If you don’t like the scandals get involved with local politics (From Prestwich and Whitefield Guide)

If you don’t like the scandals get involved with local politics

11:27am Thursday 2nd July 2009

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Those who do not like scandals and find the latest election results dangerously unwelcome have a very simple remedy.

Read up the party lines yourself; then join up; roll up our sleeves and get on with the, “washing up”, and the, “painting and decorating”. If you want a job done as you wish, we have to do it ourselves or at least supervise it.

The price of liberty is not only vigilance but being as participatory as football, or whatever. Get out leafletting, canvassing and meetings. You will be surprised by Joe Public’s variety of saying no without saying no.

If you stay at home then you have given easy victory to opponents. Those of us whose parents got off a boat one step ahead of the Gestapo or Lenin’s lads can not afford to sit out the dance any more than those whose ancestors objected to the overweening authoritarianism of the stewards of religion and landlords. Lloyd George — born in Manchester actually —opened his batting aged 11, challenging a governors’ visit with a vicar as to why they insisted on an English Anglican assembly for a Welsh speaking pupil body from Methodist homes?

This is not a dangerous country for politics — unless you stay at home grumbling and let the villains vote themselves in, as happened between the wars. Frank Adam Hartley Avenue Prestwich

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