Love Our World!

Martyn Rhisiart Jones

Madrid, Wednesday 14th January 2026

The Universal Compass: Why Morality Transcends the Partisan Divide (With a Touch of Martyn Jones’s Slow-Burn Scepticism and a Proper Welsh Understated Grin)

Look, I’m not saying I’ve cracked the code to world peace or anything daft like that. However, morality, ethics, values, and principles don’t belong just to one side of the political spectrum. They’re not strictly red or blue. They’re like that jumper your mam keeps in the drawer ”just in case.” It’s full of holes and a bit faded. It smells faintly of mothballs. But it still does the job whoever’s wearing it. And if it doesn’t quite fit, well, there’s always room to stretch it a bit.

In this glorious age of everyone screaming into the void online, every opinion seems like the second coming. Alternatively, it appears as the end of civilisation. This depends on which algorithm you’ve annoyed today. It’s dead easy to forget the obvious: morality doesn’t turn up with a party membership card and a free pen. It’s not handed out by Westminster think-tanks or branch meetings. It’s this big, sprawling, awkward, properly human mess. This mess lets people from completely opposite corners of the ideological valley nod at the same basic truths. They still bicker like it’s the last pasty on the plate. Even Stewart Lee might grudgingly admit that it’s probably true. After a long pause, he takes a sip of overpriced flat white. Then he’d spend the next twenty minutes explaining why admitting it ruins the joke. Take the environment, for starters.

The progressive lot tend to go on about climate justice and evil corporations. They also talk about saving the polar bears for the grandkids. It’s all fair enough, mind. But then you’ve got the old-school conservatives who still talk about “stewardship.” They don’t sound like they’re taking the mick. These are the sort who grew up thinking the countryside was something you looked after. They believed it was yours to pass on. It wasn’t just because some teenager in Sweden gave you evils on the news. Theodore Roosevelt, the Republican who probably shot more animals than most people have had hot dinners, didn’t set up America’s national parks because he’d been reading the latest IPCC report. He did it because he reckoned nature was a legacy worth keeping hold of.

Same core idea: don’t wreck the place for the next lot. Different accent, different way of saying it. Here in these islands, you’ll still find Tory landowners and green campaigners. Both groups tut at the same wind farm. One group does so because it spoils the view from the hall. The other group complains because the blades were bolted together somewhere in China. Shared principle. Different complaints. Classic.

Human rights are much the same. The fight to abolish slavery wasn’t some pure left-wing victory parade with banners and chants. William Wilberforce, that devout evangelical Tory, led the charge in Parliament. He leaned on Christian notions of human worth. Meanwhile, the radicals were out on the streets with their pamphlets. Skip forward to refugees today: progressives talk compassion, empathy, we’re-all-in-this-together. The communitarian right talk about sovereignty. They emphasise fairness to the people already here. They discuss the limits of what any community can sensibly take on board. Both dipping into the same ethical bucket: respect for the person versus duty to the group. Neither has the monopoly. It’s just two sides tugging on the same rope – and sometimes the rope’s a bit frayed.

Economics? Don’t get me started. The free-market brigade roots their case in liberty, merit, and the dignity of getting on with it. The Guardian occasionally paints them as morally bankrupt. Adam Smith didn’t just focus on the invisible hand. He wrote a whole book explaining that sympathy is what actually keeps society from falling apart. The left pushes equality, solidarity, not letting the fat cats hoover up the lot. Yet both can end up buying the same fair-trade coffee in Waitrose. The liberal buys it as a small stand against exploitation. The conservative buys it to help traditional farmers carry on in the old way. Same beans. Same vague feeling of “well, it’s the right thing, isn’t it?” Completely different inner monologue. Of course, the really spiky issues are abortion, guns, and identity. These are where the trenches get deepest. The shouting gets loudest. Pro-choice rests on bodily autonomy as something close to sacred. Pro-life rests on the sanctity of life as non-negotiable. Both sides are calling the other monsters. Afilonius Rex would probably take a good twenty minutes. He would unpick how everyone’s performing their virtue. He would stop every few sentences to ask: “Is this even funny anymore? Or am I just annoying you? Because that’s sort of the point, isn’t it?” And he’d be spot on. The heat comes from a shared foundation. Everyone’s working from the same basic versions. These include dignity, freedom, not harming others, and fairness. Different priorities. Different endings.

The trick isn’t pretending the rows don’t happen. They do, and they’re often proper ones. The trick is seeing that those rows spring from rival interpretations of the same underlying stuff. Morality isn’t anyone’s private plot of land. It’s an open field. Left, right, centre, and the bemused folk in the middle can all stick their flags in. Occasionally, only occasionally, you’ll see a few of them waving in the same direction.

So next time someone informs you the other side hasn’t got a moral bone in their body, just remember this. They’re probably standing in the same ethical landscape. They are just facing the opposite direction. And if that doesn’t calm the conversation down… well, at least it’s a start. We Welsh know a thing or two about making the best of a damp outlook.

In the end, ethics builds bridges, not barricades. Even if the bridges are a bit wobbly, the handrail’s gone missing, and it’s raining. Again.

Many thanks for reading.

_😺  Click for the last 100 Good Strat articles _😺