different from (god I’m turning into an American like those bloody sentence inflectors!)

not remotely convinced… since they gave up clause 4, they gave up any pretence to a core philosophy any different than that of Blair Light and Blair Lighter.

P h-j

I am a determinist, not a religous-ist.
The reason why morality is something they daren’t touch, is because moral relativism dictates that “good” may not be defined; and if “good” cannot be defined, then “good” cannot be done.

My definition of “good” and morality, stems from a “first principles” approach, and travelling via Plato, Darwin, and Popper.
I would never hand over the determination of morality to a man in a dress waving an ancient book of fairy stories!
Morality can be defined in terms of systems; and in my view, should be defined as rather like a vector than scalar concept: the direction being the persistence of the system. It just so happens that “the 7 deadly sins” concur conveniently with “systemic errors” in the moral logic of the system (in my view).

In one of your posts above you touched on a point which was recently raised by the Archbishop of Canterbury (and the RC Archibishop in Scotland) which is that we do not hear our political leaders making a stand on moral issues of “right” and “wrong”.

To a large extent this is a consequence of the “liberation” philosphy of the 1960s or the concept of “moral relativism”. Actually, both are primarily selfish inasmuch as what is “right” is determined by what any individual hapens to consider “right” for themselves, so there are no absolute or universal values.

The generation which grew up in the 60s/70s who felt most strongly about this approach went on to work in media and public services, labelling themselves as “progressive”. Roy Jenkins described it as “bien-pensant” – the implication being that anyone who thought differently was bad. From this developped the concept of “political correctness” – which is plain totalitarianism if looked at objectively.

Whenever any politician has tried to make a stand based on moral values, they have been ridiculed by this self-appointed clicque, led most notably by our publicly-funded broadcaster.

Prime examples are Frank Field and Iain Duncan-Smith, but also look at what happened to John Major when he launched “back to basics” in an attempt to bring back some morality. The media immediately jumped on some examples of individual misbehaviour to rubbish the concept which threatened their world-view.

If we want to reconnect politics with morality, we need to reform our media, or we are asking for characters with incredible courage to stand up to them.

It may be possible. In the past few weeks I have heard more prayers in church for our politicians and leaders than I can ever recall in the past.

We’ve evolved rapidly over the last 20 years, led by technological development. Our system of electing people to speak up for us shouldn’t be locked in the past, but brought up to date.

The one thing that could attract a lot of people’s vote woould be a referendum offering a choice of electoral systems.

The one positive thing about the last few weeks has been a sudden burst of energy in the electorate. There is an opportunity to turn that energy into positive engagement.

I think that’s fair JIM JAM. When the post GE blood has been sluiced away people who have that “core philosophy” will come together & re-express it.But there will be arguments about what that philosophy is or should be , and more blood will be spilt. And this will all be a cleansing .

Meanwhile the concept of Cameron’s philosophy expressed in your second paragraph will be seen as dated……because of course he has already been through the process described above….he knows why Conservatives kept losing & all of this will feed into the “Labour” quest for it’s new/old/revised/whatever philosophy.

And so it goes on ad infinitum-the constant game of catching up with the public.