The Harrogate Agenda

"Whenever Parliament is persuaded to assume the offices of executive government, it will lose all the confidence, love and veneration which it has ever enjoyed whilst it was supposed to be the corrective and control on the acting powers of the state. This would be the event though its conduct in such a perversion of its functions would be tolerable, just and moderate; but if it should be iniquitous, violent, full of passion and full of faction it would be considered as the most intolerable of all modes of tyranny". - Edmund Burke.

"The great instrument of all these changes and what infuses a peculiar venom into all of them is party. It is of no consequence what the principles of any party or what their pretensions are; the spirit which actuates all parties is the same, the spirit of ambition, of self interest, of oppression and of treachery.... in a word we have all seen ...we have some of us felt such oppression from the PARTY GOVERNMENT as no other tyranny can parallel".

- Edmund Burke 18th Cent Parl. MP for Malton, N. Yorks.

Watch this space