Member Of Parliament Quotes

A member of Parliament to Disraeli: 'Sir, you will either die on the gallows or of some unspeakable disease.' That depends, Sir,' said Disraeli, 'whether I embrace your policies or your mistress.

On two occasions, I have been asked [by members of Parliament], 'Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?' I am not able to rightly apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question.

The people of England regards itself as free; but it is grossly mistaken; it is free only during the election of members of parliament. As soon as they are elected, slavery overtakes it, and it is nothing.

Here's some simple advice: Always be yourself. Never take yourself to seriously. And beware of advice from experts, pigs, and members of Parliament.

Conservatives are not necessarily stupid, but most stupid people are conservatives... I never meant to say that the Conservatives are generally stupid. I meant to say that stupid people are generally Conservative. I believe that is so obviously and universally admitted a principle that I hardly think any gentleman will deny it. Suppose any party, in addition to whatever share it may possess of the ability of the community, has nearly the whole of its stupidity, that party must, by the law of its constitution, be the stupidest party; and I do not see why honorable gentlemen should see that position as at all offensive to them, for it ensures their being always an extremely powerful party . . . There is so much dense, solid force in sheer stupidity, that any body of able men with that force pressing behind them may ensure victory in many a struggle, and many a victory the Conservative party has gained through that power." John Stuart Mill ( British philosopher, economist, and liberal member of Parliament for Westminster from 1865 to 68 )

We find that at present the human race is divided into one wise man, nine knaves, and ninety fools out of every hundred. That is, by an optimistic observer. The nine knaves assemble themselves under the banner of the most knavish among them, and become 'politicians'; the wise man stands out, because he knows himself to be hopelessly outnumbered, and devotes himself to poetry, mathematics, or philosophy; while the ninety fools plod off under the banners of the nine villains, according to fancy, into the labyrinths of chicanery, malice and warfare. It is pleasant to have command, observes Sancho Panza, even over a flock of sheep, and that is why the politicians raise their banners. It is, moreover, the same thing for the sheep whatever the banner. If it is democracy, then the nine knaves will become members of parliament; if fascism, they will become party leaders; if communism, commissars. Nothing will be different, except the name. The fools will be still fools, the knaves still leaders, the results still exploitation. As for the wise man, his lot will be much the same under any ideology. Under democracy he will be encouraged to starve to death in a garret, under fascism he will be put in a concentration camp, under communism he will be liquidated.

A man whose desire is to be something separate from himself, to be a member of Parliament, or a successful grocer, or a prominent solicitor, or a judge, or something equally tedious, invariably succeeds in being what he wants to be.  That is his punishment.  Those who want a mask have to wear it.

So, what happens in the world is that everybody is fighting somebody. One man is lesser than another man. There is no love, there is no consideration, there is no thought. Each man wants to become somebody. A member of parliament wants to become the leader of the parliament, to become the prime minister, and so on and on and on. There is perpetual fighting, and our society is one constant struggle of one man against another, and this struggle is called the ambition to be something. Old people encourage you to do that. You must be ambitious, you must be something, you must marry a rich man or a rich woman, you must have the right kind of friends. So, the older generation, those who are frightened, those who are ugly in their hearts, try to make you like them, and you also want to be like them because you see the glamour of it all. When the governor comes, everybody bows...

Anna Arkadyevna read and understood, but it was distasteful to her to read, that is, to follow the reflection of other people’s lives. She had too great a desire to live herself. If she read that the heroine of the novel was nursing a sick man, she longed to move with noiseless steps about the room of a sick man; if she read of a member of Parliament making a speech, she longed to be delivering the speech; if she read of how Lady Mary had ridden after the hounds, and had provoked her sister-in-law, and had surprised everyone by her boldness, she too wished to be doing the same. But there was no chance of doing anything; and twisting the smooth paper knife in her little hands, she forced herself to read.

The majority of the members of the Irish parliament are professional politicians, in the sense that otherwise they would not be given jobs minding mice at crossroads.

John Stuart Mill (20 May 1806 – 8 May 1873), English philosopher, political theorist, political economist, civil servant and Member of Parliament, was an influential liberal thinker of the 19th century whose works on liberty justified freedom of the individual in opposition to unlimited state control. He was an exponent of utilitarianism, an ethical theory developed by Jeremy Bentham, although his conception of it was very different from Bentham's. He clearly set forth the premises of the scientific method.

I do not know that the Chinese system is any worse; there is a limit to the evil one despot alone can do, and if he is truly vicious he can be overthrown; a hundred corrupt members of Parliament may together do as much injustice or more, and be the less easy to uproot.

More recently, Labour MP Dawn Butler took umbrage at a new brand of ‘jerk rice’ that had been marketed by television chef Jamie Oliver. ‘Your jerk rice is not ok,’ Butler tweeted. ‘This appropriation from Jamaica needs to stop.’ For me, angry tweets addressed to celebrity chefs are what being a Member of Parliament is all about.

To decide once every few years which member of the ruling class is to repress and crush the people through parliament - such is the real essence of bourgeois parliamentarianism, not only in parliamentary-constitutional monarchies, but also in the most democratic republics.

It used to be that a novel would put you among people, tell you a story or stories, give you some sense of what it might be like to see a different cut-out and perspective of the world: as a schoolteacher, an adulteress, the wife of a member of Parliament, an officer, a cockroach.

It contained a spell for turning Members of Parliament into useful members of society and now, just when Uncle Auberon thought he had a use for it, he could not find it

blowing up three hundred Parliament members and the king of England wasn't restoration. It was death with no phoenix to rise out of it.

Hitherto, the Palestinians had been relatively immune to this Allahu Akhbar style. I thought this was a hugely retrograde development. I said as much to Edward. To reprint Nazi propaganda and to make a theocratic claim to Spanish soil was to be a protofascist and a supporter of 'Caliphate' imperialism: it had nothing at all to do with the mistreatment of the Palestinians. Once again, he did not exactly disagree. But he was anxious to emphasize that the Israelis had often encouraged Hamas as a foil against Fatah and the PLO. This I had known since seeing the burning out of leftist Palestinians by Muslim mobs in Gaza as early as 1981. Yet once again, it seemed Edward could only condemn Islamism if it could somehow be blamed on either Israel or the United States or the West, and not as a thing in itself. He sometimes employed the same sort of knight's move when discussing other Arabist movements, excoriating Saddam Hussein's Ba'ath Party, for example, mainly because it had once enjoyed the support of the CIA. But when Saddam was really being attacked, as in the case of his use of chemical weapons on noncombatants at Halabja, Edward gave second-hand currency to the falsified story that it had 'really' been the Iranians who had done it. If that didn't work, well, hadn't the United States sold Saddam the weaponry in the first place? Finally, and always—and this question wasn't automatically discredited by being a change of subject—what about Israel's unwanted and ugly rule over more and more millions of non-Jews? I evolved a test for this mentality, which I applied to more people than Edward. What would, or did, the relevant person say when the United States intervened to stop the massacres and dispossessions in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Kosovo? Here were two majority-Muslim territories and populations being vilely mistreated by Orthodox and Catholic Christians. There was no oil in the region. The state interests of Israel were not involved (indeed, Ariel Sharon publicly opposed the return of the Kosovar refugees to their homes on the grounds that it set an alarming—I want to say 'unsettling'—precedent). The usual national-security 'hawks,' like Henry Kissinger, were also strongly opposed to the mission. One evening at Edward's apartment, with the other guest being the mercurial, courageous Azmi Bishara, then one of the more distinguished Arab members of the Israeli parliament, I was finally able to leave the arguing to someone else. Bishara [...] was quite shocked that Edward would not lend public support to Clinton for finally doing the right thing in the Balkans. Why was he being so stubborn? I had begun by then—belatedly you may say—to guess. Rather like our then-friend Noam Chomsky, Edward in the final instance believed that if the United States was doing something, then that thing could not by definition be a moral or ethical action.

All the six hundred and fifty-eight members in the Commons House of Parliament of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland; who are strong lovers no doubt, but of their country only, which makes all the difference; for in a passion of that kind (which is not always returned), it is the custom to use as many words as possible, and express nothing whatever.

