Two sided stories blog

The TV, Radio and paper news may tell us the non news of what Mr Right or Mr Left of centre is going to say today, but occasionally they illustrate a different aspect of politics...

I have a serious issue with our political system that I know is widely shared - the way that the two main parties vie for electioneering points "in the period leading up to a general election".

Our politics, as a species, appears hopelessly short term, and designed to encourage people to think that all planning should be for four years ahead at most.
While I can enthuse about the idea of individuals living as if they are going to die tomorrow - this is not what governments are supposed to do.
They are supposed to take the other half of
that little homily and "Plan like they are going to live forever".

I would like to see someone in the Labour camp - but they would probably have to be a friend of Mandy's - make people understand the truth in Einstein's saying about the insanity of believing that doing the same actions as you have always done can bring about a different result.

In this case the context is shaping your politics around winning an election when the world doesn't care about your anti-Tory sound bites or glazed eye promises of what you will do in 3 years time - you clearly have no idea of how obvious it is that you are not expecting to be in government in 1 or 5 years time.

And..EVEN if this was serious hope, how better to convince the public that the Labour party deserves to have another four years in power than by ignoring the electioneering completely and revealing, instead of Michael Foot's suicide note - a coherent vision of the next twenty years (as many local authorities work on, as well as private sector businesses and quangos).

But don't do this as "Approaching the general election" - do it as something you plan to work on whether in opposition or in power, to bring people together to save the planet from its short-termist, expansionist, growth obsessed political classes and their leaders' pathetic studio glossed images of themselves as celebrity idiots.

The way the government is working now is more like Jones and Fraser in Dad's Army - far too far removed from the war time message the rest of us seem to want on our walls, and T shirts:
"Keep calm and carry on".