News items this week have highlighted an under-appreciated political division - between issues that involve clear harm to identifiable individuals and those that don't.

Contrast the crime* that is the mishandling of A levels with reports of migrants crossing the channel in dinghies. There's a massive difference between the two. The mis-marking of A levels imposes real suffering upon identifiable people. But a few migrants in dinghies do not: even if you believe - wrongly - that immigration cuts wages and jobs, it is not the few desperate people who arrive in boats that are doing so.

The latter - what Chris Grey calls an "artificial emergency" - is not the only example of reified, unempirical politics that is unconcerned with real material harm. The BBC reports on record government borrowing without pointing to a single individual who is suffering because of it. Claims that borrowing imposes a burden on future generations miss the point that government borrowing is also an asset for some people, and that such borrowing bequeaths assets to future generations in the form of better infrastructure and education, and by preventing the loss of businesses and skills that would occur if borrowing were not so high.

Similarly, even the more articulate Brexiters often fail to point to a material harm done by being in the EU or a material benefit from leaving, preferring to speak of windy abstractions such as sovereignty. Of course, the EU like all human institutions has its faults, but leaving on account of its fisheries policy is like jumping out of a plane because you don't like the in-flight meal. And if you really want to boost UK exports, there are countless better ways to do so than trying to negotiate new trade deals.

These are serious examples of unempirical politics, but there are unserious ones too. At a time when thousands of people are losing their livelihoods, futures and even lives because of government incompetence, the Times saw fit yesterday to run a piece fantasising about a Labour government nationalizing Marx and Spencer (ooh, my sides are splitting).

Compare all this to empirical people-based politics. Issues such as poverty, the inadequate benefits system, excess deaths from Covid-19, mass job losses and a decade of wage stagnation all involve real material suffering.

This division between the politics of empirical suffering and the politics of fantasy and abstraction overlaps to a large extent with the left-right divide. In recent years much of the left has focused upon the empirical harms of poverty and austerity whilst the right has been obsessed with sovereignty and "control of our borders."

From one perspective, this is an odd inversion. Those of us formed in the 70s were told that conservatism was an empirical tendency concerned with the amelioration of identifiable evils whilst the left had abstract utopian visions. Here, for example, is Oakeshott (pdf):

[The conservative] thinks that an innovation which is a response to some specific defect, one designed to redress some specific disequilibrium, is more desirable than one which springs from a notion of a generally improved condition of human circumstances, and is far more desirable than one generated by a vision of perfection.

By this standard, it is the left that is conservative, worried about specific defects of poverty and the mismanagement of the exam system whilst it is the right that has a "vision of perfection", a vision of perfect sovereignty and controllable borders.

In this divide, the BBC - let alone the rest of the media - horribly fails to maintain due impartiality. Imagine the mass media didn't exist so your only knowledge of political issues came from the personal experience of you and your family, friends and neighbours. How would politics appear to you?

Chances are, empirical issues would loom large. You would know people who hadn't had a real pay rise for years; had missed a top university place; or was worried about their job or business. Most of you wouldn't, though, feel any material harm from being in the EU and would not know a few dozen migrants were crossing the channel. In drawing our attention to the latter and diverting us from the former, the media biases us against empirical politics. "Due impartiality" is not merely a matter of how the BBC reports particular issues. It is about what it chooses to report.

But why has this left-right division between empirical and unempirical politics emerged? It's a relatively recent development. Thatcher, for example, attempted to solve genuine problems such as inflation and our poor economic performance.

Personally, I doubt that it's because rightists suffered a bang on the head all at the same time. Instead, I suspect it is because extractive rentier capitalism precludes - to a greater extent than used to be the case - remedies for specific defects. Which means that fantasy politics is all the right have got.

* I say "crime" because three unforgiveable errors are involved: the class war that has seen students from poor backgrounds hit hard; the fundamental misunderstanding of statistics (no method can uncover information that's just not there); and the failure to appreciate that there was an obvious solution.