UK - As shrewd a comment as any on the two political dramas currently filling the headlines came from the 19th-century Liberal politician who was described as “the greatest Parliamentary orator of his age”. “The art of statesmanship”, observed John Bright, “consists as much in foreseeing as in doing”. In other words, few things are more important in politics than to anticipate the likely consequences of one’s actions and how others might respond.
There could be no better examples of this truth than those exposed by the Chilcot report on Iraq and the aftermath of the vote to leave the EU. In each case, what we see is the glaring failure of the key players in the drama to have given proper forethought as to what should be done next if the first step in a sequence turns out the way it did.
Our failure to have worked out in advance any practical plan for how to leave the EU has left us in the shambles we are in today, where no politician has any real idea of how we can execute the people’s wishes. Theresa May insists that “Brexit means Brexit” and Andrea Leadsom may have campaigned to Leave. But neither has yet given us any practical clue as to how they would seek to achieve this goal.
We are looking at two of the greatest failures of statesmanship in modern politics, each reflecting a retreat from any grown-up ability to anticipate political reality into little more than emasculated wishful-thinking. One symptom of this has been the wish to portray our next prime minister as “the new Mrs Thatcher”. But not for nothing was she known as “the only man in the Cabinet”. In this age of blinkered groupthink, I fear we no longer have such a man of either sex today.
“Just what is an APOSTLE?”
Today we find the Church of God in a “wilderness of religious confusion!”
The confusion is not merely around the Church – within the religions of the world outside – but WITHIN the very heart of The True Church itself!
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