Nothing passes unchallenged there; the Houses of Parliament hatch some twelve hundred laws every session, yet no member of Parliament has ever yet raised an objection to the system —

On December 13, 1931, a fifty-seven-year-old English politician, still a member of Parliament but quite unwelcome in his own party’s government, stepped out of a taxi on New York’s Fifth Avenue.

Pamela’s husband, Randolph, newly minted member of Parliament, missed the birth. He was in London, in bed with the wife of an Austrian tenor, whose monocled image appeared on cigarette trading cards.

Tony Blair's response when asked by one of his Parliament members why he believes so much in America: "A simple way to take measure of a country is to look at how many want in.. And how many want out.

The gangs filled a void in society, and the void was the absence of family life. The gang became a family. For some of those guys in the gang that was the only family they knew, because when their mothers had them they were too busy having children for other men. Some of them never knew their daddies. Their daddies never look back after they got their mothers pregnant, and those guys just grew up and they couldn’t relate to nobody. When they had their problems, who could they have talked to? Nobody would listen, so they gravitated together and form a gang. George Mackey, the former representative for the historic Fox Hill community in The Bahamas.

The story was certainly current at court, and in 1535 a Member of Parliament, Sir George Throckmorton, accused Henry to his face of 'meddling' with both Anne's mother and sister Mary. 'Never with the mother,' Henry said.

But the nation’s business must go forward, and this is how: an act to give Wales members of Parliament, and make English the language of the law courts, and to cut from under them the powers of the lords of the Welsh marches.

One by one, members of the Commons, speaking in turn at a lectern in the center of the chamber, added their charges and complaints. The King’s councillors, they said, had grown rich at the cost of impoverishing the nation; they had deceived the King and wasted his revenues, causing the repeated demands for fresh subsidies. The people were too poor and feeble to endure further taxation. Let Parliament discuss instead how the King might maintain the war out of his own resources.

Just imagine: if a member of the party (elected member of parliament, candidate or simple activist) were to make a public commitment, ‘Whenever I shall have to examine any political or social issue, I swear I will absolutely forget that I am the member of a certain political group; my sole concern will be to ascertain what should be done in order to best serve the public interest and justice.’ Such words would not be welcome. His comrades and even many other people would accuse him of betrayal. Even the least hostile would say, ‘Why then did he join a political party?’ – thus naively confessing that, when joining a political party, one gives up the idea of serving nothing but the public interest and justice. This man would be expelled from his party, or at least denied pre-selection; he would certainly never be elected.

Reaching out to immigrants promotes national security. Following the July 7, 2005, London subway suicide bombings by British-born Muslim terrorists, Boris Johnson, a member of Parliament, noted that Americans did not grow their own suicide bombers, giving credit to Americans for acculturating its immigrants.

Uncle Auberon (who was quite an old gentleman) had stopt listening to them both a while ago and had wandered off to resume his search for a book. It contained a spell for turning Members of Parliament into useful members of society and now, just when Uncle Auberon thought he had a use for it, he could not find it (though he had had it in his hand not a hundred years before). So Mr Goodfellow said nothing but quietly turned himself back into William Shakespeare.

Bill C-9 was supposed to be a budget bill, but it came with innumerable measures that had little or nothing to do with the nation's finances. It was, as critics put it, the advance of the Harper agenda by stealth, yet another abuse of the democratic process. The bill was a behemoth. It was 904 pages, with 23 separate sections and 2,208 individual clauses.... As a Reform MP, [Stephen Harper] .... said of one piece of legislation that 'the subject matter of the bill is so diverse that a single vote on the content would put members in conflict with their own principles.' The bill he referred to was 21 page long -- or 883 pages shorter than the one he was now putting before Parliament.

We won the right to be free citizens. And it’s one of the privileges of being born English that no matter who you are, no matter if you’re rich or poor, you’re born free and you’re born so that you can express your opinion freely, and vote in your member of parliament or vote him out. That’s what dignity’s really about, if you’ll excuse me, sir.

[representative government is] deciding once in three or six years which member of the ruling class was to misrepresent the people in Parliament,

Social Media and Internet is the new government. We are all members of the parliament. Be careful what you post, because it might change a life or it might take a life.

I should like to distinguish two things which are very often confused. The Christian conception of marriage is one: the other is the quite different question--how far Christians, if they are voters or Members of Parliament, ought to try to force their views of marriage on the rest of the community by embodying them in the divorce laws. A great many people seem to think that if you are a Christian yourself, you should try to make divorce difficult for every one. I do not think that. At least I know I should be very angry if the Mohammedans tried to prevent the rest of us from drinking wine. My own view is that the Churches should frankly recognize that the majority of the British people are not Christians and, therefore, cannot be expected to live Christian lives. There ought to be two distinct kinds of marriage: one governed by the State with rules enforced on all citizens, the other governed by the Church with rules enforced by her on her own members. This distinction ought to be quite sharp, so that a man knows which couples are married in a Christian sense and which are not.

People point to Reading Gaol, and say ‘There is where the artistic life leads a man.’ Well, it might lead one to worse places. The more mechanical people, to whom life is a shrewd speculation dependent on a careful calculation of ways and means, always know where they are going, and go there. They start with the desire of being the Parish Beadle, and, in whatever sphere they are placed, they succeed in being the Parish Beadle and no more. A man whose desire is to be something separate from himself, to be a Member of Parliament, or a successful grocer, or a prominent solicitor, or a judge, or something equally tedious, invariably succeeds in being what he wants to be. That is his punishment. Those who want a mask have to wear it.

The executive possesses means of distracting Parliament from its proper function; it seduces members by the offer of places and pensions, by retaining them to follow ministers and ministers' rivals, by persuading them to support measures —whereby the activities of administration grow beyond Parliament's control. These means of subversion are known are known collectively as corruption, and if ever Parliament or those who elect them—for corruption may occur at this point too—should be wholly corrupt, then there will be an end of independence and liberty.

I believe that members of parliament should be prohibited from holding office for an extended period of time. The aim is not to sanction elected members who have experience — because politics, like everything else, requires know-how and skills. Nevertheless, when politics is no longer a vocation but a profession, political leaders no longer have commitment, and have vested interests.

Generally speaking, it is no longer the ambition of monarchs which endangers peace; but the impulses of a nation, its dissatisfaction with its internal conditions, the strife of parties and the intrigues of their leaders. A declaration of war, so serious in its consequences, is more easily carried by a large assembly, of which no one of the members bears the sole responsibility, than by a single individual, however lofty his position; and a peace-loving sovereign is less rare than a parliament composed of wise men. The great wars of recent times have been declared against the wish and will of the reigning powers. Now-a-days

Watching Nigel Farage rudely insult fellow members of the European Parliament today - the first occasion they were all assembled in Brussels since the tragic 'Brexit' referendum result - made me feel utterly ashamed to be British. Let it be known that Nigel Farage is the very epitomy of a narrow-minded 'Little Englander' who does not represent the vast majority of outward-looking people from Great Britain. His shameful and unofficial campaign to convince the British electorate to leave the European Union was peppered with lies and deceit. His populist and xenophobic rhetoric has also subsequently contributed to ugly scenes of racial abuse and hate crime directed at Eastern European nationals and ethnic minorities living and working in the UK, in the wake of the referendum result. Fellow Europeans, world citizens, let this be a wake-up call. Deny your own domestic peddlers of populism and nationalism the opportunity to follow the example of this unelected, disrespected maverick, intent on making a name for himself, for he has unwittingly unleashed a wrecking ball on Britain's future economic prosperity, cultural diversity and social harmony.

Are Members of Parliament, for example, to be seen as delegates of the voters, bound to follow the will of their electorate? Or are they representatives, elected to exercise their own judgement in the changing circumstances of government?

Pitt and Burke were two of the most eloquent and respected members of Parliament, and taken together, by early 1775, they were warning the British ministry that it was headed toward a war that was unwise, unnecessary, and probably unwinnable.

