I have just returned from a short visit to some of the (increasingly expensive) countries of the European Union. For much of the time I was in the enjoyable company of couples from the U.S. and had ample opportunity to overhear their conversations.

One such conversation between a wife who was a Democrat and her husband who was a Republican was brief and instantly amusing but as I pondered on it I was reminded that we need to be careful in wishing for what we want: we might get it.

The conversation ran thus:-

Wife. ‘The reason I like Obama is that he believes in what he says.'

Husband. ‘That is just what worries me.'

My first reaction was that the husband was simply reflecting a Republican view that Obama was both dangerous and seriously wrong in believing that the U.S. would be a more successful society if it embraced policies which were redistributive of wealth and ‘socialist'. I put ‘socialist' within quotation marks because, as another of my travelling companions explained to me, it is seen by many in the U.S. as a word connoting a political system based on the taking of money from those who work and giving it, in cash or kind  ( e.g. ‘excessive' access to education or health care), to those who don't  - ‘like in the U.K. and France'.

But on reflection I wondered if the husband also meant that, in an inherently selfish world, the interests of the U.S. would be served better by a leader who was more practised in the arts of deception and less inclined to honesty and openness.

The man in the moon observing the current political scene in our country could be forgiven for concluding that our supposed leaders are competing with each other to see which of them can make us the most miserable. Egged on by the media in pre-election mode they are describing our present economic position in exaggerated and horrific terms and delight in telling us how they propose to put the situation right by ‘savage cuts', housewifely prudence and, of course, new and larger taxes.

Before long people, particularly those suffering the real misery of unemployment, whether directly or through members of their families, will notice two things. None of those leaders, including particularly those in official opposition, are anxious to accept that anything they did (or did not do) as cogs in our parliamentary system contributed to our problems. Also that their remedies presume that they should carry on as usual - and they are simply competing over who should ‘take the lead' in doing what they claim needs to be done. And that the question of whether their unchanged system might in any way be part of the problem, or might itself need to be ‘savagely' changed, is not asked. And that therefore all the leaders on offer wish to continue doing things to us - not with us.

When such pennies do drop questions will be asked and asked with increasing vigour. Questions that could include the following: Does our parliamentary system work? Can our members of parliament truly represent us if their future depends in any degree on how their party whips report to party leaders on their commitment to the party cause? Do we get the best ministers if they have to be members of either house? Why can we not have primaries before a general election? Should we have fixed term parliaments? Why not proportional representation? Why not more civic involvement in the lead up to fundamental decisions, culminating in some cases in national referendums?

When I was very young in the early 1930s there was a period of some two years during which my parents could not afford to buy a daily newspaper. Instead my father, who was out of work and on the very small, state provided, dole, would call in to our local public library to read, I think, the Daily Mirror and the Times. Sometimes the library copies were in use - there were many families needing to watch every penny - and he had to wait his turn. Others were waiting their turn too and the library became a local, entirely male, gossip parlour.

My brother and I were ‘little pigs with big ears' and we would eavesdrop as my father, on his return, told my mother what was up nationally and, courtesy of the gossip parlour, locally. So I grew up believing that buying a newspaper was a luxury - something like an orange or a banana - and that access, free, to ‘the news' was one of the civic rights that came with being a member of a benevolent society.

It never occurred to me to wonder what would happen if nobody bought a daily newspaper and everyone's father went to the public library instead. That, in essence, is the situation  which the newspaper proprietors are threatened with: not by the public libraries but by the web.

Rupert Murdoch has now said that he intends to charge web users for access to some (what ‘some' is he has not said) of the contents of his newspapers. He is not the first proprietor to take this line but he has distinguished himself from the others by making his private intentions public as an important news item in their own right. He is taking the web on.