I thought last night’s edition of this programme, like not a few that had gone before it, provided excellent examples of why I am standing for parliament on the platform I am and why others are both repeating the same message and offering somewhat different versions of it.
I think the distinctions are also important.
A question on ‘How do we do deliver more kindness’ produced some very revealing answers.
It was answered in many cases with reference to the current political situation but, not for the first time,
the best answer was delivered by the one non politician on the panel, Chris Boardman. He said basically:
‘by listening better to one another, trying to get into the other person’s shoes, seeing their point of view and being aware of how,
even when arguing with one another, we can still be supporting each other and the things we have in common’.
Liz Saville Roberts from Plaid Cymru added to this by pointing to ‘the noble art of being able to change one’s mind’.
The ability to yield to another point of view should be seen as a strength, in appropriate circumstances, not a weakness.
And yet even this in a way missed the point which is that a better ability to acknowledge all points of view leads to better decision making.
The means exist to expand this ability and we need to do more to enlist their help.
We must encourage our politicians to do this too and insist upon it as a way of dealing with our current crises -
over Brexit and everything else - and as a way of finding a productive path forward.
What this really means seems to elude even those politicians who do have a sense for it,
so that Clive Lewis could speak about the need to depersonalise our politics in this election and have a ‘battle of ideas’ rather than between personalities, but even here we are talking about a battle without seeing that it is this very mentality of going to war over everything that gets in the way of more rounded, more inclusive, more effective solutions.
The lady from the Brexit party, Alex Phillips, struggled similarly to see the difference between fighting with honour and fighting at all,
when speaking of the virtue of being honest about one’s opinions.
This is true and fair – we do need to be honest about our views and not ‘hide them under a rock’ for strategic purposes.
But the problem can be the very strength of those opinions which makes it harder to see the virtue of another point of view at all.
In fact we may not even allow ourselves to listen sufficiently so that this might be revealed to us.
James Cleverly got the biggest mauling of all from the same man in the audience who had put the question in the first place.
The Chair of the Tory party was talking about the kindness of making his wife a cup of coffee in the morning and this drew towards him the angry response that his answer should be more about matters of State and the state his party had left certain people in.
James’ measured response, in pointing out the little kindnesses that MPs of all persuasions show to one another behind the scenes, especially in situations of individual distress and difficulty, was to be commended for its calmness.
But this again missed the point that the ‘kindness’ needed is in how politicians conduct themselves in debate itself and how they see and relate to each other in terms of the principal reason why they are there.
Liz Saville Roberts did show particular sensitivity and awareness when she linked the benefits of listening to one another with better mental health. But this situation too applies equally to matters of State and public debate and it may be interesting that we now seem to have an increasing crisis in both these domains.
More United was also mentioned. This movement takes its name from the maiden speech given by Jo Cox, the Labour MP who was murdered in 2016.
It also calls for MP’s of all persuasions to work together more in pursuit of certain objectives.
It offers MP’s every encouragement to sign up to its principles and makes financial resources available to help their campaigns.
It has been, according to its own publicity, very effective and it is certainly to be applauded many respects.
But it seems also to be a response from within the political establishment itself towards certain desirable ends rather than
a response to the message from the public to their MPs and I wondered how much scope there might be for it to be more active in that.
It is this message from the electorate which I so strongly feel has now to be advanced.
An interesting question, finally, in relation to all this is what do we mean by kindness anyway?
It means more than simply being considerate of each other and attending to each other’s needs whilst still remaining essentially in the same place we were at before. In the Bible the different species of animals are referred to as the different ‘kinds’.
In the human kingdom, notwithstanding all the things we have in common as individuals, each individual is more like a species in himself.
And so to be more kind means to be able to see feel and hear things more as another person does.
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I really feel that we are heading for disaster over Brexit as wounds which have been opened up over this will not be healed by ‘getting Brexit done’ but will go on for years and neither side will really have won.
For all it is being talked up by its architects, or re-modellers, this is not a fantastic deal and a fantastic deal would be recognized by many,
many more - if not everyone - as such. It may get us out of Europe in some ways at least,
but it will not heal the nation’s wounds and it is simply bizarre wishful thinking to imagine it will; to imagine that after we have pulled out – on whatever terms or none, as things stand – we will once again be a nation at one.
That is the same thing as imagining that after every conflict, there will be universal peace and happiness again.
There will not. There will be on going resentment from the losers and this will seek its vengeance further down the road.
We have to be more considerate of these things.
This has been the history of so many conflicts across so many continents.
Is it not what inevitably happens when you try to resolve things in the way we, or some of us, are trying to do now?
Why do we not see this? What gets in the way of this recognition? It is something that needs to change.
Richard Shaw
15th November 2019
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