Silverbridge, though it was blessed with a mayor and corporation, and was blessed also with a Member of Parliament all to itself, was not blessed with any court-house. The magistrates were therefore compelled to sit in the big room at the “George and Vulture,” in which the county balls were celebrated, and the meeting of the West Barsetshire freemasons was held. That part of the country was, no doubt, very much ashamed of its backwardness in this respect, but as yet nothing had been done to remedy the evil

Ding! Lady Elizabeth Figgles. Her father’s a viscount and a member of Parliament, and she’s also Sam Berkinshire’s—an old schoolmate and one of my dearest friends—girlfriend. “Elizabeth? What the hell are you doing here? Where’s Sam?” “Sam can go fucking die.” She looks right at the camera. “Are you getting this? You can go fucking die, Sam! I hope your prick gets caught in a wood chipper, you cheating bastard!” “He cheated on you? Sam?” Sam’s a great guy. The kind of guy even really good guys want to be more like. He makes Abraham Lincoln look like a lying shit. “Your face right now, that’s exactly how I looked when I found out—but a hell of a lot angrier. I found receipts, knickers that weren’t mine, rubbers. Faithless, worthless son of a bitch.” She bangs the table and her nails are long enough to double as claws. “Now I want Sam to see what it feels like. So I’m going to fuck you. On television. A lot. Hopefully live. You’d better rest up, Henry. I brought lube—a whole bucket of it.” Wow. Ding!

Joseph Goebbels had artfully accomplished what all good propagandists must, convincing the world that their version of reality was reasonable and their opponents’ version biased. In doing that, Goebbels had not only created a compelling vision of the new Germany but also undercut the Nazis’ opponents in the West—whether they were American Jews in New York City or members of Parliament in London or anxious Parisians—making all of them seem shrill, hysterical, and misinformed. As thousands of Americans returned home from the games that fall, many of them felt as one quoted in a German propaganda publication did: “As for this man Hitler. . . . Well I believe we should all like to take him back to America with us and have him organize there just as he has done in Germany.

Sovereignty, for the same reason as makes it in alienable, cannot be represented; it lies essentially in the general will, and will does not admit of representation: it is either the same, or other; there is no intermediate possibility. The deputies of the people, therefore, are not and cannot be its representatives: they are merely its stewards, and can carry through no definitive acts. Every law the people has not ratified in person is null and void -- is in fact, not a law. The people of England regards itself as free; but it is grossly mistaken; it is free only during the election of members of parliament. As soon as they are elected, slavery overtakes it, and it is nothing. The use it makes of the short moments of liberty enjoys shows indeed that it deserves to lose them.

I believe I did succeed in making Indian uslims look upon me as a friend: when I was nominated to be a member of the Rajya Sabha many said, "We have another Muslim in Parliament." Others who disliked my views called me an unpaid agent of Pakistan. I treated both views as compliments.

To protect them from Hitler’s bombers, the curators secreted Wallace’s and Darwin’s bird skins in unmarked lorries to manors and mansions throughout the English countryside. Among the safe houses was a private museum in the tiny town of Tring, built by one of the richest men in history as a twenty-first-birthday present for his son. Lionel Walter Rothschild would grow up to earn many distinctions: the Right Honorable Lord, Baron de Rothschild, member of Parliament, adulterer, blackmail victim, and one of the most tragically obsessive bird collectors ever to roam the earth.

That raised an issue still familiar in modern electoral systems. Are Members of Parliament, for example, to be seen as delegates of the voters, bound to follow the will of their electorate? Or are they representatives, elected to exercise their own judgement in the changing circumstances of government?

That raised an issue still familiar in modern electoral systems. Are Members of Parliament, for example, to be seen as delegates of the voters, bound to follow the will of their electorate? Or are they representatives, elected to exercise their own judgement in the changing circumstances of government? This

And it is only in its early stage. All those who believe they will remain untouched by its wrath are delusional. If Ehsan Jafri, a former member of parliament with a line to the deputy prime minister’s office, could be dragged out of his home and gashed and burned alive, what makes anyone think he or she will remain unharmed? If Aamir Khan, one of India’s biggest film stars, can be unpersoned; if Gauri Lankesh, one of its boldest journalists, can be shot dead; if Ramachandra Guha, one of its greatest historians, can be stopped from lecturing; if Naseeruddin Shah, among its finest actors, can be branded a traitor; if Manmohan Singh, the former prime minister, can be labelled an agent of Pakistan by his successor; if B.H. Loya, a perfectly healthy judge, can abruptly drop dead; if a young woman can be stalked by the police machinery of the state because Modi has displayed an interest in her—what makes the rest of us think we will remain untouched and unharmed? Unless the republic is reclaimed, the time will come when all of us will be one incorrect meal, one interfaith romance, one unfortunate misstep away from being extinguished. The mobs that slaughtered ‘bad’ Muslims will eventually come for Hindus who are not ‘good’.

The same ingenious application of slogans, coined by others and tried out before, was apparent in the Nazis' treatment of other relevant issues. When public attention was equally focused on nationalism on the one hand and socialism on the other, when the two were thought to be incompatible and actually constituted the ideological watershed between the Right and the Left, the "National Socialist German Workers' Party" (Nazi) offered a synthesis supposed to lead to national unity, a semantic solution whose double trademark of "German" and "Worker" connected the nationalism of the Right with the internationalism of the Left. The very name of the Nazi movement stole the political contents of all other parties and pretended implicitly to incorporate them all. Combinations of supposedly antagonistic political doctrines (national-socialist, christian-social, etc.) had been tried, and successfully, before; but the Nazis realized their own combination in such a way that the whole struggle in Parliament between the socialists and the nationalists, between those who pretended to be workers first of all and those who were Germans first, appeared as a sham designed to hide ulterior sinister motives—for was not a member of the Nazi movement all these things at once?

Naturally the principles vary with the party; but owing to the mere fact that the individual members are a part of a crowd, they are always inclined to exaggerate the worth of their principles, and to push them to their extreme consequences. In consequence parliaments are more especially representative of extreme opinions.

That’s what we fought Hitler for, after all. If Hitler had had things his way, we’d just be slaves now. The whole world would be a few masters and millions upon millions of slaves. And I don’t need to remind anyone here, there’s no dignity to be had in being a slave. That’s what we fought for and that’s what we won. We won the right to be free citizens. And it’s one of the privileges of being born English that no matter who you are, no matter if you’re rich or poor, you’re born free and you’re born so that you can express your opinion freely, and vote in your member of parliament or vote him out. That’s what dignity’s really about, if you’ll excuse me, sir.

We’re always the last, Stevens. Always the last to be clinging on to outmoded systems. But sooner or later, we’ll need to face up to the facts. Democracy is something for a bygone era. The world’s far too complicated a place now for universal suffrage and such like. For endless members of parliament debating things to a standstill.

Working simultaneously, though seemingly without a conscience, was Dr. Ewen Cameron, whose base was a laboratory in Canada's McGill University, in Montreal. Since his death in 1967, the history of his work for both himself and the CIA has become known. He was interested in 'terminal' experiments and regularly received relatively small stipends (never more than $20,000) from the American CIA order to conduct his work. He explored electroshock in ways that offered such high risk of permanent brain damage that other researchers would not try them. He immersed subjects in sensory deprivation tanks for weeks at a time, though often claiming that they were immersed for only a matter of hours. He seemed to fancy himself a pure scientist, a man who would do anything to learn the outcome. The fact that some people died as a result of his research, while others went insane and still others, including the wife of a member of Canada's Parliament, had psychological problems for many years afterwards, was not a concern to the doctor or those who employed him. What mattered was that by the time Cheryl and Lynn Hersha were placed in the programme, the intelligence community had learned how to use electroshock techniques to control the mind. And so, like her sister, Lynn was strapped to a chair and wired for electric shock. The experience was different for Lynn, though the sexual component remained present to lesser degree...

A man whose desire is to be something separate from himself, to be a member of Parliament, or a successful grocer, or a prominent solicitor, or a judge, or something equally tedious, invariably succeeds in being what he wants to be. That is his punishment. Those who want a mask have to wear it. But with the dynamic forces of life, and those in whom those dynamic forces become incarnate, it is different. People whose desire is solely for self-realisation never know where they are going. They can’t know. In one sense of the word it is of course necessary, as the Greek oracle said, to know oneself: that is the first achievement of knowledge. But to recognise that the soul of a man is unknowable, is the ultimate achievement of wisdom.

