When an MP crosses the floor without returning to the electorate, the Nolan Principles of public life – not least integrity – are flagrantly flouted. It is a breach of trust. When we vote, we choose not merely a person but a particular policy perspective: a party.
Our political class is paralysed because the wider nation has not yet decided in what direction it wishes to be led.
Prime Minister Keir Starmer paid little more than lip service to the fate of Jimmy Lai during his visit to China this month.
Parties are far too in thrall to the temporary nature of polls that gauge those public attitudes. They don’t share my Fantasy Premier League patience or Singapore’s investing mantra.
Surely we have to encourage Mr Trump and Mr Xi to sit down and devise a revitalised UN which, give or take a few safeguards, is based on power, tasked with a very specific role and given the wherewithal to enforce its diktats. We might not like it, but what else is there?
Will the crisis over illegal migrants precipitate the PM’s abandonment of his commitment to human rights?
While the moral and democratic arguments for lowering the voting age are widely discussed, far less attention is paid to the practical consequences.
This is not about discrimination. It is about upholding the social contract that binds us together, and asking if we can truly live together, side by side, if we cannot even look one another in the face.
We didn’t gather to escape from Rachel Reeves, Angela Rayner, Zia Yusuf, Nigel Farage, Sadiq Khan and Keir Starmer, we gathered to focus on them and to freely vent the true depths of our frustrations and anxieties at what is being foisted upon us. We met to talk about what we hoped for and yearned for.
Here are four clauses for a potential Bill of Rights which, if included, would get us as close as our constitution can get to American free-speech protections.
The alarming trend of undermining freedom of speech, stripping independence from academies, and imposing a 20 per cent VAT on independent school fees pose significant threats to educational choice and accessibility.
This is not a dispute on policy but on priorities, and I suspect Thatcher herself might tell you that the contemporary Conservative version of the ancient Japanese rice festival is emblematic of the wrong one.
Whomever might replace us and Labour, if they prove just as hopeless, enough voters might conclude that this democracy shtick isn’t worth the effort, and it’s time we tried something new.
When senior figures in the Green Party of England and Wales rush to condemn Western democracies but seem to really struggle to speak with the same alacrity about Tehran’s persecution of its own citizens, something is awry.