Three interesting articles in The Times today:
Regulation comes in, necessarily, when you recognise that you can’t rely as much as you might hope on people’s intelligence or goodwill. But this can turn into an excuse for failing to encourage intelligence and goodwill in the first place.
via Enough humiliation. We must move on | Rowan Williams – Times Online, a column well worth reading.
This week I was thinking about an MP whom I met a year ago, named Natascha Engel. A Labour backbencher for a rundown Derbyshire constituency, she was hugely pregnant with her third child and, as she cheerfully recounted her working week, I thought I’d never met anyone with a more stressful life. Every Thursday night she and her husband – a South London vet – would throw their children into the car, drive to Derbyshire, where she spent the weekend in constituency surgeries. Often her babies would play at her feet while she sat inexhaustibly dealing with glass in the parks, unpaid tax credits or the undiagnosed mentally ill.
via Politics is a tougher game than reality TV | Janice Turner – Times Online.
Give them a kicking, Times readers, when they deserve it. Some of them now do. But don’t kick all the stuffing out of them. Don’t give them so savage a kicking that, when Government needs a kicking, there is nobody left who is able to kick.
via Kick them – but don’t kick all the stuffing out | Matthew Parris – Times Online.