Does the Convocation make the laws?" Erskyll asked. Hozhet was perplexed. "Make laws, Lord Proconsul? Oh, no. We have laws." There were planets, here and there through the Empire, where an attitude like that would have been distinctly beneficial; planets with elective parliaments, every member of which felt himself obligated to get as many laws enacted during his term of office as possible.

Sovereignty, for the same reason as makes it inalienable, cannot be represented; it lies essentially in the general will, and will does not admit of representation: it is either the same, or other; there is no intermediate possibility. The deputies of the people, therefore, are not and cannot be its representatives: they are merely its stewards, and can carry through no definitive acts. Every law the people has not ratified in person is null and void — is in fact, not a law. The people of England regards itself as free; but it is grossly mistaken; it is free only during the election of members of parliament. As soon as they are elected, slavery overtakes it, and it is nothing. The use it makes of the short moments of liberty it enjoys shows indeed that it deserves to lose them.

Imaginary Lives Imaginary Lives is a thought experiment I have adapted from two important career-change thinkers, Julia Cameron and John Williams, which aims to take your ideas a stage closer towards specific job options.55 It’s simple but potentially powerful. • Imagine five parallel universes, in each of which you could have a whole year off to pursue absolutely any career you desired. Now think of five different jobs you might want to try out in each of these universes. Be bold in your thinking, have fun with your ideas and your multiple selves. Your five choices might be food photographer, member of parliament, tai chi instructor, social entrepreneur running a youth education project, and wide-achieving Renaissance generalist. One person I know who did this activity – a documentary film maker who was having doubts about her career – listed massage therapist, sculptor, cellist, screen-play writer, and owner of her own bar on a tiny, old-fashioned Canarian island. Now come back down to earth and look hard at your five choices. Write down what it is about them that attracts you. Then look at them again, and think about this question: • How does each career measure up against the two motivations in the previous activity that you chose to prioritize in the future? If you decided, for instance, that you want a combination of making a difference and high status, check whether your five imaginary careers might provide them. The point is to help you think more deeply about exactly what you are looking for in a career, the kind of experiences that you truly desire.

The very houses seemed disposed to pack up and take trips. Wonderful Members of Parliament, who, little more than twenty years before, had made themselves merry with the wild railroad theories of engineers, and given them the liveliest rubs in cross-examination, went down into the north with their watches in their hands, and sent on messages before by the electric telegraph, to say that they were coming.

The English Civil Wars made a number of irreversible changes to life in England. Firstly, the crown lost its feudal rights and authority over the courts. Secondly, the crown lost its right to levy taxes without Parliament’s consent or to arrest Members of Parliament without cause. Thirdly, Parliament became a permanent part of the British institution and lastly, the Church of England ceased to be the sole religious institution.

Churchill wrote to his friend and colleague Alfred Duff Cooper that there were some “unpleasant features in this election which indicate the rise of bad elements.” He added, “Conscientious objectors were preferred to candidates of real military achievement and service.” Members of Parliament “who had done the most to hamper and obstruct the war were returned by enormously increased majorities.” And, “None of the values of the years before were preserved.

That raised an issue still familiar in modern electoral systems. Are Members of Parliament, for example, to be seen as delegates of the voters, bound to follow the will of their electorate? Or are they representatives, elected to exercise their own judgement in the changing circumstances of government? This was the first time, so far as we know, that this question had been explicitly raised in Rome, and it was no more easily answered then than it is now.

Communist Romania almost everything was owned by the state. Democratic Romania quickly privatised its assets, selling them at bargain prices to the ex-communists, who alone grasped what was happening and collaborated to feather each other’s nests. Government companies that controlled national infrastructure and natural resources were sold to former communist officials at end-of-season prices while the party’s foot soldiers bought houses and apartments for pennies. Ion Iliescu was elected president of Romania, while his colleagues became ministers, parliament members, bank directors and multimillionaires. The new Romanian elite that controls the country to this day is composed mostly of former communists and their families. The masses who risked their necks in Timişoara and Bucharest settled for scraps, because they did not know how to cooperate and how to create an efficient organisation to look after their own interests.21

India is a land where contradictions will continue to abound, because there are many Indias that are being transformed, with different levels of intensity, by different forces of globalization. Each of these Indias is responding to them in different ways. Consider these coexisting examples of progress and status quo: India is a nuclear-capable state that still cannot build roads that will survive their first monsoon. It has eradicated smallpox through the length and breadth of the country, but cannot stop female foeticide and infanticide. It is a country that managed to bring about what it called the ‘green revolution’, which heralded food grain self-sufficiency for a nation that relied on external food aid and yet, it easily has the most archaic land and agricultural laws in the world, with no sign of anyone wanting to reform them any time soon. It has hundreds of millions of people who subsist on less that a dollar a day, but who vote astutely and punish political parties ruthlessly. It has an independent judiciary that once set aside even Indira Gandhi’s election to parliament and yet, many members of parliament have criminal records and still contest and win elections from prison. India is a significant exporter of intellectual capital to the rest of the world—that capital being spawned in a handful of world class institutions of engineering, science and management. Yet it is a country with primary schools of pathetic quality and where retaining children in school is a challenge. India truly is an equal opportunity employer of women leaders in politics, but it took over fifty years to recognize that domestic violence is a crime and almost as long to get tough with bride burning. It is the IT powerhouse of the world, the harbinger of the offshore services revolution that is changing the business paradigms of the developed world. But regrettably, it is also the place where there is a yawning digital divide.

thousands more exiles across the vast and furious ocean, seeking political freedom in the colonies. It would also foster in them a deep and abiding spirit of rebellion against arbitrary rule. Even as dissenters in New England struggled to survive their first winter in a settlement they named Plymouth, members of Parliament were beginning to challenge the tradition by which Parliament met only when summoned by the king. In 1621, Edward Coke, who, after Ralegh’s beheading in 1618 had emerged

Tiberius persuaded them to vote out of office the tribune who opposed him, his argument went along the lines of ‘if the people’s tribune no longer does what the people want, then he should be deposed’. That raised an issue still familiar in modern electoral systems. Are Members of Parliament, for example, to be seen as delegates of the voters, bound to follow the will of their electorate? Or are they representatives, elected to exercise their own judgement in the changing circumstances of government?

At the heart of the concept of the rule of law is the idea that society is governed by law. Parliament exists primarily in order to make laws for society in this country. Democratic procedures exist primarily in order to ensure that the Parliament which makes those laws includes Members of Parliament who are chosen by the people of this country and are accountable to them. Courts exist in order to ensure that the laws made by Parliament, and the common law created by the courts themselves, are applied and enforced. That role includes ensuring that the executive branch of government carries out its functions in accordance with the law. In order for the courts to perform that role, people must in principle have unimpeded access to them. Without such access, laws are liable to become a dead letter, the work done by Parliament may be rendered nugatory, and the democratic election of Members of Parliament may become a meaningless charade. That is why the courts do not merely provide a public service like any other.

It is sometimes remarked that, whilst Scotland has become a distinctive polity since the Scottish Parliament's re-establishment, it is still regarded 'down south' as a territory and possession of the British state to which it remains beholden. This is certainly true in the field of defence where the military bases, weaponry and other assets in Scotland are regarded by London, and even by Washington and NATO's other member states, as the British state's necessary territories and properties - its intrinsic entitlement - in both a physical and politico-legal sense.

What is the use of Parliament if it is not the place where true statements can be brought before the people? What is the use of sending Members to the House of Commons who say just the popular things of the moment, and merely endeavour to give satisfaction to the Government Whips by cheering loudly every Ministerial platitude, and by walking through the Lobbies oblivious of the criticisms they hear? People talk about our Parliamentary institutions and Parliamentary democracy; but if these are to survive, it will not be because the Constituencies return tame, docile, subservient Members, and try to stamp out every form of independent judgment.

