-dog battle, every man for themselves. You can repackage and resell the same shit, and they’ve done it forever. People still fall for it.  

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When things are good, politics is less extreme. I assume things will one day be good again. 

Do you have a story to tell or opinions to share about this? Get in touch and tell us more. 

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