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22 JUN 2026
UK politics · find your place

Where do you sit on Britain's two value scales?

The companion to our piece on the British spectrum. Answer the same eleven statements the British Social Attitudes survey has used since 1986 — five for the economic left–right scale, six for the liberal–authoritarian scale — and we'll place you on the same 0–100 map, against the national average and where each party's support leans.

Noodle News data desk · self-scored · ~3 min
Read me first. These are NatCen's genuine British Social Attitudes scale items, scored the way NatCen scores them. But this is a self-test, not the survey: the real BSA is a weighted random-probability sample of thousands of people. Your single result is a personal indication, not a data point in any study, and nothing is sent anywhere — the maths runs in your browser. There is no public tool that returns your “official” BSA score; the nearest well-known lookalike, the Political Compass, uses a different questionnaire and its own scoring.

Economic: left–right

How far you think the economy is stacked against ordinary people, and what the state should do about it. Agreeing leans left.

Social: liberal–authoritarian

Whether society should enforce shared rules and traditional norms, or leave people to make their own choices. Agreeing leans authoritarian.

0 of 11 answered
Economic left–right
—/100
Liberal–authoritarian
—/100
You Britain (avg) shaded = party territory (indicative)

0 = most left / most liberal, 100 = most right / most authoritarian; 50 is the midpoint. “Britain” is the recent national average from our piece (economic 33, 2022; social 59, 2025). The faint party names mark where each party's supporters lean on these two scales — indicative directions from British Social Attitudes 43, not surveyed coordinates.

Method. Each statement is answered on the standard five-point scale (strongly agree → strongly disagree). For the economic scale, agreement is scored as more left-wing; for the social scale, agreement is scored as more authoritarian. Each scale is the mean of its items (1–5), rescaled to 0–100 exactly as in the article (0 = left / liberal, 100 = right / authoritarian). All eleven items must be answered for a score. Computation happens entirely in your browser; no responses are stored or transmitted.

On the party territories. Parties are not plotted at precise points, because no published source gives each party's mean on these exact 0–100 voter scales. The shaded zones show, directionally, where each party's supporters concentrate on the two scales — e.g. Reform and Conservative support is heavily authoritarian (Reform only mildly right on economics), while Green, Labour and Liberal Democrat support leans liberal and left-of-centre. Quantifying a party precisely would need either its voters' BSA averages or an expert/manifesto rating such as the Chapel Hill Expert Survey, which uses a different scale from this self-test.

Source. Scale items and the directional party leanings: British Social Attitudes survey, National Centre for Social Research (NatCen) — economic left–right and libertarian–authoritarian batteries (fielded since 1986) and BSA 43, “Who supports Reform?”. National averages: NatCen BSA 40 and BSA 43. natcen.ac.uk

Caveat. A self-administered scale can't reproduce the survey's sampling, weighting or interviewer context, and the six-item social scale deliberately leaves out immigration and trans-rights debates — so read your result, and the party zones, as useful indications rather than verdicts.

Figures to 22 Jun 2026. Noodle News · v3.0 · BSA self-scorer.