So, for clarity... ALL Boomers were alive when The Beatles topped the chart with Can't Buy Me Love. TRUE, not discriminatory. Also, ALL Boomers watch Countdown, read the Daily Mail and think their children / grandchildren would be able to afford a £1.3m house if they just stopped eating avocado toast and watching Netflix. Discriminatory. (Although also true! No, no, just kidding. Not all baby boomers think that. Just the ones that read the Mail. Which is all of them.)
You don't think there is such a thing as age discrimination? Then why is it a protected characteristic under the Equality Act? This is precisely my point; somehow it's seen as 'jokey' and OK: but so were generalisations about black people in the 1970s and gay people until the 1990s, but we wouldn't talk like that now. And you weren't using it in a pejorative sense to imply that all people of that generation (but not others) are Tory foot soldiers? That's why it's different from 'British': it isn't used simply as description (at least not always: I agree that the Beatles example is acceptable). Any generalisation risks becoming a stereotype which risks tilting into prejudice.
This is like students debating, students who incidentally all have long hair, hairy armpits, take drugs, go on climate change demos and eat vegan food.
It wasn't a generalisation and it wasn't discriminatory. It was a statement of fact. The generation that bought the (great majority of) shares when Thatcher privatised anything that moved was the Baby Boomer generation – defined as people born between 1945 and 1964. There was absolutely no implication by me that the foot soldiers were Tory. I didn't make any mention of their political persuasion. The implication was that Thatcher saw the population as foot soldiers who'd happily march to her tune by snapping up the shares, which is an entirely different thing. If you read the sentence again you'll see it's clear. Discrimination is a completely different thing too, as I am sure you know.
So 'happily march to her tune' is not the same as being Tory? Hmm. I mean; obviously it was people of that generation who bought most shares because at the time they were the ones most likely to be in work, with disposable income. I agree that is a fact. But don't you see that labelling them in such a way as to single them out from later generations tends to lump them all together? But they aren't all the same; plenty of members of that generation didn't do this (for one thing, there was high unemployment in the 1980s which would have precluded many millions from doing so). Most of the miners who took part in the strike were also boomers, presumably. It's this arbitrary lumping together and crass labelling of a disparate population cohort that I think is problematic (and the same goes for all of these age labels). Not to mention that the chronological cut offs seem totally artificial. It may not be discrimination per se but it tends to generate stereotypes as your references to the Mail and Countdown suggest (I appreciate, of course, that they are tongue in cheek).
Nice to see our democratic system being influenced by a bunch of thugs. Reminds me of 1932 in Germany. The state and police should be able to stop such intimidation. I'd rather we didn't turn into another Lebanon.
Liz Truss is having a whale of a time.over in the States. She even got to meet her 'biggest fan' https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2024/02/22/truss-at-cpac-00142807
Sunak urged to act against Truss for spreading rightwing conspiracy theories Ex-PM appears with former Trump strategist Steve Bannon and talks of ‘deep state’ ousting her from power Well worth clicking on that to see how delusional she has become.
What about withdrawing his citizenship whilst he's in-country? Tory MP Lee Anderson claims ‘Islamists’ have got control of Sadiq Khan Ex-deputy party chair says on GB News Islamists control London as well as its mayor, prompting calls for him to lose the whip
It’s full on racism all the way to the Election from here. Conservatives seem to think they can just say ‘Muslims’ enough times and that will do for the electorate.
Thing is, they have bucket loads of money pouring into their election war chest and always spend loads of it on focus groups and data analysis. I can't see what the strategy is but surely there must be one? Maybe they have accepted they're going to get a well deserved hiding and are just looking to limit their losses and make sure they shore up as much of their core vote as possible and need to outflank Farage's mob to do so? Most of the people I know aren't typically wedded to a party and have voted across the political spectrum in the past (those darn centrists you have so little time for ) but they're appalled by this current bunch and despise them. Despite the increasingly unhinged rhetoric coming out of the Tory party, I think most people in this country are fundamentally decent and this **** isn't going to appeal to them.
Must do, otherwise he’d be all grey instead of his usual nut brown. Probably uses one of those ‘Touch of Grey’ products. Hey that sounds like a good name for a song…
There seem to be a three strategies, one to wait as long as possible for a possible uptick so they can tell the electorate their plans are working. I don’t believe many of them really have faith in this (Tories are queuing up to quit before the election) and they have completely abandoned talking about their key election strategies from last time, Brexit and Levelling Up. The second and third are linked. To undermine Labour and in particular Keir Starmer as weak/authoritarian, flip flopper/dogmatic etc. Whatever you’ve got. Starmer is making this hard for them though by tracking their policies. So it comes back to the culture war and this is probably the only thing that unites Tories at the moment with the cohort that voted them in. There are some deeply shameful elements of it, depending as it does on identifying enemies, Muslim ‘hate mobs’ (which seems to just be Muslims for people replying to Rory Stewart in the thread below) permissiveness, transgender, ‘wokery,’ climate change etc. I think you are right that many people are beyond this now, have socially liberal views and will see through it. The only course then is to make them scared and in that respect the Israel/Gaza conflict is a godsend to them. https://x.com/rorystewartuk/status/1761125985544446051?s=46&t=oqOMSJXE_g7J5C7kNPG9LA
Truss is unhinged, dumb and incredibly stupid but I'd rather not have someone along with many others who knew exactly what they were doing in going out to the ISIS caliphate be allowed to return to this country. It's not a hippy commune she ran off to.
Say what you like about Lee Anderson or Suella Braverman, but there is no doubt that the Tories are a unifying force for our Country.
Nick Timothy was the 'brains' behind the Maybot wasn't he? https://twitter.com/mrhenrymorris/status/1761359069812596844
The Truss clip with her grinning alongside Steve Bannon while he praises Tommy Robinson getting a fair bit of attention. Toe-curling.
This was Politics Live today. It was a staggering performance from Maclean who appears to hold the brief of Minister for Gaslighting and Bullsh!t. You can hear her in this clip, but you may just gnaw your own leg off in sheer frustration. https://x.com/haggis_uk/status/1762098467571200445?s=46&t=oqOMSJXE_g7J5C7kNPG9LA
Neanderthals frankly insulted by the comparison. These ones have vowed never to vote Tory again after the whole European land bridge vote thing.
