What do they all mean?????

[shortstop]

My nephew (Aged 13) has totally confused his mum and dad. His school has been discussing politics and he has come back asking for words to be explained.

He wants them to explain to him what a communist is, a fasisct is, a socialist is, etc. etc.

Also the differences between Labour and Conservative.

I'm afraid this has stumped them as Football and Heat Magazine is their expertise (I'm not being horrible, thats just the way they are).

He has come to my wife and I (She has a degree in politics) and I think we've confused him more.

My question is (sorry it took so long).....Does anyone know of a website which explains all this in layman's terms so a teenager can understand......Thankyou.

[Loosehead]

I'm amazed there are people with children who have no idea what the political pursuasions are. What did they vote last election? Some people don't deserve a vote. Poor little sod, soon to be brainwashed into chavology.

www.thepoliticalcompass.org explains it well

[shortstop]

Thanks for the website, I appreciate the fact that you have gone out of your way to assist.

I will, however, stick up for my brothers parenting skills.

His kids are not being brought up in the way of the chav, far from it. My nephew represents Dorset at football, athletics, Golf and Rugby and it is his sports that they concentrate on.

I admit that my brother and his wife are not the most academically gifted and are not as aware of current events as perhaps they should, and for that reson they sent my nephew to my wife and I to assist. They care enough to want him to learn.

Rant over and thanks again.

[shortstop]

Great website by the way....My wife's gonna love this one....

[Loosehead]

OK fair enough, I suppose I'm a little shocked when I discover there are voters who don't know what they voted for. Then again as they are not interested I suppose they probably don't vote. Your question did give the impression of an archetypal chav family, sorry for the mis judgement. The site, I think does a good job of explaining that the system isn't just left/right wing

[jno]

I can't find that website, Loosehead, can you post a link?

[jake-the-peg]

It looks like we can't post links anymore

the link is www.politicalcompass.org

I think Loosehead erropneously inserted a "the"

[vehelpfulguy]

> also the differences between Labour and Conservative

When you find out can you let the rest of us know. :-)

[vehelpfulguy]

When I explained this to my daughter I drew a straight line to represent policitcal leanings.

I put LEFT at one end, RIGHT and the other end, and CENTRE in the middle.

I tried to simply explain the difference between left and right in political terms.

In then put Labour just left of CENTRE, Conservatives just right of CENTRE with libs dems over CENTRE.

I then put Communist to the very left, and Facist to the very right. Socialist I put on the LEFT, but not as far left as Communist.

This is fine for a 13 year old, but of course is does not explain why Stalin, who was head of a communist state, was probably more Fascist than Hitler.

Maybe my straight line actually joins up at either end to form a circle.

[jno]

thanks, jake. You can post links but you have to include the http stuff at the start for them to work.

[jake-the-peg]

Yeah, spotted that JNO.

Tell her Hitler was a National Socialist - that'll confuse her!

[antiguru]

From the set up you describe it won�t be the last time you�re asked a complicated question by your nephew, so I thought you might be interested to know about Wikipedia. Kids asking questions is great, but sometimes grown-ups need to do some research to answer correctly!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page

For this one, put british politics into the search box.

Hope this helps.

[reinganum]

Jake's link was very useful, and I even tried the test (not telling!!)

But I have known about the two-dimensional thing (left-right and liberal/authoritarian) since I was at school in the early 1960s and there was a diagram printed in the Times newspaper.

There was an excellent essay in the Spectator a few months ago on the common misconceptions regarding the left-right thing. Unfortunately don't have the exact details at present.