Like Eric Pickles himself, it is possible that the now defunct council watchdog, the Audit Commission, was just another bloated public-sector body that urgently required serious slimming down. 
 
Set up 25 years ago to oversee local government spending, the Commission was abolished in the so-called ‘Bonfire of the Quangos’ by the last Tory/Lib-Dem government. The bluff Sir Eric Pickles and his conservative colleagues called it ‘wasteful, ineffective and undemocratic’.
 
That’s as maybe. The question is whether it was genuinely in the public interest to do away with the entity precisely set up to tackle incompetent, reckless or nefarious behaviour among local councils.
 
When the Audit Commission was finally abolished in 2015, town and parish councils were rid of any public oversight or scrutiny, beyond, that is the efforts of local democracy campaigners. This means that if you wish to complain or ask questions, your only recourse is to tackle the offending council itself or go to the police: the first option is usually doomed, the second is nuclear, and without compelling evidence of criminal activity, is also futile.
 
Parish and town councils are not overseen by the government ombudsman, no standard code of conduct exists for councillors or officials, there is no higher authority to appeal to if you are dissatisfied. Town and parish councils are literally laws unto themselves. They set their own rules, investigate complaints against themselves by themselves, and if they so decide, can banish you from view as a ‘vexatious complainant’. Meanwhile, as if it were not hard enough to call officialdom to account, proposals are now emerging to curtail Freedom of Information rights by the Conservative government. See here if you are worried.
 
What really is going on here?
 
In one of its final acts, the Audit Commission issued a report bemoaning the shoddy state of financial reporting by first tier local government, the parish and town councils which handle about £590 million of public money each year. Over 10% of councils were found to be deficient in their financial management while seventy four of them had failed persistently to improve their performance and demonstrated “systemic weaknesses” over several years.  In future, the malpractice in these councils will most likely go unnoticed.
 
Audit is now the responsibility of councils themselves. The new arrangements allow even the most errant local council client to hire and fire their own auditors with impunity. As a Parliamentary Committee commented, it has been a principle of public sector policy for the last 150 years, ‘that those commissioning audit reports should be independent from those being audited.’ Not any more.
 
In the past, the audit service was able to commission ‘public interest reports’ (from independent auditors) into financial mismanagement and other maladministration, precisely because it was completely removed from the councils it was seeking to inspect. Auditors were free to do their job without fear of losing contracts if their findings were uncomfortable or compromising for dodgy local politicians or officials.
 
“It is interesting”, the Audit Commission’s ex-chair Michael O’Higgins noted in a Guardian interview, “that no public interest reports [were] issued on NHS foundation trusts, which are allowed to appoint their own auditors, despite some performance and financial scandals. That may not be a coincidence".
 
Public sector fraud and wrongdoing may now blossom in this new era of political deregulation. Says respected academic Elizabeth David-Barrett of Transparency International, "with local authorities appointing their own external auditors, those auditors may not challenge local authorities for fear of not getting their contract renewed or winning other contracts for providing services."
 
It is not just corruption, sleazy back-scratching or managerial incompetence we should be worried about either. The Localism Act 2011 also abolished the national standards board which was responsible for setting and enforcing a standard code of conduct for all elected members across the country. Now, depending on where you behave badly, you can get away with the most flagrant abuses either scot-free or score just a few column inches in the local press if you are very unlucky, all quickly forgotten.
 
As Cllr Martin Eager, Ledbury’s tempestuous chair of Environment and Leisure proudly announced in a Town Council meeting when he was threatened last year with a standards complaint: ‘been there, done that’. Ditto Bob Barnes who was caught out lying and bullying, but refused to apologise. Do they care? Not so much.
 
The awful truth is that if you are a first-tier councillor (as I have learned to my cost), there really is no sanction against abuse, intimidation, lies, bullying and all the thousand other deplorable little tricks that are endemic in the world of parish politics. Out here, it’s survival of the fittest. You wonder whether the new free-market political ethos is purpose-designed to weed out the weaklings and reward the sociopaths. Progressive voices, transparency campaigners and democracy activists can expect to be chewed up and spat out like a mouthful of stale tobacco – and then be accused of bullying for their pains.
 
