Thursday 15 April 2010

The Leaders debate

I’m not planning on watching the party leaders’ debate on the idiot box tonight. I really don’t see the point. One of the problems we have in this country now is that the media seemed to have successfully reduced politics to a celeb-fest. Image is all. Power and influence resides with a handful of folk, and the party leader is portrayed as the party. We live in a Parliamentary democracy that should mandate an individual to represent the whole their constituency. Unfortunately it no longer quite seems to work like that. There is no office of Prime Minister yet the political process has been reduced almost to a race for this one coveted job. Why?

In many ways the individual party leader shouldn’t matter. It should be the party that people want to support. Supporting it in the knowledge that it will stick to the principles by which it stand. The party leader should merely be a custodian steering the party to where the supporters, members and MPs wish it to go. Idealism can be a painful affliction at times!

No comments:

Post a Comment