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.

I was saying that in the current system ‘the people’ as a whole broadly want what we’ve got, it encourages all parties to gather round the centre ground, and the centre ground is by default, what people want….it’s a bad average of the positions people would vote for, that ends up being specifically not what most people would vote for…

If you’re looking for tricky counting, part of the electoral system in Woods dictatorship involves each head of department being chosen by the electorate with an option for each voter to list up to 30 out of the 100 candidates for each post in a borda count system. So assuming 20 posts to be chosen each voter has up to 9300 votes.

And yes I figured it was automatic, just letting ya know there was another reply coming from the past…never would have occured to me to look out for the ci@lis in soci@lism.

(I’ll refrain from any expecially rude examples!)

“I think most of the reason the three parties are so clustered together is that people are generally pretty happy with the way things are….even if they don’t think so, when offered alternatives….”

Why do you think that?

try a bit of basic analysis:

graph of internet access:
http://www.statistics.gov.uk/CCI/nugget.asp?ID=8
http://www.ofcom.org.uk/research/telecoms/reports/bbresearch/int_bband_updt/may2004/figure3
http://www.oucs.ox.ac.uk/internal/annrep/annrep9900/figure19.jpg

graphs of turnout;
http://www.esrc.ac.uk/ESRCInfoCentre/facts/index15.aspx

I’m suggesting causality, but simply that during the 90s this “politician-speak” emerged in the wake of the traumas at either end of the 80s for different sectors of society; and this precipitated disenfranchisement, and then conincided with the emergence of the internet and info-revolution (incl. digital media in general), which has created a new paradigm in political activity and supplanted the old model – and the old model has now been found to be inadequate not only in the realms of discourse, but also in terms of economic management, and in terms of morals – a perfect storm.
social mobility and infestation and centralisation of the media and political spheres has further alienated large swathes of society… those who have been on the “right” side of the boom in information, wealth, and everything else have dominated the discourse.
This has now changed: more people are more educated; more informed, and more engaged by the technologies info revolution, and can now use that muscle to make new choices; and expectations in the social, economic, and moral realms have been suddenly unmet, and this is a toxic tsunami for any political establishment.

That’s the background.

I don’t think there should be any differences between those three – I think they should simply merge into one party and stop the facade.

You won’t get rid of parties – our species is hard-wired to categorise and organise, to groupform, to discriminate (or favour).

I think what is desirable is for a huge number of MPs to go; and for the triumvirate’s cold dead grip on power to be prised away.
PR isn’t the answer, but maybe a more proportional non-list single member system where you pick three in order of preference, and they get points for it… but that’ll be a pig to count!

I think most of the reason the three parties are so clustered together is that people are generally pretty happy with the way things are….even if they don’t think so, when offered alternatives….

I suspect the best way for good change would be constitutional/electoral reform, possibly something leading away from the party system entirely…