The 2013 report Corruption in the UK, The Mounting Risks highlighted the pernicious effects of the relaxation of the rules over elected members’ behaviour. Councils no longer have a duty to operate a ‘standards’ process. In Herefordshire for instance, there has been no standards committee for at least two years. Complaints are dealt with ‘informally’ (ie by local government officers), and are not officially published. Even if the informal procedure finds against a councillor, there is no sanction – except the remote chance of being kicked out at the next election. Around here, people have stopped raising complaints against bad councillor behaviour. There seems little point.
 
With touching, laissez-faire insouciance, Communities Minister Andrew Stunell said: “In the future, councillors must expect to be judged at the ballot box by an electorate with real access to their accounts and personal interests in a new transparent era.”  
 
This is of course nonsense. If complaints are never published, how can the general public possibly judge the ethics and probity of candidates at election time?
 
Even worse, among town and parish councils, there are usually so few candidates as to render elections almost meaningless or to make it that they don’t happen at all.
 
Like most market towns of its size, Ledbury Town Council has for decades avoided elections because fewer candidates threw their hats in the ring than existed vacancies to fill them. In May 2015, at least twenty-one candidates were needed to trigger a poll. Hoorah, we did it this year – just. Twenty three people came forward. Even if your name was Fred West, your odds of being elected were rather sporting. So much for weeding out the liars, time-wasters and the lazy, the racists and ne’er do wells who have been skulking around Ledbury Town Council’s Church Lane offices for as long as anyone can remember. Depressingly, the nasty brigade limped home at the poll.
 
It is a cruel twist that their continued presence, fortified by a chummy town clerk, will do very well to deter any new faces from stepping forward for election next time round. Who, except the very brave or the foolhardy, would want to put themselves in the path of these people?
 
And thus, against all logic and natural justice, the ancien regime manages to linger on, self-replicating like a non-lethal, but rather nasty virus. George Orwell said: If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face - forever. He was talking about the futility of trying to effect change when the odds – and the law – is so heavily stacked against you.
 
Unmatched in the public sector for amateurism and incompetence, self-serving abuse and resistance to reform, so many parish and town councils are not fit for purpose - but now there is hardly anybody there to say so.

Between them, councils in Britain’s first tier of local government spend over a half billion pounds, serving 16% of the population.  Despite their increasing power with the move towards devolved local services, the checks and balances have gone. All of them.  Our communities are being run by the same old stuff shirts and reactionary power freaks that they ever were.  Keithley, Tewkesbury, Peterlee, Edwinstowe, Chard, Broughton Hacket, Berwick on Tweed, Hertford, Kimberley, Seaford, Arlesey, Shepton Mallet, Rothbury, and the rest of you, (not forgetting Ledbury), take a bow. 
 
We should have known. ‘Localism’ was meant to give power to local communities to shape their destinies. With a few inspiring exceptions, all it has done has been to hand over the keys of the town gaol to the local political mafiosi, covert groups of cronies determined never to let go. Short of a change in the law, where scrutiny and accountability are enshrined in their rules, town and parish councils around the country will continue to hobble the hopes and dreams of their communities.  There has to be a rethink.  Local activism is important and good, but it is national policy that that has to shift in favour of genuine local democracy. 
 
If you are interested in joining the platform for Town Council Democracy and Transparency, click here. 2016 is the start of something better. 

 “Admit nothing. Deny everything. Make counter-accusations.” (Roger Stone)
 
It seems that people like Annette Crowe (the mayor), Bob Barnes (the ex-mayor) and Karen Mitchell, the town clerk, have learned by heart Roger Stone’s simple advice to keep schtum when you are asked a difficult question. Nothing. You don’t reply to emails. When pressed, say you will respond in ‘due course’, but never do. You explain that you have sought advice and are working within the rules (when plainly you are not). And you keep repeating this, again and again.
 
