Monday, March 16, 2009

Iain Dale's Dinner

On Saturday night we had leading blogger Iain Dale as our guest speaker at Leyton & Wanstead. Iain shared some of the secrets of his on line success and also revealed that he stood for Waltham Forest council in 1990. I was first elected to represent Chingford's Valley ward that year, so we must have been at the same count - small world! I must dig the results out...

Iain has a link to one of those 'how conservative are you?' quizzes on his site. It is American so some of the questions feel a bit unnatural (the focus on abortion and religion seems odd) but I gave it my best shot and got 142 out of 200. The higher your score the more progressive you are - it rated me as Very Conservative.

I wonder how Boris would do...

2 comments:

Rog T said...

Roger,

You should have posted a link. I scored 328 - extremely progressive. I quite like these type of polls as a bit of fun. I suspect that most politicians would cheat a little on their scores. Given that the US has no NHS, poor benefits & an Isolationist world view, and that the Tories ran the country for most of the last century, I'd hazard a guess that most of you aren't really to the right of your average yank.

I'd guess that if you answer questions designed for a US audience from a UK perspective (ie about benefits, small govt)you'd probably skew to the right as their system is much harsher. I doubt that may Tories would want to have the US model or something to the right of it. What do you think? I'd also guess (may be wrong) that Brit conservatives would be moved to the left by gay/religion questions.

I reckon that compared to an average Yank you are about a 250 !

All good fun.

Roger Evans said...

Rog T - some interesting observations. I'm a small government libertarian basically, and the older I get the more libertarian I become...

Looks like you scored a bit on the low side - can we have a recount?