Far left - US/UK definition

I trained with some IDF officers once - they told me they had no problem gunning down arabs or their children* "because they breed like rats and they are rats". This was a common view amongt all of the IDF i have encounted.* and before any one asks - yes they specifically said children.This message has been edited by Charles Knight, 24-Jul-2005 05:33 AM

Great - so we can discount your abortion story in any furture debate about the subject.

To add to this -

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Religious Freedom:

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Although this doesn't at first glance appear to be a personal freedom vs state, I would argue that it is another good example of the contrast. Many of those involved in mainstream politics in the US have the view that because they are in the majority, then they should have the freedom to do whatever they please when it comes down to religion. The centre ground in Britain is held by people who accept that certain aspects of religion have to be curbed in order for society as a whole to be fair.

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I hold that despite the constitutional separation of church and state, religion (specifically Christianity) plays a much bigger part in politics in the USA than it does in Europe.

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Ironically for a country that has no bars on religion in public life our views on it's place in that environment are very different from the states. While in theory our leaders could make great play out of being god-fearing christians, it would go down very very badly with the british public. The (and please fellow brits correct me if I'm wrong) overwhelming feeling here is that relgion belief is a matter for the home not to bother other people with. If you believe in Allah or God or Zeus, that is your business but keep it to yourself,eh?

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Gun Ownership

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I've touched on this in another thread, and I know that at least one person will disagree with me, but in my mind this is a classic Right/Left issue. The right of one individual to own a gun is compared to the right of another not to be shot by some nutter who just lost his job and owned the gun legally!!!. The Right-wing in the US are the most fervent supporters of semi-automatic 'hunting rifles', it is a non issue in the UK.

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I would agree - there are a very very small amount of people on the right who would disagree with the current policy on firearms, this group is too small to count. This is a total non-issue here, we don't like guns, we don't want guns. This is in no small part to our perception*of the warped effect it seems to have had on american culture.* note i say perception - I'm not really interested in arguing the reality with anyone because it makes no jote of different to the current view of the UK public.This message has been edited by Charles Knight, 24-Jul-2005 06:51 PM

See that test doesn't quite work in the UK - The Guardian is pretty much "anti-whoever is in".The Sun is the most read paper in the UK and openly on the right of the debate. It has supported both Labour and the tories.The Mirror would be a better example - it has never and I would guess will never support the tories. However it does regularly call for blair to resign and condemn the current labour Govt.(But since the labour party is right-wing anyway...)

unveils capethat would be me. what would you like to know?

first it's nickname is the Daily Torygraph. As for what's in it - beats the shit out of me, I get all my news off the internet using a RSS reader (I did start an RSS reader thread - if you have not used them it's worth a go, plenty of christian newsources as well) - that means i can check 50,100 newspapers over my morning coffee. I hate columnists so never read them. However I do read the odd copy on the train or on a plane.The internet means that I don't really have much call for a paper anymore - I want facts and I'll perform my own analysis of the event and contexts in which those events occur.I do agree with this:

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The Telegraph is known for its right-wing politics. Within this classification it takes a roughly central position on the authoritarian/libertarian axis. It is less traditionalist and more libertarian than The Spectator but more traditionalist and less libertarian than The Economist.

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In the last election it backs the conversatives.The other significant paper is the Daily Mail, this is the paper of middle england and it's position can be broadly represented as : "how will situation X affect house prices" - I kid you not.A while back I did a quite detailed analysis of all the UK papers (for something else), I'll try and find and post it later.

I used to have much fun on a sat morning trying to engage members of the socialist workers party in debate."Every had a job?""em..no"when I was a student I had great fun on the first week of term, setting up a "capitalist owners of production party" stand next to the one they had during freshers week.