Eventually, after days and weeks of stonewalling and obfuscation, when the niceties of office politesse have finally been stripped away, and your would-be correspondent sends a direct, crisp, clear request for information within a deadline, it is time to invoke counter-accusation. You accuse them of harassment, citing the frequency and increasingly irritated tone of messages as evidence of their unreasonableness.
 
If only you could be more polite and friendly, it would be so much better for your cause. Actually, you say, if you are going to adopt that attitude then we refuse to talk to you at all… You know this will enrage your critic, and are pleased for it to do so, since it will give you more evidence that you are being bullied.

Catch-22, it will be remembered is “a set of circumstances in which one requirement, etc., is dependent upon another, which is in turn dependent upon the first”. Welcome to Ledbury Town Council.
 
Weeks of increasingly frustrating email ping-pong last spring (2015) with Karen Mitchell, Ledbury Town Clerk and Bob Barnes, Mayor concerning the misspent £7 thousand pounds on the Foxley Tagg Partnership, resulted finally in their making a complaint about Liz Harvey and me, both of us town councillors. 
 
We were accused by the Clerk and her Deputy Maria Bradman of bullying. No evidence was ever provided to substantiate this; it was apparently the ‘tone and quantity’ of our emails that were so offensive according to Lynda Wilcox of HALC who had been drafted in to arbitrate.  A private two hour meeting with Mrs Wilcox, Paul Winter and Rob Yeoman (town councillors) resulted in the complaint about us being dropped but we were sworn to secrecy and no written record was made (a useful stratagem).
 
Around this time, another employee of Ledbury Town Council, Barbara Stump, also decided to make an intervention, accusing me of having had an ‘aggressive confrontation’ with a member of the public at a council meeting (this in the run-up to the election in 2015).
 
‘I was at that meeting as an observer in the public area,’ said Barbara in an email circulated to all town councillors. ‘Although I did not hear every word that you said, it was clear that you were aggressive.  I was  so taken aback by your unpleasant tone to a member of the public, that I immediately left my seat and reported to the Clerk and Deputy what I had seen and heard:  they recall this. I am also aware that another member of the public sitting at the rear of the Market House that evening witnessed the incident and was astonished.’
 
For the record, this incident did take place, but not as Mrs Stump perceived it. A scurrilous rumour was being put about widely among councillors and their friends around the town that Cllr Liz Harvey had committed fraud during the previous summer’s Neighbourhood Plan consultation.
 
According to Mr Neil Doran, a local resident and one-time members of the Neighbourhood Plan Group, Liz Harvey had systematically tampered with the public responses as to the location of housing and retail provision. When, at the Council Meeting of 18 February, I told Mr Doran very quietly that I knew about this rumour, without accusing him, he became very angry and I walked back to my seat. So there it is: an aggressive confrontation, more evidence of bullying by ‘Hadley’.  No complaint against me was ever made, the diversionary slur was sufficient. Nor was Mrs Stump ever disciplined for her grossly unprofessional accusation: the Clerk said she had dealt with the matter ‘appropriately’.
 
Out of deference to Karen Mitchell and her colleagues, I wouldn’t normally mention these things; they are, after all public officials, not elected politicians. The reason for my doing so, is that neither Mrs Mitchell nor Mrs Bradman, nor other staff are content to let sleeping dogs lie. They have acted in the most flagrantly biased way, quite against their professional code of conduct. They have continued to circulate the falsehood that Liz Harvey and I are bullies. Not just them, for Bob Barnes and Rob Yeoman also skip around the council repeating this fiction to all and sundry. It also goes further up the political food chain.
 
At the Ledbury election hustings event in May 2015, local MP, Bill Wiggin, upbraided me in full public for bullying the clerk (‘his friend’) and her team. He said that that I was completely out of order and that such antics could not be tolerated in any circumstances. On election day, May 7, the normally jovial Mr Wiggin loudly repeated this story to a group of people, including Annette Crowe, outside the polling station at Ledbury Community Centre. Where next? In parliament? Really Mr Wiggin, haven’t you got better things to do than repeat such politically motivated tittle-tattle?
 
