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Monday, December 01, 2003

Constitutional reform, Palestine, Mary Seacole

Thanks for the comments and the advice on spelling. Oh please dear typepad, install a spell checker for Christmas!
Reforming constitutions is a tricky business. I'm all for a written constitution if you are emerging from dictatorship but if there is a long tradition of freedom and tolerance then they are not absolutely necessary. Harryj gave the example of the USA but on a cautionary note do remember their constitution was drawn up on the basis of all men being created equal. It wasn't just women who got left out of the equality bit but also slaves and the North American Indian. There were some 90 million of the latter at the beginning of the 19th. century and only about 5 million at the end of it. The other 85 million did not go on holiday. A written constitution did not help them. The old Soviet Union had a wonderful written constitution. Just to read it was enough to make you think you were in paradise. Sadly it was meaningless.
In Britain we could set up a committee and talk for years about what should or should not be in a written constitution. My guess is we would still be no further forward then we are now. If you doubt that just consider how much difficulty we had getting rid of the hereditary Peers.
There are many different systems for selecting and electing second chambers around the world. Appointment can help protect freedom as long as the appointment system is robust and transparent. Ours isn't at the moment which is why it must and will change. We could then have the regions elected into the second chamber which would also make it much harder for future governments to undermine or abolish locally elected authorities.
I notice Phil is enthusiastic about training representatives. It's true we could do more on that but there are so many ways of doing this job and most people who get elected usually have very strong views about how to represent people. There are opportunities for a brave consultant here!
Thanks for the support on Mary Seacole. She is buried in St. Mary's cemetery on the edge of my constituency but for many years I have been aware of the enormouse contribution made by so many ethnic minorities to Britain that I feel we ought to give them better recognition. William and Ellen Craft for example have a blue plaque on a wall in Hammersmith. They were two slaves who escaped from slavery in the US and on arriving here were taught to read and write and then travelled the country lecturing on the evils of slavery. They eventually wrote a remarkable tract called "Running a thousand miles for freedom". This used to be on the internet but I haven't been able to find it recently.
Anthony suggested I contacted the Times. I did and they didn't respond but I am going to pursue that option.
Finally on George Bush and Palestine. Yes, we do need to put on more pressure to get movement but it isn't one sided. Recently the US did withdraw funding from Israel for the equivalent of the cost of the wall they are erecting. The other side of this coin is that we need an effective and less corrupt Palestinian authority. That is why Syria and eventually Iraq are so important in this. They could and should play a key role in this process. Frankly there is unlikely to be a quick resolution of this dispute. Both sides have an intense and deep seated fear of the other and believe that they intend to wipe them out or totally dominate them. So compromise is not easy. That's why the road map is so important. This process has to build up trust as well as delivering robust agreements. It was largely because of my experience of Northern Ireland politics that I set up the Arab-Jewish Forum. Hopefully I will write that up soon.
Thanks for all the comments and keep posting but please remember that I may not always be able to respond in depth - or at all!

If you use IE as your browser, have a look at ieSpell (http://www.iespell.com/). You can spell check *any* text you enter.

Intresting blog, with lots of sensible ideas, but presented in an indigestible fashion! It looks like one block of text when it should be broken into manageable paragraphs.

You can write your blog in any application with a built in spell checker off line and simply cut and paste it into the text field when you post. But congratulations anyway on getting a blog up and running. Anne Stott is rightit should be broken up. Why not use the text format buttons a bit more? Some very basic HTML would let you include headings etc to break up the posts. Good Luck.

My husband and I are writing a book about Ellen and William Craft's escape from slavery. Do you know where I might find out more about their Hammersmith connection?

Thank you

OMG Clive, I've just polluted my machine by clicking into the robotic spam comments you pointed out in your latest post - if you could see where they lead to I'm sure you'd delete the comments asap - they sure are linking to some real vile stuff. I shan't look into the other December date you mentioned as I guess they're from the same twisted bunch of people. So sorry you are having to deal with this. Maybe in future you'll have to check comments - as and when they come in - by opening up your blog page and clicking into any links left in comments to ensure they are bonafide. Please feel free to delete this comment also. Don't want to give those sort of people any more publicity. btw thanks for the kind mention in your latest post. Glad you read that particular post of mine :-)