Berlin

Work in Progress: Blog & City

The vuvuzalas (vuvuzalae?) tooted happily in sedate Frankfurt am Main last week, in extrovert Berlin the response to last night's result was tumultuous.

24 years since my last visit to Berlin.

Then there was a wall dividing two different systems of political and economic belief and practice.

Today there a few battered remains of that wall preserved as a monument.

This provides stimulus for profund thought.

If that physical wall can be torn down - largely by the spontaneous work of ordinary people - what will it take to remove those other walls in Belfast, Israel/Palestine ... ?

Such physical walls are the product of 'thought walls' of religious and racial bigotry.

The WWW together with mobile phone networks, digital video and photography means that facts and evidence cannot be suppressed.

We have seen the effects of this revolution in the UK political system with the exposure of malpractice on expenses of our publicly-funded representatives.

Timely, generally available facts and evidence must lead to increasing accountability. I fear that many of our politicians "just don't get it".