RobinWe could have this conversation for ever, but I can do no more than simply ask you one last time to look at the way you and yours are conducting your politics in and around Isleworth and ask yourselves whether it is achieving anything. And more importantly, whether there is any reason other than blind and arrogant self-belief to think that it will achieve anything in the future.Assuming that you want political power back for your party, where have all the smears and trickery got you? 1998 - lost one seat. 2002 - lost three seats. 2006 - lost six seats, and with it control of the local authority. Is this really a record to be smug and proud of yourself about? I do feel I'm wasting my time with you, and that you and your associates are not going to allow a consistent record of failure and copious helpings of your just desserts (pun intended) to steer you from the path that you have decided to follow. Your faith in your own cleverness and unerring wisdom seems to work in dirctly inverse proportion to your political success.Yet again you miss the glaringly obvious (to everyone except yourself) and crucial point that it was the scheming and trickery of you and your ilk that led to the creation of the ICG in the first place and to your defeat, and you similarly ignore the fact that it is your refusal to deviate from the politics of the gutter that sustains the community movement and prolongs your isolation indefinitely.Missing the point yet again, you will console yourself by asking why I of all people should be giving you advice. You will conclude that by responding to you and pointing out your errors I am demonstrating that your underhand methods are "getting to me", and that more of the same is therefore in order. You will do this because your mindset is such that you are just not capable of conceiving a wider vision.I can only repeat (and you will continue to reject) my view that there is some good even in what remains of the local Labour Party and that most of your people have something positive to offer if only they were prepared to do so.Take Sue Sampson - a local girl, courageous (she must have been to send her kids out to swear at and abuse our canvassers and their constituents on the doorsteps no more than a day or so after we had allegedly tried to murder her!), and still possessed I'm sure of some political principles acquired from the experience of growing up, as I did, in a working class community. I've no doubt that, shorn of the debilitating negativity which surrounds the Keen machine and its local operation, she would make a pretty decent councillor and she is young enough for this still to happen. But what is she doing? Grubbing in the gutter, writing letters to the newspapers deliberately misquoting those she deems to be her opponents (do she and you really believe we will not, at some point during the campaign, demonstrate your deceit by providing voters with the full context of the "old mucker" quote, for example?), effectively threatening vulnerable people on their doorsteps that all manner of abominations await them at the hands of the ICG unless they vote for her and her miserable party?I believe Sue has made a mistake and has demonstrated her political naivete by being taken in by you. As you know other, more experienced folks in the local party give you a wide berth, rejecting your deranged messages and suggestions as to how to run their local campaigns. After all you don't even have the courage to meet them in person, do you?I realise that for your party in and around Isleworth it is currently "any port in a storm", but I truly believe that the Labour Party in the area will, one day, actually see the value of working with other members of the community as equals rather than potential masters and that some fusion of your former values and of the wider community's interests will take place for the benefit of all.It is frustrating watching your local party devour itself with its bitterness and frustration and I do confess that when we took Isleworth by such a margin in 2002 I had no inkling that we would still be having to contend with this low, subterranean activity eight years hence. I have to admit that I had assumed that through some kind of process of natural selection the dross would have been discarded and a new, more constructive and community-friendly mentality would emerge from the ashes.I anticipate a "Yah-boo, you too" response or a "yawn", but I consign these comments to record not so much for your benefit but for that of others who might revisit this post after your next drubbing at the polls (indeed I have decided that you are going to lose three more seats elsewhere in the borough as a gesture of my displeasure at your being allowed by your party in Hounslow to poison our local politics).I'll leave you, Robin, with that thought and with the ICG watchword - "We come in peace, we leave you in pieces". Please don't complain to me when your fourth election campaign in a row ends in well-deserved dismal failure because it really couldn't happen to nicer people.
Phil Andrews ● 6009d