I sat listening to the three speakers who were lecturing us in the so-called debate, which at times was more like listening to arguments in a bar. I would have liked to have heard one of the speakers use the word ‘We’, at least once, but no one did. We are, after all, voting for a party, not a person. Anyone who has worked in a large organization would understand that decisions have to be made all the way down the line, or nothing would be done, and the major decisions are taken in committee. From time to time one does find a genius who can carry large projects forward almost unaided, but I don’t think that this is the case now.
I found Gordon Brown obsequious, rather like a butler who had dropped the entrée. Clegg obviously knew that his only chance of rising in status was to be involved in a hung parliament. Cameron seems to have drawn his horns in a little, and rather than going into too much detail, was bent on undermining the other two. The electorate understands that going into a new parliament, is a little like moving house, and it’s difficult to budget until you’ve lived in it for a while. I found the proposals of how the future economy was going to be handled, so much pie-in-the-sky. There is no way that they will be able to sort things out for the first six months, and by that time things will have changed radically, because, geographically we are an island. In every other way we are just part of the world economy, and the effects the changes in the world structure is having on that economy.
We used to vote on tribal lines, but the days of cities being a collection of small villages, where whole families lived their whole lives, generation on generation, with politicians fed politics with their mother’s milk have all gone. Now our families are scattered across the Globe, and our politicians are mainly graduates in Political Science, rather than a mixture of trade union officials, landed gentry and people from industry. Am I wrong in thinking there is not enough experience and knowledge of the needs, preferences, worries and objections of the man in the street, in Parliament? The dichotomy of the lack of public transport increasing both road traffic and Co2 emission, is a case in point, one could list many