I discover Simon Jenkins’ article considerably specious (I don’t need to hear MPs’ private testimonies in parliament. Points like assisted dying are for heads, not hearts, 7 January). Many MPs say that it’s their private expertise that brings them into politics, as is the case with my native MP, Cheadle’s Tom Morrison. His resolution to enter politics was pushed by his private expertise of the specter of his household changing into homeless when he was a toddler.
I see him recurrently, he lives not far away. He retailers the place I do, drives on the roads I do, travels on the trains I do and makes use of the identical hospital I do. His private experiences do make him a greater MP and I need to hear extra of them, not simply from him however from all MPs, in order to scale back the quantity of occasions I shout on the radio or TV: “What kind of world do these people live in?”
Geoffrey Thomas
Cheadle, Better Manchester
Simon Jenkins is true to say that particular person experiences of hardship or injustice are a poor foundation for good regulation. Nonetheless, his discount of the controversy round assisted dying to emotivity concerning coercion is irrational.
It was the humility in MPs’ deliberative engagement that impressed; a humility that may solely stem from going through and accepting our emotional responses, fairly than their exclusion. Freed from an emotive attachment to a place, we might then be genuinely open to listening to the factors of view of others.
Franz Schembri Wismayer
Dunkerton, Somerset
MPs speaking excessively about their life tales could also be traced again to the rampant individualism that expanded throughout Margaret Thatcher’s premiership. Historically, maiden speeches give members a chance to speak about their very own constituencies, which will be completely correct and generally very entertaining.
Typically there is no such thing as a hurt in being moved by a speech if it displays an understanding of the precept that private expertise shouldn’t affect selections taken within the public curiosity, as Simon Jenkins insists. Nonetheless, for a few of us probably the most shifting speech of the post-Thatcher interval was Robin Prepare dinner’s resignation assertion on the assist his authorities was giving to america on the Iraq invasion – particularly the previous couple of sentences.
Geoff Reid
Worsbrough, South Yorkshire
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