Fiddling with expenses while Britain burns [2]
论文作者:佚名论文属性:短文 essay登出时间:2009-04-28编辑:gcZhong点击率:3322
论文字数:4894论文编号:org200904291402593145语种:中文 Chinese地区:中国价格:免费论文
关键词:
ron approach is causing considerable concern in his own party. “With Margaret Thatcher you knew exactly what she would think on every issue. You can't say the same about David Cameron,” one Tory frontbencher told me. “There's a lack of clarity from the top. It's all about short-term headlines rather than big ideas. Labour are losing the next election but we're not winning it. We're not doing enough to persuade the voters that we know what we would do.”
Confucius told his disciple Tsze-kung that three things are needed for government - weapons, food and trust, and a ruler should give up weapons first, and then food, before relinquishing trust. “Without trust we cannot stand,” he said. Our rulers have got it the wrong way round - perhaps it is easier to get a receipt for rockets, and indeed rocket salad, than respect. Ironically, as the philosopher Onora O'Neill argued in the Reith Lectures a few years ago, the very tools designed to enhance trust - transparency, accountability and human rights - have been used to undermine the public's respect for those in power. But those genies are out of the bottle; they cannot be put back in. Now politicians need to win back trust by being open about things that matter more than their expenses.
One Cabinet minister says that MPs themselves have turned Westminster into a “conveyor belt of personality stories” by allowing politics to become too “manufactured” and centrally controlled. “Too much of modern politics starts from what voters already think, based on focus group research, and then tries to create dividing lines to box other parties into being against positions which those focus groups reveal to be popular with the public,” he says. “But the voters see straight through us so they stop listening. Left on the outside of a closed system voters interpret our words through the prism of our personality to try to get to the real meaning. We need a different politics that reflects the importance of the decisions at stake.”
Now, more than ever, policy matters. For the first time since 1997, there are real differences between the parties about how to run the economy. But the politicians need to be honest about what that means. Otherwise they will be left with the trivia. The downward spiral of mistrust will continue and, as in Animal Farm, the voters will look “from pig to man and from man to pig” and conclude that “already it was impossible to say which was which”.
本论文由英语论文网提供整理,提供论文代写,英语论文代写,代写论文,代写英语论文,代写留学生论文,代写英文论文,留学生论文代写相关核心关键词搜索。