Get stuck in and join the party of politics (From Prestwich and Whitefield Guide)

Get stuck in and join the party of politics

11:29am 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 your sleeves and get on with the, “washing up”, and the, “painting and decorating”.

If you want a job done as you wish, you have to do it yourself 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 meeting. You will be surprised by variety of ways Joe Public says 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 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 Prestwich

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