I got these snippets from Jim Wallis' Blog. They are quotes from a speech this week from the new prime minister of England,Gordon Brown. who grew up as a pastor's kid and apparently has deeply felt Biblically influenced ideas on Justice issues. I personally take all quotes from politicians with a grain of salt, but if he really means all of this he could be an interesting leader to watch in the coming years...
First on his values and moral compass:
All I believe and all I try to do comes from the values
that I grew up with: duty, honesty, hard work, family, and respect for
others.
And this is what my parents taught me and will never leave me:
that each and everyone of us has a talent, each and everyone of us
should have the chance to develop their talent, and that each of us
should use whatever talents we have to enable people least able to help
themselves.
And so I say honestly: I am a conviction politician. My conviction
that everyone deserves a fair chance in life. My conviction that each
of us has a responsibility to each other. And my conviction that when
the strong help the weak, it makes us all stronger. Call it ‘the
driving power of social conscience’, call it 'the better angels of our
nature’, call it ‘our moral sense’, call it a belief in ‘civic duty’.
I joined this party as a teenager because I believed in these values.
They guide my work, they are my moral compass. This is who I am. And
because these are the values of our party, too, the party I lead must
have more than a set of policies – we must have a soul.
On children in poverty:
... let me say also that in the fourth richest country in
the world it is simply wrong – wrong that any child should grow up in
poverty. To address this poverty of income and to address also the
poverty of aspirations by better parenting, better schools, and more
one-to-one support, I want to bring together all the forces of
compassion – charities, voluntary sector, local councils, so that at
the heart of building a better Britain is the cause of ending child
poverty.
On foreign policy:
Our foreign policy in years ahead will reflect the truth
that to isolate and defeat terrorist extremism now involves more than
military force – it is also a struggle of ideas and ideals that in the
coming years will be waged and won for hearts and minds here at home
and round the world. And an essential contribution to this will be what
becomes daily more urgent – a Middle East settlement upholding a two
state solution, that protects the security of Israel and the legitimate
enduring desire for a Palestinian state.
Because we all want to address the roots of injustice, I can tell
you today that we will strengthen and enhance the work of the
department of international development and align aid, debt relief and
trade policies to wage an unremitting battle against the poverty,
illiteracy, disease and environmental degradation that it has fallen to
our generation to eradicate.
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