One aspect of being a candidate is the large number of people who contact you from different pressure groups. It is gratifying the large number of letters that are addressed to James Oates MP! Of course, the dissolution of Parliament means that there are no MPs until after the election. One of the most interesting communications was an invitation to identify where you stand on the Political Compass. This attempts to identify people’s political opinions, not only on a left-right scale, but also on an authoritarian-libertarian scale. You can take the test on the website http://www.politicalcompass.org/
I found that I was just fractionally to the left, but strongly libertarian. This is precisely where Charles Kennedy and the Liberal Democrats are supposed to stand. I was pleased to be sharing the same quadrant as Nelson Mandela and the Dalai Lama, and even more pleased to be in the opposite quadrant to Tony Blair, Michael Howard and President George W. Bush- all of whom were defined as right-wing authoritarians!