The culture that created the KJV championed marriage as the ideal state decreed by God. The holy (male-headed) household formed the center of English society, from the household of the urban merchant to the lordly estates of the members of Parliament. Law codes favored husbands and male heirs by excluding women from inheritance, reducing married women to the legal status of children, and elevating marriage as key for securing masculine social rank and authority. Yet early modern biblical scholars found that marriage was puzzlingly absent from the Old Testament (the Hebrew Bible), especially for an institution thought to be championed by God.

He ate a ghastly blutwurst in the dining car, finished Bartha, managed to buy a copy of Est, the evening edition brought in from Budapest, at the station buffet in Brno. Clearly, political life was heating up. Two members of parliament had come to blows. At a workers’ march in the Tenth District, bricks thrown, people arrested. To the Editor. Sir: How can we let these liberal pansies run our lives? An editorial called for “strength, firmness, singleness of purpose. The world is changing, Hungary must change with it.” A coffeehouse by the university had burned down. TENS OF THOUSANDS CHEER HITLER SPEECH IN REGENSBURG. With photograph, on page one. Here they come, Morath thought.

In the great world outside Hungary events were taking place that would change all their lives: the uprising in Russia, the dispute over Crete, the Kaiser Wilhelm’s ill-timed visit to Tangier, the revelation of Germany’s plans to expand its navy – but such matters were of no importance to the members of the Hungarian Parliament. Even events closer to home, such as the rabble-rousing speech of an Austrian politician in Salzburg urging revolt among the German-speaking minorities in northern Hungary, or the anonymous pamphlet, which appeared in Vienna and revealed the total unpreparedness of the Austro-Hungarian forces compared with those of the other European powers, went unnoticed in Budapest. Naturally when Apponyi made a speech in favour of Deszo Baffy’s proposal to limit the demand for Hungarian commands in the army to using Hungarian only in regimental matters, everyone listened and discussed it as if their very lives depended on it.

You cannot imagine, to give you another example, that you may have, one day, a prime minister (it would go against my modesty to breathe his name) who, one day, after announcing in Parliament, in a cool, impassive voice, that, as the result of a number of carefully thought out diplomatic manoeuvres he has refrained from discussing before (for he is not a man of many words), he has succeeded in annexing Britain as an ordinary colony of Hungary, and that he is taking this opportunity to apprise the House of the fact; - Well, as I say, after explaining this in a cool and impassive tone, ignoring the shouting, jubilant Members who want to carry him round on their shoulders, suddenly he takes up a fencing posture and, right there, on the premier's rostrum, employing a formidable, hitherto unknown jujitsu hold, floors the Australian world wrestling champion whom the British opposition treacherously hid under the rostrum in order to assassinate the greatest European.

When public attention was equally focused on nationalism on one hand and socialism on the other, when the two were thought to be incompatible and actually constituted the ideological watershed between the Right and the Left, the “National Socialist German Workers’ Party” (Nazi) offered a synthesis supposed to lead to national unity, a semantic solution whose double trademark of “German” and “Worker” connected the nationalism of the Right with the internationalism of the Left. The very name of the Nazi movement stole the political contents of all other parties and pretended implicitly to incorporate them all. Combinations of supposedly antagonistic political doctrines (national-socialist, christian-social, etc.) had been tried, and successfully, before; but the Nazis realized their own combination in such a way that the whole struggle in Parliament between the socialists and the nationalists, between those who pretended to be workers first of all and those who were Germans first, appeared as a sham designed to hide ulterior sinister motives—for was not a member of the Nazi movement all these things at once?

Although Golden Boy is a work of fiction, the situations portrayed in it are real. The first materials that Habo and Davu read together in the library are all real. The children’s book they read aloud is a real book, True Friends: A Tale from Tanzania, by John Kilaka. All of the newspaper headlines they read came from real newspapers. Sadly, the stories of the people with albinism in Golden Boy are real as well. The two members of parliament that Habo sees on TV are real people, and so was Charlie Ngeleja. He died in Mwanza the way Auntie describes to Habo’s family. Charlie’s is just one story, but there are too many like his. When I came across a news story in 2009 that told about the kidnapping, mutilation, and murder of African albinos for use as good-luck talismans, I was upset that I had never heard about the tragedy before. I started looking for books on the subject and found none. The most I could find were a few articles from international newspapers and a documentary produced by Al Jazeera English: Africa Uncovered: Murder & Myth. This haunting documentary touched a nerve and sent me down the path of writing Golden Boy.

Between the Restoration and the Glorious Revolution, the Stuart Kings Charles II and James II succeeded in using select militias loyal to them to suppress political dissidents, in part by disarming their opponents. Under the auspices of the 1671 Game Act, for example, the Catholic James II had ordered general disarmaments of regions home to his Protestant enemies. These experiences caused Englishmen to be extremely wary of concentrated military forces run by the state and to be jealous of their arms. They accordingly obtained an assurance from William and Mary, in the Declaration of Right (which was codified as the English Bill of Rights), that Protestants would never be disarmed: “That the subjects which are Protestants may have arms for their defense suitable to their conditions and as allowed by law.” This right has long been understood to be the predecessor to our Second Amendment. It was clearly an individual right, having nothing whatever to do with service in a militia. To be sure, it was an individual right not available to the whole population, given that it was restricted to Protestants, and like all written English rights it was held only against the Crown, not Parliament. But it was secured to them as individuals, according to “libertarian political principles,” not as members of a fighting force.

Last night they stole the watchman’s rattle, and knocked the watchman down. Now they go rattling through the streets, proclaiming the ballad of Worse-was-it-Never. There was a former age, it seems, when wives were chaste and pedlars honest, when roses bloomed at Christmas and every pot bubbled with fat self-renewing capons. If these times are not those times, who is to blame? Londoners, probably. Members of Parliament. Reforming bishops. People who use English to talk to God. Word spreads. On the farms around, labourers see the chance of a holiday. Faces blackened, some wearing women’s attire, they set off to town, picking up any edged tool that could act as a weapon. From the marketplace you can see them coming, kicking up a cloud of dust. Old men anywhere in England will tell you about the drunken exploits of harvests past. Rebel ballads sung by our grandfathers need small adaptation now. We are taxed till we cry, we must live till we die, we be looted and swindled and cheated and dwindled … O, Worse was it Never! Farmers bolt their grain stores. The magistrates are alert. Burgers withdraw indoors, securing their warehouses. In the square some rascal sways on top of a husting, viewing the rural troops as they roll in. ‘Pledge yourselves to me—Captain Poverty is my name.’ The bell-ringers, elbowed and threatened, tumble into the parish church and ring the bells backward. At this signal, the world turns upside down.

Another secret organization that tries to influence world politics is the Bilderberg Group, founded in 1954 by Prince Bernhard van Lippe Biesterfeld and Joseph Retinger. This group consists of a number of permanent members that form a small core, and a number of changing members that are invited to take part in conferences. The members meet once a year behind closed doors. The Inner Circle, that is the Round Table, consists of nine members of the Bilderberg Group. Then there is a decision making forum that consists of thirteen members. Finally there are three more members that make up the Inner Circles. These consist of members of the black nobility and other exceptionally influential men. Despite the strict confidentiality and secrecy surrounding the Bilderberg Group, some of their objectives got out. The following objectives are strived for: An international economic Power Block. Founding an international Parliament. Creating an international “World Army” through the abolition of national armed forces. Restriction of the power of national governments in favor of a unique and coordinated World Government. Traditionally the international press never mentions anything about the content of the off-the-record discussions. Sometimes a conference where prominent members from the world of politics, business and society speak confidentially about international questions is mentioned briefly. It is always mentioned that the participants assist as private persons, not in their official occupations. However it is striking that the participants of every Bilderberg conference are flown in from all parts of the world with airplanes and helicopters belonging to different air forces. Also, the large police force used to prevent disturbances and protect the invited is paid for by the tax contributors.[48]

