No-one, I think, believes the end of the party system to be imminent – that we are about to witness a return to a Parliament composed of unattached free-thinking souls giving and retracting their loyalties to fortuitously assembled Cabinets of the likeliest talents in the land. Nor would this be in any way desirable or sensible.
The essence of power is the knowledge that what you do is going to have an effect not just an immediate but perhaps a lifelong effect on the happiness and wellbeing of millions of people and so I think the essence of power is to be conscious of what it can mean for others.
In sum, the truth is that we luxuriate in the comfortable assertion that women enjoy equality. We have salved our consciences by eliminating the more obvious discriminations like unequal rates of pay for work of equal value. But, in fact, we have not eliminated the inheritance of the millennia that women are lesser beings, an inheritance which still manifests itself in a whole range of prejudice and other forms of discrimination.
The surest guarantee for continued conflict is to perpetuate the gulf between principle and practice which characterises our community today.
I just loved him and he loved me? He was a most humble man, the most decent man I’ve ever met in my life and he always looked for the best in people to find positives and he said something to me that always remained with me. He said if you believe in the fatherhood of God you must necessarily believe in the brotherhood of man, it follows necessarily and even though I left the church and was not religious, that truth remained with me.
Politics to some extent has become debased in our country, in part because of the perceptions people have of politicians, but also because the actual practice of Government has become too remote from them. Parliament does not provide the link to Government,… it is perceived essentially as a rubber-stamp for the government of the day.
Peoples have come to experience that political structures and divisions of power are not immutable. Nor will they perceive the distribution of wealth and resources between nations to be unalterably ordained by heaven and incapable of drastic rearrangement by the less than gentle manipulation of man.
While society cannot provide employment for its members, the production/work/income nexus has to be abandoned as a justification for our present parsimony to the unemployed. An assumption cannot be used to justify making second-class citizens of those who are unfortunate enough to constitute living proof of the inaccuracy of that assumption.
It is entirely possible to argue for an amendment of Westminster without arguing for either the presidential system or indeed entering the lists at all on behalf of those who believe we should become a Republic. The issues are quite separate.
The world will not wait for us.