Do Elected Politicians Automatically Deserve Respect?

This is the transcript of my YouTube video "Do Elected Politicians Automatically Deserve Respect?". 

Do elected politicians automatically deserve respect?  It’s an interesting question and I guess there are going to be as many answers as there are respondents to the question.

I’m sure the response from elected politicians would be “yes, I automatically deserve your respect because I was chosen out of thousands of constituents to represent them”.  I call bullshit on that answer and here’s why:

The truth is that most members of a constituency wouldn’t know the person chosen to be a Parliamentary candidate from any other random stranger in their area so that reduces the pool of people who actually chose the candidate.

The Parliamentary candidates are chosen by the local constituency party which can be a very small number of people, depending on the size of the party at the national level and the level of engagement at the local level.

If you’re extremely lucky, you might be a member of the local constituency party and have a say in who’s picked to be the candidate but you’re probably not given a blank piece of paper to write any old name on it that’s then put into a box and whoever gets the most mentions becomes the candidate.  The truth is, there will be a small committee who choose a number of potential candidates and the constituency party members get to chose from that very small sample.  Not exactly the badge of a true chosen one.

You may not even be that special if the national party is being led by an authoritarian control freak like Keir Starmer because he overrode the wishes of many of the local constituency Labour party branches at the last General Election and parachuted in his chosen handpicked candidates that may not even have a connection to the local area they have been chosen to represent, meaning that a number of Labour candidates were picked by a single person, Starmer.  And it’s not just Labour who picked candidates with no connection to a constituency so how can those candidates possibly be considered “chosen out of thousands”.

The truth is that most people vote for the party, not the candidate, meaning that a particular party could put up a trained chimp and win a seat.  Some would say that that’s exactly what happens all the time.  It certainly explains the moral and ethical vacuums that represent the Starmer regime.

I couldn’t guess what your answer would be but here’s mine.

All human beings are worthy of a baseline level of respect for their basic Humanity.  We should treat everyone with a bit of respect until they prove themselves worthy of more respect or worthy of none.  Members of Parliament are deserving only of that baseline respect.  Every other bit of respect they think they deserve should be hard fought for and as fragile as Hell.  The more they do to benefit their constituents and society as a whole, the more respect they deserve and should get.  The more they do to harm or ignore their constituents or society or the more they serve themselves at the expense of their constituents or society as a whole, the less respect they deserve and should get.

It’s a simple equation – good – harm = the level of respect you deserve. 

That’s how I’ve worked my entire life and it’s worked for me so far.  It’s just a shame that most people don’t use that equation or those of us who’ve worked hard for the respect we deserve would actually get it.