Baron, Baroness Originally, the term baron signified a person who owned land as a direct gift from the monarchy or as a descendant of a baron. Now it is an honorary title. The wife of a baron is a baroness. Duke, Duchess, Duchy, Dukedom Originally, a man could become a duke in one of two ways. He could be recognized for owning a lot of land. Or he could be a victorious military commander. Now a man can become a duke simply by being appointed by a monarch. Queen Elizabeth II appointed her husband Philip the Duke of Edinburgh and her son Charles the Duke of Wales. A duchess is the wife or widow of a duke. The territory ruled by a duke is a duchy or a dukedom. Earl, Earldom Earl is the oldest title in the English nobility. It originally signified a chieftan or leader of a tribe. Each earl is identified with a certain area called an earldom. Today the monarchy sometimes confers an earldom on a retiring prime minister. For example, former Prime Minister Harold Macmillan is the Earl of Stockton. King A king is a ruling monarch. He inherits this position and retains it until he abdicates or dies. Formerly, a king was an absolute ruler. Today the role of King of England is largely symbolic. The wife of a king is a queen. Knight Originally a knight was a man who performed devoted military service. The title is not hereditary. A king or queen may award a citizen with knighthood. The criterion for the award is devoted service to the country. Lady One may use Lady to refer to the wife of a knight, baron, count, or viscount. It may also be used for the daughter of a duke, marquis, or earl. Marquis, also spelled Marquess. A marquis ranks above an earl and below a duke. Originally marquis signified military men who stood guard on the border of a territory. Now it is a hereditary title. Lord Lord is a general term denoting nobility. It may be used to address any peer (see below) except a duke. The House of Lords is the upper house of the British Parliament. It is a nonelective body with limited powers. The presiding officer for the House of Lords is the Lord Chancellor or Lord High Chancellor. Sometimes a mayor is called lord, such as the Lord Mayor of London. The term lord may also be used informally to show respect. Peer, Peerage A peer is a titled member of the British nobility who may sit in the House of Lords, the upper house of Parliament. Peers are ranked in order of their importance. A duke is most important; the others follow in this order: marquis, earl, viscount, baron. A group of peers is called a peerage. Prince, Princess Princes and princesses are sons and daughters of a reigning king and queen. The first-born son of a royal family is first in line for the throne, the second born son is second in line. A princess may become a queen if there is no prince at the time of abdication or death of a king. The wife of a prince is also called a princess. Queen A queen may be the ruler of a monarchy, the wife—or widow—of a king. Viscount, Viscountess The title Viscount originally meant deputy to a count. It has been used most recently to honor British soldiers in World War II. Field Marshall Bernard Montgomery was named a viscount. The title may also be hereditary. The wife of a viscount is a viscountess. (In pronunciation the initial s is silent.) House of Windsor The British royal family has been called the House of Windsor since 1917. Before then, the royal family name was Wettin, a German name derived from Queen Victoria’s husband. In 1917, England was at war with Germany. King George V announced that the royal family name would become the House of Windsor, a name derived from Windsor Castle, a royal residence. The House of Windsor has included Kings George V, Edward VII, George VI, and Queen Elizabeth II.

Two nights after the Chaworth ball, Gabriel practiced at the billiards table in the private apartments above Jenner's. The luxurious rooms, which had once been occupied by his parents in the earlier days of their marriage, were now reserved for the convenience of the Challon family. Raphael, one of his younger brothers, usually lived at the club, but at the moment was on an overseas trip to America. He'd gone to source and purchase a large quantity of dressed pine timber on behalf of a Challon-owned railway construction company. American pine, for its toughness and elasticity, was used as transom ties for railways, and it was in high demand now that native British timber was in scarce supply. The club wasn't the same without Raphael's carefree presence, but spending time alone here was better than the well-ordered quietness of his terrace at Queen's Gate. Gabriel relished the comfortably masculine atmosphere, spiced with scents of expensive liquor, pipe smoke, oiled Morocco leather upholstery, and the acrid pungency of green baize cloth. The fragrance never failed to remind him of the occasions in his youth when he had accompanied his father to the club. For years, the duke had gone almost weekly to Jenner's to meet with managers and look over the account ledgers. His wife Evie had inherited it from her father, Ivo Jenner, a former professional boxer. The club was an inexhaustible financial engine, its vast profits having enabled the duke to improve his agricultural estates and properties, and accumulate a sprawling empire of investments. Gaming was against the law, of course, but half of Parliament were members of Jenner's, which had made it virtually exempt from prosecution. Visiting Jenner's with his father had been exciting for a sheltered boy. There had always been new things to see and learn, and the men Gabriel had encountered were very different from the respectable servants and tenants on the estate. The patrons and staff at the club had used coarse language and told bawdy jokes, and taught him card tricks and flourishes. Sometimes Gabriel had perched on a tall stool at a circular hazard table to watch high-stakes play, with his father's arm draped casually across his shoulders. Tucked safely against the duke's side, Gabriel had seen men win or lose entire fortunes in a single night, all on the tumble of dice.

The first signal of the change in her behavior was Prince Andrew’s stag night when the Princess of Wales and Sarah Ferguson dressed as policewomen in a vain attempt to gatecrash his party. Instead they drank champagne and orange juice at Annabel’s night club before returning to Buckingham Palace where they stopped Andrew’s car at the entrance as he returned home. Technically the impersonation of police officers is a criminal offence, a point not neglected by several censorious Members of Parliament. For a time this boisterous mood reigned supreme within the royal family. When the Duke and Duchess hosted a party at Windsor Castle as a thank you for everyone who had helped organize their wedding, it was Fergie who encouraged everyone to jump, fully clothed, into the swimming pool. There were numerous noisy dinner parties and a disco in the Waterloo Room at Windsor Castle at Christmas. Fergie even encouraged Diana to join her in an impromptu version of the can-can. This was but a rehearsal for their first public performance when the girls, accompanied by their husbands, flew to Klosters for a week-long skiing holiday. On the first day they lined up in front of the cameras for the traditional photo-call. For sheer absurdity this annual spectacle takes some beating as ninety assorted photographers laden with ladders and equipment scramble through the snow for positions. Diana and Sarah took this silliness at face value, staging a cabaret on ice as they indulged in a mock conflict, pushing and shoving each other until Prince Charles announced censoriously: “Come on, come on!” Until then Diana’s skittish sense of humour had only been seen in flashes, invariably clouded by a mask of blushes and wan silences. So it was a surprised group of photographers who chanced across the Princess in a Klosters café that same afternoon. She pointed to the outsize medal on her jacket, joking: “I have awarded it to myself for services to my country because no-one else will.” It was an aside which spoke volumes about her underlying self-doubt. The mood of frivolity continued with pillow fights in their chalet at Wolfgang although it would be wrong to characterize the mood on that holiday as a glorified schoolgirls’ outing. As one royal guest commented: “It was good fun within reason. You have to mind your p’s and q’s when royalty, particularly Prince Charles, is present. It is quite formal and can be rather a strain.

A Jewish boy comes to his father and asks, ‘Dad, why shouldn’t we eat pork?’ The father strokes his long white beard thoughtfully and answers, ‘Well, Yankele, that’s how the world works. You are still young and you don’t understand, but if we eat pork, God will punish us and we will come to a bad end. It isn’t my idea. It’s not even the rabbi’s idea. If the rabbi had created the world, maybe he would have created a world in which pork was perfectly kosher. But the rabbi didn’t create the world – God did it. And God said, I don’t know why, that we shouldn’t eat pork. So we shouldn’t. Capeesh?’ In 1943 a German boy comes to his father, a senior SS officer, and asks, ‘Dad, why are we killing the Jews?’ The father puts on his shiny leather boots, and meanwhile explains, ‘Well, Fritz, that’s how the world works. You are still young and you don’t understand, but if we allow the Jews to live, they will cause the degeneration and extinction of humankind. It’s not my idea, and it’s not even the Führer’s idea. If Hitler had created the world, maybe he would have created a world in which the laws of natural selection did not apply, and Jews and Aryans could all live together in perfect harmony. But Hitler didn’t create the world. He just managed to decipher the laws of nature, and then instructed us how to live in line with them. If we disobey these laws, we will come to a bad end. Is that clear?!’ In 2016 a British boy comes to his father, a liberal MP, and asks, ‘Dad, why should we care about the human rights of Muslims in the Middle East?’ The father puts down his cup of tea, thinks for a moment, and says, ‘Well, Duncan, that’s how the world works. You are still young and you don’t understand, but all humans, even Muslims in the Middle East, have the same nature and therefore enjoy the same natural rights. This isn’t my idea, nor a decision of Parliament. If Parliament had created the world, universal human rights might well have been buried in some subcommittee along with all that quantum physics stuff. But Parliament didn’t create the world, it just tries to make sense of it, and we must respect the natural rights even of Muslims in the Middle East, or very soon our own rights will also be violated, and we will come to a bad end. Now off you go.’ Liberals, communists and followers of other modern creeds dislike describing their own system as a ‘religion’, because they identify religion with superstitions and supernatural powers. If you tell communists or liberals that they are religious, they think you accuse them of blindly believing in groundless pipe dreams. In fact, it means only that they believe in some system of moral laws that wasn’t invented by humans, but which humans must nevertheless obey. As far as we know, all human societies believe in this. Every society tells its members that they must obey some superhuman moral law, and that breaking this law will result in catastrophe.

