The right wing press still sways the opinion of the Boomer generation, imo, as it’s the last generation to be raised with a heavy dependence on the daily newspaper for the news. My children’s generation grew up to embrace the internet and, if my sons and their friends are any indication, newspapers weren’t/aren’t part of their daily lives. The voting tendency of the majority of the boomers is to vote for the Tory party and if polled on whether or not they still read a newspaper, hard copy or online, my guess is that the majority would still be getting their daily fix and for most of them it would be the Mail, Express, Telegraph or Sun. I won’t be around but it will be interesting to see how the country votes when the boomers are gone, or down to very small numbers.
Is this not a lazy and presumptuous statement? Fairly sure being lazy and presumptuous are human qualities that are not specific to either wing. The left has not even been in power in the UK for 14 years. We on the left got heavily battered at the last election. The left moved a lot of steps to the right afterwards to adjust. In the US there is no left. The Democrats are politically right of our Tories. Macron is not a leftist figure in France. Trudeau is not a liberal. He changes his views dependent on the situation and is probably best described as centrist.
This government is just plain incompetent. Trudeau is/was not. He’s taken for granted a huge rump of voters who are utterly fed up of his complacency in assuming their support was a given.
This is the reason that I can (in my mind) and will vote Labour. Same for a lot of centralists who drift slightly right.
Now you tell us. If I knew you were standing I would have voted for you. Actually, now you've mentioned it, both Saints supporters, both of Indian heritage, both have worked in the US and are filthy rich. I always thought he posted on here. Is that you Rishi?
You might be right. Perhaps not though. I have absolutely no love for the Tories, as you have probably guessed by now. But they have provided the U.K. with the first non Christian PM - Benjamin Disraeli, a century and a half ago - and in this century they’ve given us three women and an Asian man. So I have to give them some credit for that. It appears that to the Tories, so long as you hate (other) immigrants and poor people, it doesn’t matter what creed, gender or colour you are.
True, or are they like some who say "I'm not racist, I am friends with lots of black/asian/etc people".....
My best friend from school used to play a joke on my wife by occasionally dropping a racist stereotype into a private conversation just to get her to react, which she always did, giving him a few slaps on the arm to reinforce her discomfort at what he would say. I knew he was messing with her as his parents had specialised in fostering black children, which was quite brave in the late 60s, early 70s, and he bore no prejudice towards black people. His adopted brother is of mixed race. Fast forward about 10 years and he’s at our front door to introduce his fiancée, a gorgeous black woman. I’m not sure how my wife stopped her chin from hitting the floor because I think she still wasn’t certain about his true beliefs. He played the long game on that joke and won.
The far-left is much, much worse than the far-right. At least if you score it in terms of human lives & murders.
I'm late again but there's really no point in this discussion. The only thing I'll say is I don't know he'll try to do that. Or anything of the sort. I don't pretend to know the minds of people I've never met, especially not someone like Trump whose public statements are so rambling and erratic, but actually I very much doubt he'd try. There's a huge difference between trying to manipulate the result of a pretty close election and trying to stage some sort of military coup. I have no doubt most politicians are capable of the former, very few would consider the latter.
Why has a party that (according to you) hates immigrants decided to allow the highest levels of immigration in the history of our country?
He didn't try to manipulate the results of a close election. He tried to overturn the results, first via fraud, and when that failed, by violence. And I can't say that I know the mind of Trump, either. But I can say that it's really telling that so many people who worked closely with him have been sounding the alarm that, yes, he really wants to do these things, and will try to do these things. Mark Esper is a Republican. Trump picked him to be Secretary of Defense, he served in that capacity until after the election, when Trump fired him because Esper pushed back on Trump's suggestion that they invoke the Insurrection Act. Here is his opinion of Trump: https://thehill.com/homenews/campai...reat-to-democracy-on-capitol-riot-anniversary Here is Esper's predecessor as Secretary of Defense, James Mattis, also Republican, also picked by Trump: And here's the letter that ten former SecDefs, most of them Republican (including Dick Cheney!), wrote after the 2020 election, when it became evident that Trump wanted to use the military to overturn the results: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opin...23d52e-4c4d-11eb-a9f4-0e668b9772ba_story.html So, yes. I am inclined to believe them. Whether he will succeed is unknown. Whether he will try his damnest seems really evident.
Tedious semantics. Again, trying to manipulate/change/overturn/[whatever word you choose] the result of the 2020 election is a totally different thing to trying to remain in power beyond a second term, and if you're arguing he poses a threat to democracy now that's what you have to argue he would do. None of the quotes I've left out suggest he has any intent to do that. I very much doubt he plans to try. I'm not replying to anything else on this.
As a Canadian, I don't find this a particularly plausible explanation. Trudeau has a minority government currently, and has since 2019...not exactly an environment that breeds complacency. I'd say that the biggest drivers are: 1. Longevity. Trudeau has won the past three elections. The last Canadian PM to win four consecutive elections was Wilfrid Laurier...from 1896-1911. He really ought to retire before the election, and I still suspect it's better than even odds that he does. 2. The housing/cost of living crisis. This is the biggest political issue, and the Liberal government hasn't really had a solution for it. Granted, a large part of the reason that the federal government doesn't have a solution for it is that it isn't primarily a federal issue...the feds control the purse strings in Canada, but most housing policy (most policy in general, really) is determined at the provincial or town/municipal levels. The feds can exert pressure on the lower levels through their control of the purse strings, and belatedly have, but the results of that won't be seen for a few years, long after the election. 3. Vote-splitting. The Conservatives are likely to take a significant plurality of the vote in the next election, but the three left-of-center parties in the Liberals/NDP/Greens will (as per usual) likely take more of the vote than the parties on the right. I say this as an NDP voter: there really isn't any reason for the party to exist anymore. The Liberals used to be further to the right, and the NDP used to be further to the left (and exerted considerable influence over the agenda despite never coming close to power), but now they occupy most of the same territory and compete for most of the same votes. If the two parties merged, as the parties on the right did in the 2000s, this would be a far different election.
He wanted to call the military out in order to retain power. That is according to the cabinet official Trump selected in order to oversee the military, the one that Trump fired when it became apparent that he would not utilize the military to help Trump retain power. I'm not the one engaging in semantics here...that is a direct threat to democracy, which is why so many Trump officials keep coming out and saying that he is a threat to democracy.
There's a point here. There are very obvious differences in the way the far left and far right are viewed. I used to work in London with a young Polish woman who was deeply shocked by how often she saw people wearing or carrying the hammer and sickle symbol. She used to say things like "Don't they know what those people were like? Don't they know what they did?" and "They wouldn't wear a swastika so how can they wear that?"