After the recent dissolution of the Neighbourhood Plan Working Group, Maria Bradman, the deputy town clerk, spent a day or two soliciting potential ‘volunteers’ for the new Neighbourhood Plan group including members of the public and town councillors. She wasted little time in explaining to potential recruits that the previous ‘hateful personalities’ that had created the ‘poisonous atmosphere’ of the previous group, would be absent.
 
Wasn’t it Joseph Goebbels who said that if you repeat a lie often enough, it becomes the truth? So while the gossip goes around and again, it becomes commonly accepted fact that yes, Liz Harvey and I are in fact bullies. In the unreal world of Trumpton politics, none of the allegations of financial irregularity concerning the Foxley Tagg £7k were true. The Clerk and the Mayor were victims of a vicious slur on their good names. Bob Barnes didn’t lie to the press and invent a fictional story about me. Why should he apologise as requested by Herefordshire Council? 
 
What all these pitiful incidents show is that when cornered, councillors and staff of Ledbury Town Council have the aggressive instincts of spitting cobras. They play with the truth and make up what they don’t know, which is a lot. Lies are deployed like grape shot. Rules and procedures are used and abused, mostly to confound scrutiny, but never to illuminate the truth. When raw nerves are touched, they fake offence as expertly as a Premiership team of diving footballers.
 
It started looking like incompetence and stupidity, a last hurrah from the dusty old fossils kicking about the shadows of the Market House. What now emerges is something altogether more sinister, an organised conspiracy by the Ledbury political establishment to crush opposition, and to stamp on dissent. The defamation, lies and systematic political bullying is calculated to send out a clear message to anyone wishing to shake things up for the better. In this town, alternative voices will not be tolerated, they will be destroyed.
 
As the great fictional President of House of Cards, Frank Underwood said, ‘democracy is so overrated’.

​Politicians not telling the truth is about as newsworthy as lawyers divesting their clients of cash. Everybody knows that’s what they do. But even so, with the near certainty of being found out, the question is: why are politicians so prone to porkies? What makes them think they can get away with those big whoppers?
 
Winston Churchill famously coined the phrase ‘terminological inexactitude’ so as to avoid being censured for ‘un-parliamentary’ language. In modern times, MP Alan Clarke refused to admit to lying in court, explaining playfully to the eminent QC that he was being ‘economical with the actualité’.
 
The manifestation of deceit was potently imagined as a stench of stale alcohol by Tennessee Williams in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. In the great 1958 movie, the unforgettable Burl Ives asks “What's that smell in this room? Didn't you notice it, Brick? Didn't you notice a powerful and obnoxious odour of mendacity in this room?”
 
Bill Clinton said: 'I did not have sexual relations with that woman'. If you’ve got nothing to lose, maybe it’s worth a shot. Somebody might believe you. There’s a sucker born every minute. In any case, there’s lawyerly wriggle room too: what exactly do we mean by sexual relations? What’s a woman anyway? Which woman? See, it’s easy to lie and get away with it. Bill, more or less, did just that.
 
Perhaps those practised in the dark art of dishonesty are simply impervious to its moral repugnance: they just don’t care. Psychologists report an alarming propensity for business leaders and politicians to exhibit ‘personality disorder’ of various kinds. Apart from being excessively self-regarding, the greatest attribute of narcissists is their ability to shrug off disgrace and scandal and move on as if nothing had happened.
 
Regular readers will be familiar with 'Big' Bob Barnes and his bouncing truth bombs. I recently pondered whether Bob was a fool or a liar, and being charitable, opted for the stupidity option. Now I’m not so sure.
 
In this morning’s Ledbury Reporter online, Cllr Barnes claims he knew nothing about the squandered Awards for All grant of £10 thousand gifted to Ledbury Town Council to support a community engagement programme for the ill-fated Neighbourhood Plan project in 2014.
 