A Jewish boy comes to his father and asks, ‘Dad, why shouldn’t we eat pork?’ The father strokes his long white beard thoughtfully and answers, ‘Well, Yankele, that’s how the world works. You are still young and you don’t understand, but if we eat pork, God will punish us and we will come to a bad end. It isn’t my idea. It’s not even the rabbi’s idea. If the rabbi had created the world, maybe he would have created a world in which pork was perfectly kosher. But the rabbi didn’t create the world – God did it. And God said, I don’t know why, that we shouldn’t eat pork. So we shouldn’t. Capeesh?’ In 1943 a German boy comes to his father, a senior SS officer, and asks, ‘Dad, why are we killing the Jews?’ The father puts on his shiny leather boots, and meanwhile explains, ‘Well, Fritz, that’s how the world works. You are still young and you don’t understand, but if we allow the Jews to live, they will cause the degeneration and extinction of humankind. It’s not my idea, and it’s not even the Führer’s idea. If Hitler had created the world, maybe he would have created a world in which the laws of natural selection did not apply, and Jews and Aryans could all live together in perfect harmony. But Hitler didn’t create the world. He just managed to decipher the laws of nature, and then instructed us how to live in line with them. If we disobey these laws, we will come to a bad end. Is that clear?!’ In 2016 a British boy comes to his father, a liberal MP, and asks, ‘Dad, why should we care about the human rights of Muslims in the Middle East?’ The father puts down his cup of tea, thinks for a moment, and says, ‘Well, Duncan, that’s how the world works. You are still young and you don’t understand, but all humans, even Muslims in the Middle East, have the same nature and therefore enjoy the same natural rights. This isn’t my idea, nor a decision of Parliament. If Parliament had created the world, universal human rights might well have been buried in some subcommittee along with all that quantum physics stuff. But Parliament didn’t create the world, it just tries to make sense of it, and we must respect the natural rights even of Muslims in the Middle East, or very soon our own rights will also be violated, and we will come to a bad end. Now off you go.’ Liberals, communists and followers of other modern creeds dislike describing their own system as a ‘religion’, because they identify religion with superstitions and supernatural powers. If you tell communists or liberals that they are religious, they think you accuse them of blindly believing in groundless pipe dreams. In fact, it means only that they believe in some system of moral laws that wasn’t invented by humans, but which humans must nevertheless obey. As far as we know, all human societies believe in this. Every society tells its members that they must obey some superhuman moral law, and that breaking this law will result in catastrophe.

A Jewish boy comes to his father and asks, ‘Dad, why shouldn’t we eat pork?’ The father strokes his long white beard thoughtfully and answers, ‘Well, Yankele, that’s how the world works. You are still young and you don’t understand, but if we eat pork, God will punish us and we will come to a bad end. It isn’t my idea. It’s not even the rabbi’s idea. If the rabbi had created the world, maybe he would have created a world in which pork was perfectly kosher. But the rabbi didn’t create the world – God did it. And God said, I don’t know why, that we shouldn’t eat pork. So we shouldn’t. Capeesh?’ In 1943 a German boy comes to his father, a senior SS officer, and asks, ‘Dad, why are we killing the Jews?’ The father puts on his shiny leather boots, and meanwhile explains, ‘Well, Fritz, that’s how the world works. You are still young and you don’t understand, but if we allow the Jews to live, they will cause the degeneration and extinction of humankind. It’s not my idea, and it’s not even the Führer’s idea. If Hitler had created the world, maybe he would have created a world in which the laws of natural selection did not apply, and Jews and Aryans could all live together in perfect harmony. But Hitler didn’t create the world. He just managed to decipher the laws of nature, and then instructed us how to live in line with them. If we disobey these laws, we will come to a bad end. Is that clear?!’ In 2016 a British boy comes to his father, a liberal MP, and asks, ‘Dad, why should we care about the human rights of Muslims in the Middle East?’ The father puts down his cup of tea, thinks for a moment, and says, ‘Well, Duncan, that’s how the world works. You are still young and you don’t understand, but all humans, even Muslims in the Middle East, have the same nature and therefore enjoy the same natural rights. This isn’t my idea, nor a decision of Parliament. If Parliament had created the world, universal human rights might well have been buried in some subcommittee along with all that quantum physics stuff. But Parliament didn’t create the world, it just tries to make sense of it, and we must respect the natural rights even of Muslims in the Middle East, or very soon our own rights will also be violated, and we will come to a bad end. Now off you go.’ Liberals, communists and followers of other modern creeds dislike describing their own system as a ‘religion’, because they identify religion with superstitions and supernatural powers. If you tell communists or liberals that they are religious, they think you accuse them of blindly believing in groundless pipe dreams. In fact, it means only that they believe in some system of moral laws that wasn’t invented by humans, but which humans must nevertheless obey. As far as we know, all human societies believe in this. Every society tells its members that they must obey some superhuman moral law, and that breaking this law will result in catastrophe.

The Seventh Central Pay Commission was appointed in February 2014 by the Government of India (Ministry of Finance) under the Chairmanship of Justice Ashok Kumar Mathur. The Commission has been given 18 months to make its recommendations. The terms of reference of the Commission are as follows:  1. To examine, review, evolve and recommend changes that are desirable and feasible regarding the principles that should govern the emoluments structure including pay, allowances and other facilities/benefits, in cash or kind, having regard to rationalisation and simplification therein as well as the specialised needs of various departments, agencies and services, in respect of the following categories of employees:-  (i) Central Government employees—industrial and non-industrial; (ii) Personnel belonging to the All India Services; (iii) Personnel of the Union Territories; (iv) Officers and employees of the Indian Audit and Accounts Department; (v) Members of the regulatory bodies (excluding the RBI) set up under the Acts of Parliament; and (vi) Officers and employees of the Supreme Court.   2. To examine, review, evolve and recommend changes that are desirable and feasible regarding the principles that should govern the emoluments structure, concessions and facilities/benefits, in cash or kind, as well as the retirement benefits of the personnel belonging to the Defence Forces, having regard to the historical and traditional parties, with due emphasis on the aspects unique to these personnel.   3. To work out the framework for an emoluments structure linked with the need to attract the most suitable talent to government service, promote efficiency, accountability and responsibility in the work culture, and foster excellence in the public governance system to respond to the complex challenges of modern administration and the rapid political, social, economic and technological changes, with due regard to expectations of stakeholders, and to recommend appropriate training and capacity building through a competency based framework.   4. To examine the existing schemes of payment of bonus, keeping in view, inter-alia, its bearing upon performance and productivity and make recommendations on the general principles, financial parameters and conditions for an appropriate incentive scheme to reward excellence in productivity, performance and integrity.   5. To review the variety of existing allowances presently available to employees in addition to pay and suggest their rationalisation and simplification with a view to ensuring that the pay structure is so designed as to take these into account.   6. To examine the principles which should govern the structure of pension and other retirement benefits, including revision of pension in the case of employees who have retired prior to the date of effect of these recommendations, keeping in view that retirement benefits of all Central Government employees appointed on and after 01.01.2004 are covered by the New Pension Scheme (NPS).   7. To make recommendations on the above, keeping in view:  (i) the economic conditions in the country and the need for fiscal prudence; (ii) the need to ensure that adequate resources are available for developmental expenditures and welfare measures; (iii) the likely impact of the recommendations on the finances of the state governments, which usually adopt the recommendations with some modifications; (iv) the prevailing emolument structure and retirement benefits available to employees of Central Public Sector Undertakings; and (v) the best global practices and their adaptability and relevance in Indian conditions.   8. To recommend the date of effect of its recommendations on all the above.

