The Economist ~ A nation united

Day 1,681, 10:04 • Published in United Kingdom United Kingdom • by Spite313


Dear friends,

Yesterday I announced my intention to run for national president of the UK. Over the next few days I’ll outline my policies and beliefs which will hopefully guide my Presidency if I’m elected. Normally these things are so much waffle, I’m going to try and be honest. Some articles will be policy, with clear cut decisions I intend to make. Some will be more like this article, which is more about trying to give you a better understanding of me and the way that I operate. At the end of the day you need both these things to make a proper decision on the 5th. I’ll try and be honest about who and what I am. Not a saint by any measure, but hopefully someone who can get a job done properly.

Yesterday in my article I spoke about how one of my major targeted areas was that of national unity. Over the past year or so we’ve seen a total breakdown in unity in the country, a factionalisation of politics and the military that means whoever wins, we all lose. I can only speak for myself, not any party or group, but it’s my heartfelt ambition to end this divide and bring people together.

Before I go into how I hope to do this, let’s look at the division itself. How the natural rivalry between parties became a major problem is simple- a new party. UKPP appeared out of the blue and quickly gained power, rising to be the second largest party in the UK. It had its own forums, its own military and its own way of doing things. Many of its members felt that the rest of the UK had pushed them away, whilst at the same time the older players and parties felt that UKPP was almost a separatist movement. For a long time this meant that the UK was divided into two.


Almost as dramatic as this

It seems though that division has become a habit, and the divides amongst the major parties in the UK have begun to widen from the usual spats and disagreements to being something worse. People have never been so jumpy and defensive, and the slightest argument now escalates out of control. The last vestiges of unity disintegrate when people are refusing to work together because of dislike for each other.

I don’t claim to be an angel in all this. I’m a member of The Unity Party and I can't honestly say our hands have been clean in this. I’m not going to spend my election campaign trying to defend TUP or its members, other than to say that pointing the finger at the past achieves a totality of zero. The way forward for all of us is to wipe the slate clean of past disagreements and try to approach things with an attitude of building for the future.


Nowadays we are seeing an end to the long cold period between UKPP and the main body of the community, but there is still distrust. We have to mend these wounds by bringing UKPP into the fold, giving their members responsibility and leadership positions and offering them the chance to make the changes they want. The same can be said of every party- from the biggest to the smallest. It’s not right that these divides rob us of talent, simply because people dislike one another on a personal level. What happened in the past can’t constantly hold the future to ransom.



Let me explain too what I mean by unity. Some people associate the word with TUP, and that isn’t the context in which I’m using it. Some people too think that unity means conformity, or forcing people to all be the same. Obviously that isn’t true either. I want to be the National President- the leader of the whole country- not just the bit which elected me. To do that you need to embrace all beliefs, backgrounds and communities and use them to work for the greater good of the whole.

The key to my ideal of national unity is that we all agree to talk. It’s as simple as that, but it’s something we’ve lacked for a long time. For it to work, each of us has to accept that all of our opinions are worth listening to, fighting over, and coming to a resolution on. In the past there has been an attitude that if you don’t like something, you just ignore it. Hence why large numbers of congressmen never actually signed in to congress, or why laws and rules were simply ignored rather than addressed or debated.

What I want to see is a lot more fighting. It sounds counter-intuitive, but when someone is annoyed by an idea, or disagrees with a law, the worst possible solution is to ignore it. It’s actually against the whole principle of unity to do that- because by ignoring it you’re actually opting out of the community. By debating, fighting and voting for your changes, you’re accepting the community, and the community accepts you. So you can see straight away that my idea of unity is not to do with binding people to conformity, but quite the opposite- it’s to do with fostering debate and promoting change.

I’m trying to keep these articles readable (under a thousand words) so I’ll leave off there. But I hope you can see that my unity policy isn’t stifling, but is designed to lift the spirit of exclusion that still lurks round the corridors of power. It’s designed to bring people in from the cold. I want players who’ve never dared contribute before offer up their ideas and feel confident they won’t just be slapped down without any justification, but will be given the chance to operate within a system which we can all agree on, and make decisions we can all agree to respect.

Iain



Ps. Again I'm not buying votes for any articles in this campaign, I think it's a sucky way to get your message across and doesn't reflect any actual ingame opinion. If you see articles getting 200+ votes in a few hours... it's bought votes 90% of the time.