He said: "I would just like to point out, that the grant application was drafted by Mr Hadley and Cllr Liz Harvey, and the grant was not received until after I had been removed from the position of chairman. "Therefore my "incompetence and intransigence" would have had no bearing on it's (sic) allocation, or spending."
 
This, obviously is completely untrue. 

Let’s just clear up the actualité. The funding application was made on the 6 July 2014 under the auspices of the Neighbourhood Plan working party of which Bob Barnes was chair, and during his period as Mayor of LTC.  The award was received during October 2014 (paid into the town council bank account on 10/10/14) and the programme was due to run from 1 November 2014 to 31 August 2015.
 
It is simply not credible for Cllr Barnes to say he was unaware of this award, especially as he chaired and actively participated in the various meetings in which the programme was discussed and finalised during summer 2014. He was also present at the Neighbourhood Plan meeting of 7 October 2014 when the award was reported by Cllr Liz Harvey in the minutes and where it was agreed that a press release would be drafted.

Why, Bob even sent a congratulatory note on 13 August to Liz Harvey when we received news of the award. Here it is: "Liz, Well done everyone, it took a while but worth it in the end. Excellent news. Regards, Bob Barnes."

So unless Cllr Barnes has suffered yet another spectacular memory loss, it is quite clear he was fully aware of the award, despite his press comments. Yet again, when it comes to telling the truth, Uncle Bob is remarkably reticent.
 
What really is going on in Bob’s moral universe, that wide open, calm space which is seemingly unperturbed by qualm or scruple?  The troubling explanation is that small-town Bob, like the other great political liars of our time, Nixon, Mugabe, possibly Blair, is genuinely one of those rare individuals who sail far above the boundaries of right and wrong, inhabiting a place where advantage and expediency are his guiding lights.
 
In politics it is not gentlemanly to call someone a liar. You have to find ways of saying it nicely. That’s tricky. Sometimes you just have to tell the truth. ​

This article was updated at 17.00 on 15/12/15

​When Cllr Liz Harvey asked the Clerk Karen Mitchell what, in the understanding of Ledbury Town Council, constitutes ‘correspondence’, she was helpfully sent a link to an online dictionary. Thank you Karen for helping us out on this: for the uneducated, it means business or formal letters, or emails.
 
In town council meetings there is a standing agenda item called ‘correspondence’. This is the section in which members of the public and outside organisations can formally register any matter of concern or interest with town councillors and be sure that it will be publicly noted.
 
As you would expect in the topsy-turvy world of Ledbury Town Council, ‘correspondence’ is devoted to the presentation of trivial material such as the arrival of magazines and official bumph. Important letters and emails are rarely presented.
 
Great efforts have been made reasonably to ask the Clerk and the Mayor, Annette Crowe what are the criteria for the circulation of correspondence to councillors. When residents write officially to the council, is it just an optional extra that their letters are not put straight in the bin?  Who decides and on what basis what gets put before councillors or not?  Are there any rules or guidelines beyond the preference or whim of the Town Clerk? The questions remain unanswered by Ledbury Council’s two senior ladies.
 
When the future of Ledbury’s Neighbourhood Plan Group was under discussion, a large number of people wrote to the Mayor petitioning about the proposed dissolution of the community-led group. People rightly were concerned that the Plan should not be put in the hands of consultants who have little loyalty and limited knowledge of our town.
 
At the debate, none of their emails were circulated to councillors nor their views mentioned by the Mayor. Neither was the hand-delivered letter to Annette Crowe from five longstanding members of that Group which asked that she encourage the Clerk to agree to meet Ian James the Neighbourhood Plan chair to help unblock the process which she her deputy had lately strangled.
 
The friendly Annette Crowe airily explained that the reason this correspondence was never presented to Council was because she didn’t know she had received it. By her own admission, Annette is not so good with the internet and uses her own personal email account for official business. This means that if you send an email to acrowe@ledburytowncouncil.gov.uk (which is the address posted on Ledbury Town Council's website) it will languish unread. Note, Mrs Crowe has been a town councillor for four years and in all that time has never used her official email account. So that’s all right then.
 
