No sign of any disturbance (or aircraft) in December 1945:

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If 6 foot tall then not Spitfire – they’d hit the ground! If really that long then maybe early 3-blade Firefly (13 foot total diameter)

Yes.. it might surprise some on here that I do, too 🙂

While how we all fair is dictated by the fortunes of the ‘business’ (for which read ‘banking’) lobby, then who we vote for will always make less difference than how the ‘market’ is feeling at any one time. We would have to elect a government that believed in something else before that changed. That isn’t looking too likely.

Only this evening I saw a headline on the BBC.. “Ftse100 chief executives warn of a ‘nightmare’ SNP -Labour alliance, ‘threatening’ a possible socialist agenda”. Well, these are Chief Executives of big business. They would say that.. lucky for them then that the Labour party do not have any such agenda, their offshore fortunes are safe. Don’t have nightmares, chaps.. ghosts, monsters and Labour socialists don’t really exist.

While we are prepared to take what the particularly wealthy say as our political compass, then there will be no change from the situation the OP describes.

Agreed – as I said earlier, it’s the status quo.

See your point – about negative phrasing.. but insofar as it does appear to draw on a 1972 union manifesto (for better OR worse), all the survey is doing is holding those statements up to the light and asking how much the public agree or disagree with such sentiments. That one may see them as ‘negative’ depending upon ones own view is not the point of the survey data as presented – the data uses the shifting attitudes to that very mindset as a crude yardstick of shifting left/right political attitudes. That it choses the bald agenda of (whisper it) socialism is to its credit – it keeps it a pure left/right distinction, not one of other issues, as I said before. It’s just that the language of that particular debate is no longer fashionable. Whether that divide matters anymore is a moot point!

No, probably not – though I expect Alan Sugar strokes his beard in the back of his RR Ghost – and good luck to him.

But it’s just the capital has moved away from manufacturing, into the ‘financial sector’ – the logical final step in the evolution of capitalism, whereby the owner of the capital doesn’t even have to worry about the unfortunate business of actually producing anything!

The question is still a relevant one – does the ordinary British worker feel they are being s*at upon, whether they work for a Shipyard or Starbucks?

Yes, I see that – thanks Charlie, they do seem to focus on the negatives that the left do choose to highlight.

I suppose my defences of the poll would be:

1) It asks how much one agrees or disagrees with the statement, giving the opportunity for those who don’t hold the view described in the question to say as much. Agreed that it might be a tad simplistic.

2) The results, whatever they are, are compared historically to show how the proportion agreeing / disagreeing changes over time, and nothing else – a crude but clear measure of shifts between traditional left / traditional right views.

That the questions all seem to be whether or not one agrees with the agenda of the left might just be a facet of the right not so much being a philosophy as a defence of the status quo – harder to define definitive statements of what it means to have a right wing philosophy, unless one drifts (falsely) into immigration, race, attitudes to homosexuality, gun control, hunting, vivisection, nuclear power, Jeremy Clarkson.. all of which are actually NOT left/right issues at all (and it is lazy to brand certain attitudes to the above as ‘right wing’, though many left wingers have).

I suppose the questions COULD read more like ‘Do you agree that the super-rich in the UK deserve every penny and shouldn’t pay any tax, while you (assuming you are not super rich) don’t, and should’… but I suspect that would be seen as even more leading?

How can a question be biased?

The issue the right seem to have with the questions is their forthrightness. Much like Cameron wriggling last night, how does a Tory answer questions like ‘To what extent do you agree or disagree that big business benefits owners at the expense of workers?’ and ‘ To what extent do you agree or disagree that ordinary working people do not get their fair share of the nation’s wealth?’

To refute the traditional socialist line, a committed Tory would have to say ‘Disagree’. But that would clearly be nonsense. Oh, those poor Mail readers and their sore brains.

These are direct questions asked by an organisation with an historical political understanding of what it means to be ‘right’ or ‘left’, and therefore will not include distracting side shows about immigration that have nothing to do with party / social philosophical views but everything to do with people’s experience / perception / concerns around single issues other than the individual’s relationship to capital.

It is the directness of the questioning around straightforward left/right divisions that seems to be upsetting the more right among us, and leading them to accuse these simple questions about attitudes of being somehow biased.

The point is that attitudes do change. This poll was presented to show that they do (and demonstrate a remarkable correlation between direction of drift and the political colour of the incumbent Government), and also to show an individual where they currently stand among shifting sands.