Cicero's Songs

In most corporations these days there is considerable emphasis on "diversity training". Most people look on it as a box ticking exercise, like fire alarms or health and safety briefings: a necessary bureaucracy by which the organisation demonstrates compliance with the law. Yet, as with so many box ticking exercises, there is a core of essential and necessary work at the heart of the exercise. Organisations, like any group of human beings, can create cliques and foster a culture which fails to use each member of the group to their full potential. In short, respect for diversity is necessary if any group is going to fulfill the maximum that it can achieve. The search for excellence needs to embrace a broad range of points of view and a wide variety of experience. This is how corporations gain the best performance from their workers. What is true for corporations is even more true for a political party that seeks to promote social and political excellence. Thus the heated d...

The United States, despite its almost religious reverence for their constitution, is prone to periodic political crises which can be almost existential in scope. The civil war was caused by the constitutional ambiguity concerning slavery, which poisonous legacy still defaces American society today. In the twenty-first century the idea that there could be any legal justification for slavery seems self-evidently absurd. When Al Gore polled half a million votes more than George W, Bush in the 2000 Presidential election, even democracy itself took second place to the Constitution since it was Mr. Bush who was elected, by virtue of carrying more states and therefore winning the electoral college. The consequences of the incompetent arrogance  of the Administration of the 43rd President - from Iraq and Afghanistan to the response to Hurricane Katrina  are also still reverberating today. Trillions of dollars and hundreds of thousands of lives have been lost around the world because...