Reporting Live: British election. The surprise will be on whom?
Well, not exactly “Reporting live”: I wrote this on April 18, ju?st after Theresa May called the British election. I sent it to three British friends, also to the Canadian Globe and Mail that said it was too short. I post it here today exactly as I wrote it then (aside from adding “British election” to the title, and regretting having included two words in the first sentence: Jeremy Corbyn).
There are 64 million Brits and yet they can’t do better than Theresa May, let alone Jeremy Corbyn or David Cameron? Of course, the Americans couldn’t do better than Donald Trump. The world is now a strange place indeed.
I thought there was one overriding message from David Cameron’s snap vote on Brexit: don’t call snap votes when so much of the electorate is restless. She is, I guess, as sure as was he. Labor is ill-led, and how can the Liberal Democrats possibly come back? The British prime minister may be in for a surprise.
There is another message too, from other snap elections in different places. Be careful of sending voters to the polls too early: they might read this as political cynicism rooted in cocky confidence, punishable by purgatory.
What has happened to good sense in politics, to decency, to wisdom, to modesty? (At least here in Canada we have a prime minister who doesn’t pretend to be president.) There is the story of an old lady in Maine who said: “I never vote. It only encourages them.” In these days at least, that’s wisdom. How come she was never elected president?
? Henry Mintzberg 2017
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Holistic organization transformation champion| Human-centered, bureaucracy-free and self-managed organizations activist
7 年"What has happened to good sense in politics, to decency, to wisdom, to modesty?": almost disappeared, unfortunately. The thirst for power is too strong to let pace for the rest of values
Innovation Management | Decision-Making | Digital Transformation | Data Analytics and Visualisation
7 年Not only restless, divided on many issues too
Honorary Research Professor at University of Otago
7 年I would recommend watching Scotland's First Minister who is by far the most impressive politician in the UK at present.
Gestionnaire de projets principale multimodale soutenus par l’IA générative - Gestion du changement incluant refonte des processus et politiques corporatives centrés sur l’HUMAIN - Fluently bilingual
7 年Right on professor Henry Mintzberg -and with a few chuckles as well. Former President Barack Obama wants to devote this new chapter of his life to get the next generations involved in their democracy via a number of endeavors. What the younger generations are witnessing in the UK, the US as well as other countries (Turkey and Venezuela come to mind) will be complicating Obama’s work in my opinion.