Week 1: Ideologies and extremes

First off, I'd like to thank everyone who turned up and took part in the teaching session on Tuesday. Let me know if you've got any comments on the teaching style, e.g. the use of a single session with short lectures alternating with exercises.

Ideology was the main topic of the lecture. As you will have seen, it's a complicated concept with a lot of different, and partly overlapping, interpretations. I think the key features of ideology are:

1. An ideology is a system of ideas. "Marriage is a good thing" plus "People should pay less tax" doesn't make an ideology. "Marriage is a good thing" plus "We should bring back grammar schools" plus "The country is changing too quickly" is an ideology - a set of interconnected ideas with a central theme, in this case the theme of how much better things were in the old days.
2. An ideology explains how things are. Ideologies aren't just a set of linked ideas. If you believe that politics, education and TV have all changed a lot in the last decade, that's not necessarily an ideological belief; it may just be an observation. An ideological belief relates different ideas back to an idea about how the world is: politics, education and TV have all changed because of increasing commercialisation / the growing influence of PC liberals / etc.
3. An ideology positions you. If you're on the Left, you're not on the Right, and vice versa. If you see yourself as definitely Left or Right, you probably won't agree with people who maintain that they're neither Left nor Right.
4. A more controversial point: ideologies always have to do with power. For Marxists, the ideology of the ruling class expresses the dominance of that class in the medium of ideas. Not everyone will agree with this analysis - but, even from a non-Marxist point of view, ideology is always about who is in power and who ought to be in power, who has too much power (e.g. "PC liberals") and who doesn't have enough (e.g. "ordinary decent people").

Politics, in other words, is all about ideology. From Joseph Stalin to Ed Miliband to David Cameron to Adolf Hitler, every politician has an ideology; they use it to communicate with their supporters, to out-manoeuvre their opponents and (not least) to get things done. Any political system - Britain, Scotland, the EU, the USA - has a political spectrum, consisting of the range of ideologies which can be admitted into respectable politics. What counts as an unacceptably extreme ideology is subject to change, from country to country and from time to time.

The other main business of the session was to do some thinking about 'left' and 'right'. On this subject I have an apology to make, to the people in the back couple of rows in particular. I came up with those names on bits of paper, and I'd like to apologise for some of the selections - I went a bit far into Politics Geek territory. For anyone who's interested, here are all forty names, with the odd note:

Adolf Hitler
Gregor Strasser - also a Nazi; an early ally of Hitler, who had him killed for being (a) a potential rival and (b) too left-wing (as Nazis go)
Benito Mussolini
General Agosto Pinochet - Chilean dictator, who took power in a military coup in 1973. Margaret Thatcher was an admirer and a personal friend.
General Franco - Spanish Falangist (quasi-Fascist) dictator from 1939 to his death in 1975.
Margaret Thatcher
Ian Paisley - prominent and highly vocal leader of Northern Ireland's Protestant community; strongly anti-Catholic and quite right-wing in other areas.
David Cameron
George Osborne
Winston Churchill
General Charles de Gaulle - like Churchill, a great anti-Fascist war leader who was also well over on the Right of domestic (in this case French) politics
Angela Merkel - leader of main German right-wing Christian party, and of Germany
Aldo Moro - leader of main Italian right-wing Christian party in the 1970s; kidnapped and assassinated by the Red Brigades (more about this later in the unit)
Vince Cable
Nick Clegg
Tony Blair
David Miliband - Ed's more Blairite, and hence more right-wing, brother
Gordon Brown
Neil Kinnock - leader of the Labour Party from 1983 to 1992
Justin Welby (Archbishop Of Canterbury)
Jorge Mario Bergoglio (Pope Francis) - two new religious leaders, both sounding remarkably left-wing at the moment
Ed Miliband
Michael Foot - leader of the Labour Party from 1979 to 1983
Clement Attlee - UK Prime Minister from 1945 to 1951; oversaw the building of the NHS and the welfare state
Martin McGuinness - former Chief of Staff of the IRA; now Northern Ireland's deputy First Minister. Quite moderate politically, if you set aside the whole IRA thing.
Nelson Mandela - suspected Communist guerrilla turned elder statesman
Palmiro Togliatti - leader of the Italian Communist Party from 1927 until his death in 1964
Ralph Miliband - Ed's Marxist father, recently the subject of an extensive profile in the Daily Mail
Alexander Dubcek - reformist leader of Communist Czechoslovakia, who came to power in 1968 and was deposed in 1969
Mikhail Gorbachev - reformist leader of the Communist USSR, who came to power in 1985 and was deposed in 1991, after which the USSR dissolved
Antonio Gramsci - Italian Communist intellectual who did much of his best work in a Fascist prison
Leonid Brezhnev - leader of the USSR from 1964 until his death in 1982
Chairman Mao Zedong - leader of Communist China from 1949 until his death in 1976
Paul Foot - Trotskyist writer, nephew of Michael
Karl Marx

These 35 are listed more or less from Right to Left. The other five names are a bit harder to locate:
Mikhail Bakunin
Buenaventura Durruti - both Bakunin and Durruti were anarchists (in nineteenth-century Russia and twentieth-century Spain respectively). Does that make them very, very left-wing, or are anarchists neither left nor right? More on this later.
Kim Jong Un - the North Korean dictator is hard to locate on any sort of political spectrum; you could equally plausibly locate him on the extreme Left and the extreme Right.
Osama Bin Laden - is a global Islamic caliphate, to be brought about by unremitting war on democratic and secular nations, a right-wing demand?
Emmeline Pankhurst - leader of the Suffragettes, who campaigned for allowing adult women to vote in elections. They - and this demand - were seen as quite radical at the time.