The Left/Right divide is rather interesting. English and British Parliaments are usually divided into two groups, Government and Opposition, and these two groups is where the idea of the opposing parties originates. A primary example of left/right divide is during the mid-to-late eighteenth centuries with the Tories and the Whigs in Britain. Obviously there are older examples such as the Jacobites and Williamites; however before the personalities of Robert Walpole for the Whigs, and William Pitt for the Tories, these two groups were generally just factions within Parliament and had little to no structure. So the left/right divide was technically present in British politics for hundreds of year, however it was not a coherent divide, and is usually not consistent.
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