But Muslims now find themselves in a world shaped by western theories and western values. If we are to consider how Islamic communities conducted their affairs throughout the greater part of their history, it may be convenient to compare and contrast this way of life with the contemporary western model. Today the Muslims are urged to embrace democracy and are condemned for political corruption, while western scholars debate whether Islam can ever accommodate the democratic ideal. On the whole, they think not. Democracy, they believe, is a sign of political maturity and therefore of superiority. Western societies, since they are seen as democratic, exemplify this superiority. So there is one question that has to be pressed home: what, precisely, is meant by democracy? Let me put forward an imaginary Arab who knows nothing of western ways but would like to learn about them. He is aware that the literal meaning of the word democracy is "mob rule", but understands that this is not what westerners mean by it. He wonders how this meaning has, in practice, been modified and, since his questions are directed to an Englishman, he is not altogether surprised to be told that Britain is the exemplary democracy. He learns that the people—all except children, lunatics and peers of the realm—send their representatives to Parliament to speak for them. He is assured that these representatives never accept bribes to vote against their consciences or against the wishes of their constituents. He enquires further and is astonished to learn that the political parties employ what are known as Whips, who compel members to vote in accordance with the party line, even if this conflicts both with their consciences and with the views of the people who elected them. In this case it is not money but ambition for office that determines the way they vote. "But is this not corruption?" he asks naively. The Englishman is shocked. "But at least the party in power represents the vast majority of the electorate?" This time the Englishman is a little embarrassed. It is not quite like that. The governing party, which enjoys absolute power through its dominance in the House of Commons, represents only a minority of the electorate. "Are there no restraints on this power?" There used to be, he is told. In the past there was a balance between the Crown, the House of Lords and the Commons, but that was seen as an undemocratic system so it was gradually eroded. The "sovereignty" of the Lower House is now untrammelled (except, quite recently, by unelected officials in Brussels). "So this is what democracy means?" Our imaginary Arab is baffled. He investigates further and is told that, in the 1997 General Election, the British people spoke with one voice, loud and clear. A landslide victory gave the Leader of the Labour Party virtually dictatorial powers. Then he learns that the turn-out of electors was the lowest since the war. Even so, the Party received only forty-three per cent of the votes cast. He wonders if this can be the system which others wish to impose on his own country. He is aware that various freedoms, including freedom of the press, are essential components of a democratic society, but no one can tell him how these are to be guaranteed if the Ruler, supported by a supine—"disciplined"—House of Commons enjoys untrammelled authority. He knows a bit about rulers and the way in which they deal with dissent, and he suspects that human nature is much the same everywhere. Barriers to oppression soon fall when a political system eliminates all "checks and balances" and, however amiable the current Ruler may be, there is no certainty that his successors, inheriting all the tools of power, will be equally benign. He turns now to an American and learns, with some relief since he himself has experienced the oppression of absolutism, that the American system restrains the power of the President by that of the Congress and the Supreme Court; moreover, the electe

WE’RE MARCHING BECAUSE THE MOST POWERFUL MAN IN THE WORLD SAYS IT’S OK TO SEXUALLY ASSAULT WOMEN . . . AND WE SAY NO WAY.” YVETTE COOPER, LABOUR MEMBER OF PARLIAMENT

We conducted research on the competencies and development requirements of each state. The required information was collected from the Planning Commission, government departments—both central and state—national and international assessments of the state and other relevant documents. The data was analysed and put in a presentable form using graphics and multimedia. At the meetings, PowerPoint presentations were made to the MPs with an emphasis on three areas: 1) the vision for a developed India; 2) the heritage of the particular states or union territory; and 3) their core competencies. The objective was to stress the point that to achieve the development of the nation, it was vital to achieve the development of each of these areas. Hence a fourth aspect was also prepared—selected development indicators for each of them. And what an enrichment I got by way of preparation and by the contributions of the members of Parliament, who hailed from all parties. Meeting them helped me to understand the richness of the diverse parts of the country.

appeared. The first attempt to win legislative backing for the scheme, under the previous, Congress-led government, failed spectacularly. In 2011, the parliament’s standing committee on finance—led by a member of the BJP, which was then in the opposition—found Aadhaar to be “riddled with serious lacunae and concern areas,” and declared that it had “been conceptualized with no clarity of purpose … and is being implemented in a directionless way with a lot of confusion.” A retired judge who filed the first legal challenge to Aadhaar, in 2012,

Members of Parliament are eligible for allocation of constituency development fund (MPLADS) of 5 crore every year.

In Poland, the governing Law and Justice Party had several of its initiatives blocked by the Constitutional Tribunal—the country’s highest authority on constitutional matters—between 2005 and 2007. When the party returned to power in 2015, it took steps to avoid similar losses in the future. At the time, there were two openings in the fifteen-member Constitutional Tribunal and three justices who were approved by the outgoing parliament but had yet to be sworn in. In a dubiously constitutional move, the new Law and Justice government refused to swear in the three justices and instead imposed five new justices of its own. For good measure, it then passed a law requiring that all binding Constitutional Tribunal decisions have a two-thirds majority. This effectively gave government allies a veto power within the tribunal, limiting the body’s ability to serve as an independent check on governmental power.

But six decades of Independence have wrought significant change, as exposure to British practices has faded and India’s natural boisterousness has reasserted itself. Some of the state assemblies in our federal system have already witnessed scenes of furniture overthrown, microphones ripped out and slippers flung by unruly legislators, not to mention fisticuffs and garments torn in scuffles among politicians. Pepper spray has been unleashed by a protesting Member of Parliament in the well of the national legislature. We can scarcely blame the British for that either.

CHARLES. And there are two brothers of his, William and Walter Blunt, Esquires, both members of Parliament, and noted speakers; and, what’s very extraordinary, I believe, this is the first time they were ever bought or sold. SIR OLIVER. That is very extraordinary, indeed! I’ll take them at your own price, for the honour of Parliament.

He had already known many members of Parliament to whom no outward respect or sign of honour was ever given by any one; and it seemed to him, as he thought over it, that Irish members of Parliament were generally treated with more indifference than any others. There were O’B–––– and O’C–––– and O’D––––,

It was Gentile,” Mussolini confessed, “who prepared the road for those like me who wished to take it.”30 Gentile served as a member of the Fascist Grand Council, a senator in the Upper House of the Italian Parliament, and also as Mussolini’s minister of education. Later, after Mussolini was deposed and established himself at Salo, Gentile became at Il Duce’s request the president of the Italian Academy.

And you’re a member of Parliament now too, they tell me,” said Miss Fitzgibbon, holding up her hands. “I think everybody will be in Parliament before long. I wish I knew some man who wasn’t, that I might think of changing my condition.

He loves the way hot water spouts from the ground like geothermal gold. He loves the way people invite you over for coffee for no particular reason and talk for hours about nothing in particular. He loves the way Icelanders call their country, affectionately, the ice cube. He loves the fact that, without even trying, he already knows three members of Parliament. He loves the way on a brisk winter day the snow crunches under his feet like heavenly Styrofoam. He loves the choirs that line the main shopping street in December, their voices strong and radiant, turning back the night. He loves the fact that five-year-olds can safely walk to school alone in the predawn darkness. He loves the magical, otherworldly feeling of swimming laps in the middle of a snowstorm. He loves the way, when your car gets stuck in the snow, someone always, always stops to help. He loves the way Icelanders applaud when the plane lands at the international airport in Keflavík just because they’re happy to be home. He loves the way the Icelanders manage to be tremendously proud people yet not the least bit arrogant. And, yes, he loves- not tolerates but actively loves- the darkness. Most of all, Jared loves living in a culture that doesn’t put people in boxes- or at least allows them to move freely from one box to another.

If it had turned out to be anybody else,” said the member of Parliament, “the results might have been most serious, — not to say discreditable.