I hear you

and I'm sure there will be a God Not Him cohort at the next election (assuming he's still there - which I do).

But there's been this corrosive narrative since Blair that politics is all about owning the Centre. Endless focus groups try to define what the Centre actually is and there's this spiral of pseudo-intellectual "analysis" which is actually the precise opposite, in the sense that it doesn't analyse anything useful.

What's a United Kingdom for? Why do we have a government of any kind at all? What should its powers be and not be? What should it try to achieve for the people who live in the UK and as a player on the world stage? There are economic and ethical drivers which sometimes conflict - how do we resolve that? How do we deal with states which seek to destroy us? To what extent should we risk and spend the lives of young men and women to protect citizens of other countries? If great evil is happening somewhere do we sit back and watch or take a proactive stance?

None - literally none - of the discussion at the last election was about any of that.

I'm not saying Corbyn will wave a magic wand and get the conversation in every pub onto any of this. But I do think his election will jolt us as a nation back into discussing the kind of things we should be - ideally in the way we should be.

Posted By: Old Man, Sep 17, 23:51:34