This morning’s papers share a unifying theme: the failure of political leadership to secure a deal at Copenhagen. Now, I applaud politicians for not succombing to enormous pressure and making a series of pledges that would risk grinding the world’s poor ever deeper into the dirt. For those who take a different view, it is not that politicians have failed, but that high politics is an irrelevance, a vanity. I know Coffee Housers loathe her opinions, but Polly Toynbee is at her polemical best today. She writes:
‘Politics is being weighed in the balance and found wanting. The writing is on the wall. The leadership required within and between each nation is heavier lifting that the weak machinery of governmental power can manage.’
Government cannot alter behaviour without the consent of the governed. Humanity and the forces of opportunity, communication, environment and the market determine progress, for better or worse.
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