Reading

At the moment I am reading a number of different books. As it turns out, but perhaps not unsurprisingly, this is a very ineffective way to get your reading done, but that hasn’t stopped me. One is a fiction book – The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins - and the other two are both non-fiction – one on civil liberties and another on politics since 1918.

For some reason, I seem to have a need at the moment to understand how we have got to where we are as a nation, primarily on a political front. I am not someone who is very political really, but I see how much politics impacts our lives. One of the things I have noticed over the last few years is that we lack real characters in politics these days – and I think that character is generally represented by someone having a strong ideology. They are known for having a strong view that impacts the way that they operate. But actually over the last few years, the main motivator for politicians seems to have been staying popular – primarily with the media and secondly with the public. It makes for very tedious and directionless politics in my view.

There is also an old adage about history repeating itself and so I wonder if, in uncertain times, it is possible to have some idea of what the future might hold.

On a more minor note, one of the things I have learned though is that until about the middle of the last century some people had more than one vote. It seems that it was a way of giving the working class the vote, but allowing their “betters” to have more of a say. If you were a graduate, right up until the 1940s you could vote twice in an election. How very democratic.