There’s an interesting article in yesterday’s Telegraph by columnist and former editor Charles Moore, titled “I’m starting to think that the Left might actually be right“. While his conclusions, unsurprisingly, don’t quite live up to the title, it’s still a good critique of much that has emanated from the right wing of the political spectrum over the past few decades.

Equally unsurprisingly, plenty of left-wing commentators and bloggers have picked up on the article as vindication of their own position. But I think they’re mistaken, too. What the Right has got wrong, according to Moore, isn’t the fundamentals of their position but the way it’s been abused. Moore cites bankers and News International in support of his argument that big business, and big finance, has lost the support of the majority of the population and become a force for bad rather than good.

I’d agree with that, and I’d add to Moore’s list the big media companies who manipulate and abuse the principles of intellectual property to sustain an outdated and discredited business model. But I also agree with Moore’s concluding comment that the Left’s proposed solutions to these problems are untenable as they rely on an equally outdated and discredited belief in the role of the state.

The real significance of Moore’s article, I think, is that it’s an example of a prominent mainstream commentator following a theme that I’ve been banging on about for ages: The question of where politics goes when the old left-right distinction is lost.

The old left-right distinction has been replaced in recent years by a divide between those who see politics as a means of controlling people and those who see it as a means of liberating people. And there are people on both sides of the traditional spectrum who are on the liberationist side of the new. But a lot of political discourse, particularly in the mainstream media,  still takes place in a framework which assumes that the left-right model still holds primacy and that the battle which matters is the battle between them.

Moore’s article matters because it dares to challenge the convention of yah-boo politics where making your opponents look bad is more important than getting to the truth.  And that can only be a good thing.