Martin Wolf (Opinion, February 5) asks, speaking of politics, “how many able people will devote their lives to a strenuous and poorly paid career whose practitioners are distrusted, if not despised”. The answer in all parts of the UK is almost none, because to be “able” means to have the capacity to see several sides to an argument.
This is what “able” business people, or public servants, can do. UK politics is however entirely structured and controlled through political parties.
So the only people who can get into government are those who want to join a political party in the first place (a self-selecting group who are attracted to organisations and structures, and perhaps have an appetite for hanging out with people who think as they do) and who can get selected for a seat of some kind, by an even more extreme and narrow-minded bunch — the people who like to sit on selection committees.
To take the parties in control in the UK and Scotland at the moment, can anyone imagine someone with the reasonable view that the UK really needs to mend fences with the EU getting selected as a Conservative candidate?
Or someone who thinks Scottish independence could work, but only in certain circumstances, and is not committed one way or the other, being selected to represent the Scottish National party?
As long as parties demanding of ideological fealty control the routes to office, few “able people” will apply.
Owen Kelly
Edinburgh, UK
