I wished I lived in a world where I could be a conservative, with a status quo which I wanted to defend.

There's always going to be changes coming along, and a lot of them are for the worse, and fighting change is technically a conservative thing to do. So, where I live, anyone who tries to bring back Capital Punishment, or make it legal to own handguns, or give refugees food vouchers instead of money, or privatise the health service, or break up the London Tube system, or change the side of the road we drive on, is my enemy.

On the other hand there are a whole lot of changes I would support - I'd like to see fox-hunting outlawed, I'd like to see a maximum wage at a fairly low level, I'd like to see an end to the disastrous "war against drugs", I'd like to see a 15 mph speed limit in towns (for people on bikes and skates as well), the introduction of a Basic Income, the break-up of the United Kingdom...

And all those would mark me as Radical.

And there are some things where I suppose my views are liberal, which means saying there are two sides the question. (For example, abortion, where I do not think there is any moral "right to choose" - but that attempts by the authorities to penalise women who do choose to have abortions would be both wrong and ineffective.)

But I can't understand this weird (sorry) American terminology in which "liberal" is used to mean holding leftwing views (which in many countries would count as fairly rightwing). Being "liberal" surely just means that you don't think your opponents should be thrown in jail or shot? Which means most (unfortunately not all) Americans are "liberal", at least within America itself.

The point I'm making is that asking whether someone is conservative or radical is like asking whether they are big or small - it depends whether you are comparing them with a mouse or an elephant.

But then I suppose it's all just arbitrary terminology when you get down to it. In Russia these days "Liberal Democrat" is the title of a fascist party, and Communists are routinely described as "Conservatives". And a Republican means something rather different in Derry and in Dixie.