Unfortunately there are at least three other instances of important letters sent to the Clerk or in hard copy being filed in the 'WPB' since Annette became Mayor, no action taken. But how would anyone know the true extent of the Council’s manipulation of information? Such is the Kafkaesque bureaucratic labyrinth in which town councillors operate. As George Orwell said: Ignorance is strength. 
 
The suppression of uncomfortable official correspondence is not a new phenomenon. Last December (2014), a local landowner wrote to the Mayor, Bob Barnes outlining a major housing proposal which could have financed a large multi-use sports ground for the town. He asked that the letter be circulated to councillors for comment. Bob Barnes kept it to himself. Naturally it never appeared as ‘correspondence’.
 
There are those who tend to favour cock-up over conspiracy in explaining strangely troubling coincidences. Ok. Let’s give the benefit of the doubt and say Bob Barnes is a fool and didn’t have the basic intelligence to interpret what this letter meant or how properly to discharge his duties as Mayor and chair of the Neighbourhood Plan Group.
 
The alternative, less charitable explanation was the that the mooted housing/sports facility proposal might have derailed the advanced plans of various of his friends in the local sports world. Cllr Rob Yeoman was then acting as agent, it will be recalled, for the speculative land developers looking to build houses on the old cricket pitch, the planning application for which was at a particularly delicate stage.
 
How inconvenient to Rob’s chums at the Silverwood Partnership would an alternative scheme have been which both fulfilled all Ledbury’s housing requirements at a stroke, and provided new cricket, football and rugby fields plus a multi-use sports complex.
 
It took a full year before news of this alternative sports blueprint came to light, coincidentally just around the time the Neighbourhood Plan team was being dissolved - at Mr Yeoman’s behest. That will be another cock-up.
 
Tackled on why he didn’t do as he was requested and forward the letter to interested parties, Bob Barnes said lamely that he had discussed it with ‘two or three councillors’ and had ‘decided’ it was not ‘relevant’. Nor did he think it would be of relevance to the Neighbourhood Planning group, then grappling with all the options for location of sports, housing and open green space.

​Fool or liar? You decide.
 
Read the news story here: Stone’s rule #2: Deny Everything.

Political bureaucracies the world over have noted the efficacy of character assassination, delay and obfuscation, and the arbitrary application of rules to silence their critics.

What you do is first to ignore awkward questions, hoping your adversary will lose heart and give up. PR professionals advise their clients to do this as a first line defence when they are in a particularly tight spot, say nothing. Resigned International Development Minister Grant Shapps recently followed this strategy for several weeks before the truth caught up with him. Next you issue a bland rebuttal that ignores all the evidence of your guilt. Some fools might believe you. Finally you go on the attack and start digging the dirt. Donald Trump’s (and Richard Nixon’s) ex-political consultant Roger J Stone famously said: “Admit nothing. Deny everything. Make counter-accusations.”
 
From the White House and Westminster right down to dear old Ledbury Town Council, the turbid waters of political sleaze swirl about like a dirty ebb tide. It’s all about power and protecting your interests. The good guys drop out exhausted and disillusioned, but the sociopaths, the ruthlessly ambitious and the desperate hang on in there with nothing to lose, most, coming to relish their supremacy, ever less conscionable and more arrogant. That’s why politicians are a breed apart, not like ordinary people with scruples and consciences. It’s a club of knaves. Like Frank Underwood in House of Cards, they do what needs to be done. Shit floats.
 
Let’s talk about Ledbury as a crucible of such vainglory and conceited corruption. Some people in our town council really do believe that they are above the rules, amazed and affronted when they are called to account.
 
During the few weeks between my putting in a complaint to Herefordshire Council about ex-mayor Bob Barnes’ unacceptable behaviour (defamation, bullying, lying etc) and its adjudication, it emerges that his political sidekick Cllr Martin Eager issued an astonishing email demanding that I be banned from town council meetings.

