It's The Deed Silly, Not The Party!
Politics should be more than tribalism and the self-righteous assertion that one tribe represents heaven and the other hell. But alas British politics for the last two hundred years has been based around a bi polarity that seems to do just that.
I have a great love of 19th century literature and one of the books that I have never read is George Elliot’s Middlemarch but I am now making amends and am half way through it. It is a long read and yes it is a novel but it is also a social history of the time of Catholic Emancipation, the Great Reform Bill and the abolition of the Corn Laws.
The bi polarities of that time were intriguing and especially those between to old landed aristocracy and the new aspiring merchant and business class. And just as today tribalism was rampant. As one character says,
"In this stupid world most people never consider that a thing is good to be done unless it is done by their own set.”
Fast-forward 180 years and nothing has changed. It never fails to amuse me that in the age of the digital world and social networks people add ticks and likes to their own tribe whilst ignoring others. If a Labour person advocates a good cause there is a rush of likes to the news on Facebook from fellow Labour comrades, but if a Tory does the same “good act” then the “likes” stay hidden. And of course it is true the other way round.
What is being thus cheered is not the “good deed” but that the right tribe has advocated it.
Somehow there must be people who will liberate “good deeds” from the prison of Party politics where what is being done is less important than who is doing it.
And perhaps there should be those around who are truly Marxists (in the Groucho sense) and who will say, like Groucho “I would never belong to a group that would have me as a member. “
It may be a lonely world out there for the “Grouchos” but in our fast changing world perhaps they are needed more than ever.
Integrated Peace Strategist, Designer, Inventor, Policy advisor. .
4 年Francis this may sound correct, yet it is not at all in recent years. From 2004 onwards New Labour, Labour and Conservative all copied and plaguerised my work. The evidence for this is on my articles here. Has been posted on your site previously and I have spoken about this in two of your meetings. The copying and plagiarising of work is why there were two elections with what was called Big Society and yet not a single person in the government could adequately explain exactly what the work was other than it being "vague and amorphous" the reason for that is it was "Inherited for New Labour REF. BBC Tory Party conference 2010) You worked for the BBC why not go and check this reference if you want to be better informed on what has really gone on in UK politics. Or perhaps you could go with what I'm saying here, which is also confirmed by Ministerial letter to me and filmmaker Ken Loach also in a letter to me. So "the Integrity Initiative" took many forms, you are now helping the deception with this,