activist blues

Budget Day is going to be on 24th March. So says Richard Willis, and I think he is right. Gordon will not want to go to the country on 1st April, for obvious reasons, and Richard Willis is right about that too. So Gordon will go on 6th April, just after Easter, taking advantage of the fact that Easter is relatively early this year, because campaigning has to stop for four whole days otherwise, which is far too long in a general election, and the general election will thus be on 6th May. I do hope Lambeth council get me my postal vote in time, otherwise Eurostar will be getting too much of my hard-earned. But notice something in Richard Willis' post - he says that the dwindling number of Labour councillors who want to hold on to their seats has reduced the pool of activists available to help Labour candidates. True enough. But councillors are in it for themselves as well as for the party. A truly active and vibrant party needs activists on the ground who believe in the cause and not just in their own careers. What the Tories call "the voluntary party", which I saw disappear from the Conservatives in the early 1990s and which has now all but disappeared from the Labour Party in many areas, is essential to victory IMHO. Richard Willis is making the assumption that to have activists you need to have councillors, in fact that they are the same people, with which I disagree. The activists have disappeared from Labour for several reasons, which require another post to discuss, though as always I would welcome views, this being an interactive blog.

And now off to see the bridge where the archduke (and his pregnant wife) were shot down. And to remember that Radovan Karadzic is on trial. And to be glad that there is an international judicial process, in fact there is more than one. And to wonder if Douglas Hurd and his friends and associates have ever acknowledged their own responsibility for some of what happened in the Balkans in the 1990s, and to remember, in the words of little Bobby Zimmerman "even the President of the United States sometimes must have to stand naked."