Yet most voters are more likely to see change as loss and – without being sentimental for the often oppressive communities of 1950s Britain – want to live in relatively stable places with a high level of trust, low crime, and a degree of neighbourliness.
Americans should be defending not merely a right to be free from the oppressive attentions of the national government, not merely fighting for something embodied in the due process clause of the 14th amendment.
His trade union reform will impose oppressive restrictions on the long-attenuated right to strike.
Amnesty International said the Anwar conviction and sentence was an oppressive ruling that would have a chilling effect on freedom of expression in the country.
In pursuing these contracts, Grayling is making every one of us complicit in the administration of some of the world's most brutal and oppressive judicial regimes.
Silence may be golden, but it can also be oppressive.
No matter – the planning inspector ruled the conditions were "unlikely to be perceived as overly oppressive by the occupiers".
This part of our tradition says that liberty from oppressive control must be accorded people everywhere, as a right.
Audiences can imagine that they themselves, born to oppressive privilege, would walk away from it long before rot had a chance to establish itself, in the mouth or anywhere else.
Ever since then the predominant image has been one of oppressive orthodoxy from which the heroic rock star/poet/actor must escape to live out his wild destiny, possibly in Hoxton.
As a woman, she has been forced to embody a succession of tedious female stereotypes, but she twists this oppressive force in order to get her own way".
