The art of deceiving

Politics is the art of deceiving with a panache born of self righteousness.
We have listened this week to a series of issues voiced in parliament and through the parliamentarians to the public. Terrible patient treatment at Stafford Hospital,our food chain containing horse meat,the right of gay and lesbian couples to marry,and the British reluctance to go along with a call for an increased EU budget allocation.
I am also reading a detailed history of the Spanish Civil War and of the myriad political elements, each at each others throats, each willing,wanting to kill their fellow countryman for a political ideology. The detail is also revealed in a book written by Victor Serg, a book is about the evolution of the Bolshevistic revolution in Russia and the lengths Stalin went to kill the opposition.
Reading of the past and the present one is struck by how far we have travelled in 80 years.
I listened to a speech from President Hollande to the representatives in the European Parliament and the persuasive responses that flowed from the wide and disparate groups that make up that body. Conservatives, Socialists, Liberals, Greens, Communist, The Far Right, The Far Left people from all human view points, each engaged in the social experiment that is Europe.         
The whole event was conducted with restrained passion, expressed by the tolerance to listen. These nations who would have been intolerant of each other before the EU now seemed willing to understanding and consider other points of view whist passionately expressing their own view.     
The one fly in the ointment were the British. Crude, sarcastic, sanctimonious, they revealed that British intolerance of others, particularly Johnny Foreigner, I was embarrassed. Each of the other nations had a positive viewpoint of what was important to the community they serve, the British were like skin heads mindlessly putting the boot in regardless of the human issues at stake. The adversarial despatch box, a verbal slinging match which we are brought up to admire in our so called Mother of Parliaments, has in my opinion, had its sell by date.  We have to learn to seek consensus, to understand the other persons point of view to collaborate towards a better way !!!