‘Can I have an assurance that Hadley (sic) is not a member of the Charter Market Working Party and that he will not be attending any meetings.... If not,’ he continued, ‘then I cannot see how me (sic) or for that matter any other councillor can attend any council affiliated meeting with Hadley participating whilst this complaint against a fellow respected councillor is ongoing.’ Sent to the Mayor and the Clerk, as the note attracted no adverse reaction from them (despite my asking for their opinion), it is assumed that they concur with its contents.  
 
While the deeply unsavoury Mr Eager (see here and here) is no stranger to foolish and offensive outbursts, the democratic implications of this are rather more serious. Is he suggesting that members of the public are liable to be blackballed or ostracised if they make a complaint about a town councillor, legitimate or not? Does he not appreciate that such remarks might be construed as intended to deter public scrutiny of councillor conduct? With his track-record, would he care?

Other councillors also appear to be above criticism. Tackled on an important transparency issue, Mayor Annette Crowe said to a fellow councillor: ‘I have found that everyone is trying their hardest  to work together for the benefit of the town and do not respond well or work harder if they are constantly being criticized, accused or threatened, myself included … There is an old saying that you catch more flies with honey rather than vinegar.’
 
The trouble with this is that no matter how many flies you catch, there will always be more attracted by the unmistakable whiff of excrement.

To be continued.... 

, The twentieth century will be remembered mainly for the worst of reasons, for bombs, concentration camps and tyrannous politics. From an era dominated by ever-increasing military violence, is also bequeathed those psychological practices which are designed to encourage compliance, betrayal and surrender. Two writers had distilled the virulence of this dark psychological twentieth century, even before it had got fully into its stride: Franz Kafka and George Orwell. They foresaw the exploitation of manipulation, deception, and alienation as political strategies systematically to destroy resistance and achieve submission.
 
If we remember Orwell for Big Brother, it is to Kafka that we understand mind-numbing bureaucratic irrationality and distortion. ‘What is Kafkaesque is when you enter a surreal world in which all your control patterns, all your plans, the whole way in which you have configured your own behavior, begins to fall to pieces, when you find yourself against a force that does not lend itself to the way you perceive the world,’ said Kafka’s biographer Frederick R. Karl. ‘You don't give up, you don't lie down and die. What you do is struggle against this with all of your equipment, with whatever you have. But of course you don't stand a chance. That's Kafkaesque.’ Chilling.
 
So here we are protesting that Western Governments must reduce their carbon footprint for the sake of the planet, that the casino banking system is irretrievably broken, that the Blair government invented a fictional rationale for taking us to war in Iraq. We rage against poverty and cruel public service cuts that hurt the weakest in our society. Numb with emotional fatigue, we bear witness to the judicial killing machine in the United States, the school shootings, public beheadings in Arabia and the IS caliphate.  Way after the event, when the calamities have befallen us and our lives are littered with broken dreams, there might be a grudging admission of ‘mistakes’. But in the moments that count, the political bureacracies make their decisions anyway, continue to frack the earth and burn the oil, bail out the bankers and blame the feckless poor for our spiralling debts, launch us potentially into another catastrophic military adventure in the Middle East while sucking up to oil rich allies, castigating our enemy for barbarous practices while hoisting down our knickers, sorry, flags to half mast as a mark of respect to the death of their religious bedfellow, the Saudi King?

Closer to home in Ledbury, a few stalwarts continue to bang their head against the Town Council wall, hoping for a more humane, enlightened and intelligent approach to the governance of our town. Democratic progress is painfully slow, if at all. So much effort and enthusiasm ground into the dust. The contagion of despotism is everywhere.
 
Is it any wonder that ordinary people turn away from politicians in disgust, sickened by all the hypocrisy, greed and double dealing? Is it unreasonable to ask what really is the point of trying to change things? What is democracy anyway?
 
And yet… like baffled Kafkaesque victims, we do keep going, putting ourselves in the firing line and hoping for a better future. The point is, do we stand a chance?
 
Answers please.