Tag: reforming democracy
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Lament at UK Election time 2017
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I cannot just argue or disagree when my own country decides to throw itself into the sea. If Britain is an oak tree centuries old, then I am a leaf somewhere to one side, barely visible and increasingly wrinkled. But the great tree’s nature still courses through me and my short life…
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The Flotsam of Frantic Dreams
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We don’t know any more where our lives belong or even where to hide. The walls of home hold nothing up or out and the door hangs slack on the hinge. Where have our lives gone ? I consult the news and the world ended several days ago. Today it’s ending all…
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High Noon this Easter
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Let’s recall the film “High Noon,” that great Western. The outlaw and his hoodlum cronies are riding into town. They want revenge on the sheriff, the keeper of the law. The sheriff scours the town looking for support, a posse of townspeople who will help him defend their community from the outlaws. The townspeople know…
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A Drawing of Conclusions
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It is surely still natural to respect a conclusion that is reached through cogent argument. Each stage of the argument leads to the next stage, like a series of links in a chain. The conclusion is given its authority, its right to be heard and accepted, by the strength of the links that have led…
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If the People is Sovereign, Lying to the People is High Treason
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As 2016 comes to an end, I want to present an argument which I believe follows from the year’s events. Different elements of the argument have already been touched on here in recent posts. I must begin with language and those first words of St John’s Gospel. In the beginning was [and was always] the…
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Naming the Beast of the Year
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This beast has our country’s contours written all over it. It has leapt from out of the ruins of the city, those hollow squares, and from the great labrynth below ground where the thread got tangled, and from the wi-fi and the wires through which we do not speak but intone like digital toys…
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The Dance of the Emperor who Wears no Clothes
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The Brexit dance continues. And in London, a court case has just come to an end, in which lawyers have been debating whether or not Parliament should have influence over the Brexit process. We shall hear the result of that court case in the near future. But its implications are profoundly important and the discussion…