I find Simon Jenkins’ article somewhat specious (I don’t want to hear MPs’ personal testimonies in parliament. Issues like assisted dying are for heads, not hearts, 7 January). Many MPs say that it is their personal experience that brings them into politics, as is the case with my local MP, Cheadle’s Tom Morrison. His decision to enter politics was driven by his personal experience of the threat of his family becoming homeless when he was a child.
I see him regularly, he lives round the corner. He shops where I do, drives on the roads I do, travels on the trains I do and uses the same hospital I do. His personal experiences do make him a better MP and I want to hear more of them, not just from him but from all MPs, so as to reduce the number of times I shout at the radio or TV: “What kind of world do these people live in?”
Geoffrey Thomas
Cheadle, Greater Manchester
• Simon Jenkins is right to assert that individual experiences of hardship or injustice are a poor basis for good law. However, his reduction of the debate around assisted dying to emotivity regarding coercion is irrational.
It was the humility in MPs’ deliberative engagement that impressed; a humility that can only stem from facing and accepting our emotional responses, rather than their exclusion. Free of an emotive attachment to a position, we may then be genuinely open to hearing the points of view of others.
Franz Schembri Wismayer
Dunkerton, Somerset
• MPs talking excessively about their life stories may be traced back to the rampant individualism that expanded during Margaret Thatcher’s premiership. Traditionally, maiden speeches give members an opportunity to talk about their own constituencies, which can be perfectly proper and sometimes very entertaining.
Sometimes there is no harm in being moved by a speech if it reflects an understanding of the principle that personal experience should not influence decisions taken in the public interest, as Simon Jenkins insists. However, for some of us the most moving speech of the post-Thatcher period was Robin Cook’s resignation statement on the support his government was giving to the United States on the Iraq invasion – especially the last few sentences.
Geoff Reid
Worsbrough, South Yorkshire
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