I would like to take this opportunity to thank all of you who turned out to help the party in its election push – plus a special thank you to the three young Bangladeshi men who assisted me in another kind of push. Namely, pushing my “Popemobile” around that vast council estate when the battery gave up the ghost. There was a moment when you were visibly flagging there, but no sooner did we discover that you’d been pushing me around for three hours with the handbrake on, than it was all plain sailing.
I’ve just got the evening’s stats back from our party bean counters, and they make for very encouraging reading:
Total number of households canvassed: 2030
Confirmed RPP voters: 456
That would give the RPP a 22.5% share of the vote.
Of course, the Right Path Party is a local party devoted to local issues first and foremost, and no one is pretending that such a figure could be achieved nationally. Nevertheless, it’s a nice little acorn from which a big oak tree can grow.
Communication Breakdown
As for the residents of South East London, they seemed a tad reticent. Trying to get one to express some political views was like trying to get Keith Harris to ditch the duck (only joshing, Orville!). At one point discussions dried up to such an extent that we had to get Gary, our resident leaflet shifter, to draw caricatures of the main party leaders, myself included, whereupon the voter would be asked to point – and in several cases spit! – at the one they preferred.
Needless to say this lacks true objectivity and provides a poor overall impression of local issues. Crime? The Environment? Unemployment? Trident? What was it, I wondered, that most affects these people’s lives? Then it suddenly struck me. In fact, the answer had been staring me in the face all night. In a word: Communication.
Or rather a distinct lack of it. On the evidence of my first grassroots consultation for a full year, the main political issue of our day is obvious. People in Britain’s inner-city communities are a multi-cultural hotchpotch of dialects: from Lithuanians to Jamaicans, Vietnamese to Angolans, these ethnic groupings are more diverse than the milk bar clientele in Star Wars (where Han Solo vaporises the green alien – there’s someone we need running the Met!). We Brits cherish such diversity, it’s what makes our minorities so endearing. But, dear me! how it makes communicating with them so excruciating.
If you ever get lost driving around New Cross don’t stop to ask someone the way, just switch on the GPS instead. I’m embarrassed to say this but frankly someone has to: these people need to go back to school. Otherwise there will come a time in the not too distant future when the cultural and commercial development of this country hits the buffers. And I predict significant social breakdown when it does. The lower classes may not mind descending further into a morass of incoherent gossip and waffle – as long as they can keep texting their mates and rapping Afro-Caribbean gibberish – but I personally do. It’s time someone arrested this underdevelopment.
Express Yourselves
This spring the Right Path Party will officially unveil its “I Can’t Get No Literacy” campaign aimed at reversing our national communication crisis. The campaign is set to comprise a smorgasbord of seminars and personal tuition from the basic to the advanced. There will also be regular one-off cultural events for the faint-hearted, half-hearted and positively curious amongst you, for whom the mere mention of the word communication makes you feel like an illiterate loser. That need not be the case, and the Right Path Party has teamed up with several highly experienced communication specialists committed to ensuring it isn’t.
To find out more visit the Right Path Party today.
(Originally published 10 April 2007)
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