With a general election finally called for the UK, we now have a real chance to put the Tory Party out of our misery, and hopefully for a generation. Like most of us though, I look back on the last fourteen years and struggle to come up with a less than book length summary of the damage they’ve done. But I had to try…
Continue reading Fourteen Years: A ReckoningTag Archives: insanity
The Wrong Lizard
“It comes from a very ancient democracy, you see. . . .”
“You mean, it comes from a world of lizards?”
“No,” said Ford, “nothing so simple. Nothing anything like so straightforward. On its world, the people are people. The leaders are lizards. The people hate the lizards and the lizards rule the people.”
“Odd,” said Arthur, “I thought you said it was a democracy.”
“I did,” said Ford. “It is.”
Dumbocracy Rising
So, it appears that the UK now has a ‘parliament’ where most members don’t actually understand their job description or the nature of representative democracy itself.
At its most basic, their duty is to represent their local electorate, not blindly, but through the filter of their judgement and experience, to balance and reconcile what is actually in the best interests of the constituency and of the country as a whole. There, there is a system, evolved over a millennium or so, that has put them where they are, to be the buffer between the baying of the wilfully uninformed, the ill-intentioned and the fear-driven, and the common good. That system now seems to have been abandoned, in the name of bigotry, personal agendas and party dogma. Continue reading Dumbocracy Rising
Democratic Bereavement
Thoughts for our US friends, from the “sneering liberal elite” (as apparently we now are) of the UK. We’re a few months ahead of you in trying to work out why our country has taken the ‘Samson’ route of pulling down the temple whilst standing inside it (there will be more on that), and we’re starting to see how the stages of bereavement from principle and reason play out. This isn’t entirely serious – it’s a play on Elisabeth Kubler-Ross’s long-discredited model for the stages of grief, nor is the language safe for those of a nervous disposition but, for all that, it’s been well received…