THE CONCRETE ROUNDABOUT (TCR)

I disagree with this. I want the best, most capable people available to run the country. If that brings together a mix of genders, ethnicities, religious backgrounds, sexual orientations, etc., then that's fine. But if that turns out to be a fairly homogenous group, I'm fine with that, too.

This is going to sound like a horrendous soundbite but I think ability is more important than identity for this.

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"While I'm worth, the room on this earth..."

Sorry if I have been unclear - I'm not implying we need inclusion just for the sake of it, I meant that there will be a significant number of highly competent people who would never consider politics because they don't want to bother with the misogyny (women), racism (ethnic minorities) or have been conditioned to believe it isn't a place for people from their socio-economic background (working class communities).

In my view anyone who is daft enough to subject themselves to current media muck raking through their past to find some perceived little incident or comment that they can twist into a major scandal is not intelligent enough to be entrusted to take any part in running the country.

We will never have good governance until the media are somehow stopped from trying to destroy everyone who comes to prominence in the public eye. They constantly waffle on about 'holding to account' and 'freedom of the press'. They should themselves be held to account about their constant abuse of press freedom.

I think there are lots of people from every walk of life who don't want to go into politics because of the media and social media grief they'll get for anything and everything. Being privately educated, looking a bit unusual, just being a Conservative, having any sort of opinion on any side about what defines a woman, etc. etc., on top of all the discriminatory issues you mentioned.

To quote Peter Mannion in The Thick Of It: "That's the problem with the public: they're fucking horrible."

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"While I'm worth, the room on this earth..."

Some of that is the politician's own fault for kow-towing to people like Murdoch, rather than standing up to him and his ilk.

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I don't need your ill-informed, half-baked, idiotic opinions. I have plenty of those myself.

That is very true. And also chickening out of sorting the problem at the time of the News of the World saga.

Completely disagree with that way of thinking.

Depends on your definition of most capable. The most capable groups have routinely been found to be ones that can consider a wider range of ideas and insights. Neurodiversity has scientifically been shown to boost overall group performance far more than looking at each individual's qualifications in isolation.

Sure, your upper-middle class white male Oxbridge graduate may perform better in an aptitude test and might be better than a different individual. But a group of upper-middle class white male Oxbridge graduates will more or less only have one way of thinking regardless of if it's one, ten, or a hundred.

The easiest way to get neurodiversity is through diversity of background, be that gender, ethnicity, sexuality, upbringing, etc. You might get lucky and have a group of aforementioned graduates who actually are able to offer neurodiversity, but realistically you probably won't, and so you're less likely to be considering enough viewpoints to come to the optimum answer

It’s a good point.

I used to be very much of the view that you should always employ the most capable person for every role. However, I’ve come round to the thinking that you want a team with diversity of thinking, and therefore employing someone who isn’t necessarily the best individual for a certain post, but complements the team, is often the way to go.

Matthew Syed covers this very well in “Rebel Ideas”

Meredith Belbin…. Well worth a read. I met him once.

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I don't need your ill-informed, half-baked, idiotic opinions. I have plenty of those myself.

Interesting thought, although it depends on the type of government work involved. We could be talking about the cabinet, parliamentary undersecretaries, spads, the civil service, and so on.

I guess I favour clear, decisive leadership and probably have underlying concerns that adding too many views into decision making ends up with an indecisive, 'too many cooks' situation. This is probably explained by the fact that i live and work on my own.

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"While I'm worth, the room on this earth..."