Why bother?

I don’t ask much from politians. I expect them to do lots of things I either cannot or do not want to do. I expect them to create and maintain a progressive local and national environment for the rest of us to be the best we can at whatever we want to do. Whilst we get on with our lives, I expect them to support those of us who are disadvantaged through no fault of our own and to protect us from harm.

I am prepared to pay for this. I want the environment they are responsible for to be self-financing through taxation or other means and for the revenues to be fairly generated and dispensed. And I want them to be held to account at and between elections but not either to become the news through individual transgression nor attempt to manipulate it themselves.

In considering how to vote, I have always worried about representation. Our politicians need to represent us and not to be repaying the support from influential groups, be these commercial interests, mass movements or the media. Once they have convinced me of their good offices, I offer them my trust and the expectation that they will act according to their conscience as portrayed to me.

If I am honest, I lean more towards open than closed; more left than right, but that of course depends on where you thing the centre lies. I believe government should do just enough and not grow beyond what’s expedient. I do not believe in dogma beyond practical need. Honest review and policy change are healthy consequences of effective review.

So far as our place in the world is concerned, I would advocate working together with our neighbour and other nations to achieve not just what is in our own interests but what will serve the greater good. After all, what goes around, comes around.

The world is now global and unlikely to revert back to individual sovereignty. Many issues like fishing rights, trading rules, refugees, pandemics and climate change affect us all and will become progressively more multi-national and influential. These are amongst the hard decisions politicians will take on our behalf. Their accountability here as everywhere depends upon communicating a balanced judgement though reasoned argument.

I want to be proud of my country, not for its history but for what it stands for now; its moral compass, how it respects its citizens and the contribution it makes to what we might call, global order.

I am conscious of prescient views from the past:

Democracy is not a spectator sport, it's a participatory event. If we don't participate in it, it ceases to be a democracy (Michael Moore, American documentary filmmaker, 2007)

Your representative owes you, not his industry only, but his judgment; and he betrays instead of serving you if he sacrifices it to your opinion (Edmund Burke, British MP, 1774).