TheYhe current Radio Times has alternative covers featuring Red, Blue and Yellow Daleks representing New Labour, Conservative and the Lib Dems – but why no Green Daleks? Maybe being dependent on radiation and static electricity means they aren’t particularly Eco-friendly. I can understand the lack of Black Daleks though as Anarchists don’t necessarily vote.

And tough shit on the BNP: even the BBC’s Outer Space Robot People think you’re too right-wing.

Good sentiment – but anyone who didn’t know better would think you had been taken in by Cameron’s ‘big society’ con to reduce public services!

I agree with this and although it may appear that you’re falling for D-Cam con, being active in your local community, on whatever scale, is crucial to yours and the neighbourhoods well-being.

Much can be achieved and as naive and idealistic as it sounds, it really does make a difference.

Well argued, but I don’t agree there is a trade-off here – anecdotally, people who are involved in party politics are more likely to do the other things that you suggest and to be involved in civil society.

I also don’t like the point about “tabloid reading people who don’t take an interest” – there is always a danger of retreating into a comfort zone and only interacting with other people who are already persuaded of the merits of a cause.

To achieve many of the changes which civil society organisations want to achieve requires persuading people of the merits of the cause, engaging with “tabloid reading people”. And if the people who share our values are less engaged in party politics, it won’t go away, but it just makes it more likely that people with a very different vision of society and very different values will have power.

“… just listen to the level of debate that occurs between the tabloid reading people who don’t read blogs…”

Ah yes, the tabloid reading people: beneath “stupid” and “ill informed” – and, of course, predominantly working class. I suppose you deliberately confuse the three.

I mean, obviously, it is only bloggers who are capable of intelligent and informed debate… Seriously, what a load of wank. There were a few articles (and hundreds of comments) on here over the weekend which rather suggested the reverse was true.

Just because “tabloid reading people” don’t tend to engage in intellectual masturbation online and mostly choose to reserve their ‘talking a load of utter shite’ ration for United’s chances at the title instead of self-righteous and arrogant political pomp, doesn’t mean they are any less capable of understanding the dire consequences of electing, say, a Tory government.

Besides which, it is working class (“tabloid reading”) people who already give most to charity in relative terms, and who tend to do more voluntary work. (Apart from the obligatory bourgeois self-indulgence of a gap year in Tanzania, which costs Mummy and Daddy thousands of pounds.)

To be fair J, Don has already pointed out that he does not agree with that sentiment and neither do I and I’m sure many others here feel the same way but some of us chose to focus on the positives of the piece, which you have not engaged with at all but merely gone after the one element of it.

You hold as much class-prejudice as perhaps planeshift does, two wrongs do not make a right do they?

Regardless of what social class you are from, if you choose to buy and read tabloid newspapers, and then repeat the shite you’ve read in them almost verbatim, then I’m inclined to regard you as ill-informed and somewhere along the spectrum between well-intentioned naivety and full on stupidity. And I’m not going to apologise for that.

You’ll also be aware that the biggest anti murdoch sentiment in recent years comes from the predominantly working class area of Liverpool. Go into numerous former mining/steel communities in places like Yorkshire and South Wales and you’ll find similar sentiments. You’ll also note that the readership of the Daily Mail (which is a tabloid) is pretty much middle class and regarded as the voice of middle england. So the idea that I’ve attacked the working class is frankly bollocks – its you who has assoicated tabloid reading with being working class and thus perpetuated a negative stereotype.

And of those who do voluntary work, the experience of doing so usually generates a healthy distrust of the media, or at least media reporting around the issue for which you are volunteering.

@7 – thank you for informing me that anti-Murdoch sentiment exists in the predominantly working class area of Liverpool. Living, as I do, in Liverpool, this is no great surprise.

My own experience – buy one copy of the S*n per year (for the racing pages on National day), use it for cat litter tray fodder when your horse comes in last (actually, I won) and spend the rest of the time slagging it off – is probably typical.

Not sure what your point was, though; it’s not like the S*n is the only tabloid going. Most people in Liverpool read tabloids and most people are working class.

Trying to turn it around and accusing me of perpetuating a negative stereotype is laughable. You actually describe “the tabloid reading people who don’t read blogs” as beneath “stupid” and “ill informed”, whilst I merely observe the fact that the readership of tabloids – despite what you might say – is predominantly working class.

To answer @6, I do not engage with the positives of the piece because bloggers exhorting “tabloid reading people” to “get active” and “give financial support to charities” is, to me, reminiscent of the failure of the early so-called socialists to penetrate working class areas from their comfortable homes in the suburbs – instead retreating under a barrage of rubbish and abuse.

J:

That’s fine, you can read it like that by all means, that’s your opinion but to me and others, it does not come across that way.

The Facebook Group http://www.facebook.com/#!/group.php?gid=113749985304255 which is based on the Rage Against The Machine principle is engaging tens of thousands of young voters for this election. The membership is currently 22,000 and rising by the minute, helping to engage young people with the political process

People who read tabloids (apart from the Mirror) are scum. Let’s make no bones about it.

@11 What a horrible and ridiculous comment to make.

My Gran reads the Sun and I think shes lovely.

@11 Alternatively they want a quick, cheap easy read for an hour an hour lunch break.

As previously mentioned, I get one copy of the S*n per year on race day.

The rest of the time, I pick up a free copy of the Metro… Not that I read the thing, it’s just useful to line a cat litter tray. It gives me great satisfaction that editorial filth is shat upon from a modest height by two felines!

Not entirely relevant, but: does anybody else feel that the BBC’s Election 2010 graphics say “you may as well pick your vote with a pin”?