"To be honest, you could walk away from all of this tomorrow." (He often says "you" to distance himself from the intended "I".) "I'm not interested in what accompanies being in power. It wouldn't worry me if I never returned to any of those places - Downing Street, Chequers. That would not worry me at all. And it would probably be good for my children."More here.
Mind you, there are a lot of people out there who'd love to have the choice - the veritable luxury, in fact - of walking away from work and by thus doing, so achieving the same. That is to say, doing the right thing for their children. The economic crisis that has befallen us has made all of that all the more difficult. Children and families and parents and households are all suffering in their small and trivial, yet measurable, ways because rich people with more money than sense played silly games with all our futures.
In the meantime, I find myself in a sea of contradictions. It was my birthday recently and my family bought me a smartphone - an icon, if there ever was one, of all that I should despise and distrust. And yet I am fascinated by the beast. I have installed Skype on it, Opera Mini, Gmail and Google Maps; even the Mobi ebook reader - a French enterprise now in the clutches of Amazon.
"Who else?" you might say.
I continue to tussle with my conscience as gigantic organisations made to make profit out of the labour of small people bring the fruits of technology to my doorstep. I am a prolific user of free services provided by companies like Google and Nokia and Amazon. I am incoherent with my principles - I am bereft of them even, quite to my dismay.
And yet, on the third day of my proud ownership of my new Nokia E63 (ruby red I promise you - for I could never be a blue, even in my moments of profoundest despair), I download the Communist Manifesto from Project Gutenberg and thus it is that I begin to read a quite fascinating document.
I can't say I agree with the implications of the Communist way. I think it is solidly tied into a time and a place.
It's bond and its coherence with that time and place is - at the same time - its weakness.
But its heart - its atheist soul perhaps I should say - is in exactly the right place.
We must revisit its lessons as we try to fashion a world that does not tear itself apart through its own contradictions but aims to come together out of the dissonance of diversity.
For we are all diverse and any politics must start by recognising this.
Both in its system as well as in its outlook. Both in its benevolence to as well as in its support for human frailty.
How can I justify downloading an ebook of the Communist Manifesto to a tool which is the essence of all that is wrong in instant-gratification yuppie land? Well, I can't. I am frail also. But I do believe our future depends on our ability to accept our differences, our contradictions, our uncertain figures. If this blog has tried to say anything to those who would care to listen, it is that - above all - our differences should make us better, stronger, fitter and wiser. And our ability to countenance difference should serve to make us more humble.
Events over the past couple of months have made me reconsider my relationship with traditional politics.
Too much bad stuff, really.
I need to have more time to reflect, to understand, to try and comprehend. I can't do the blogging of snap judgements. I'm just not good enough a writer. Once, I spent about six months doing that. It wasn't productive. There must be a better way to bridge what Andrew Regan has called the yawning gap between blogging and policy-making. More blogging isn't that way.
I am convinced that the way forward is a different kind of distribution. A different kind of distribution is needed, a different kind of information.
A different kind of voice.
A different kind of soul.
A soul which countenances contradiction and exception - and then loves you because you care, you truly care, to properly countenance it yourself.
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