WHAT’S ON YOUR MIND?
Bonfire Symbols
Dear HIP,
I went to the Bonfire night for the first time and was really impressed by the organisation and great family atmosphere of the event. However, I have a couple of questions about the event that I hope someone might be able to answer for me.
I noticed that, to the right of the fire as it was being lit, there were four large burning crosses. What is the significance of that symbolism? Also, I was somewhat surprised that the main piece of music played repeatedly through the PA system as the fire burned was Rule Britannia. I was a little dismayed, as I was surrounded by people speaking a variety of languages. I was impressed by the multi-cultural nature of the crowd but confused by the message of the song. Are the burning crosses and Rule Britannia part of the usual format of this amazing event?
Laurence Flood
Privatisation disaster
Dear HIP
According to your front page article in HIP 236, Sally-Ann Hart apparently now thinks that water privatisation was a mistake.
Wow! It has only taken her 40 years to figure that out! I figured out that privatisation was bad in 1979. I wonder how much longer it will take for her to realise that every single privatisation/sell-off has been a disaster for the UK. Even the UK’s vital defence research establishments were sold off to American corporations for a tiny fraction of their value.
Marcus de Mowbray
Fencing above The Courtyard
Regarding your report Fence Following Fall in HIP 236, I am puzzled that the higher safety fencing was removed just after the funeral of the young lad. So, is it suddenly safe now?
Bryan Fisher
Café Creme
Some of your report Forsaken Café to be Offered for Castle Project in HIP 237 makes sense. The castle needs a decent visitor centre if it is to be a serious attraction, and St Mary in the Castle at the bottom of the hill needs a new function which should somehow be incorporated into the plan.
However, the cafe site would be wasted as a mere visitor centre for the castle. It’s a stunning site, fabulous views, great accessibility via West Hill lift. It should be a cafe/restaurant aimed at both local and tourist trade. There’s nothing else in the area bar except the Plough pub. Managed properly, it should be a little goldmine.
Peter Saunders
Forced Entry
Your headline Helena Dollimore: A Force to be Reckoned with in HIP 237 offers an opening for me to say that the only force about Dollimore is that she was forced upon Hastings Labour by the London HQ against strong objections from local Labour Party members who would have liked more than one local candidate to choose from. As it was, no one from Hastings or St Leonards was allowed on the shortlist.
The hustings where she was selected were the most stage-managed put-up and shut-up affair ever attended by local members and run by an unpleasant National Executive Committee member who had no connections to East Sussex, let alone Hastings. There was one, not very experienced, person from Rye on the three-member shortlist, and the questions were limited and strictly controlled. Many Labour members of 30 and 40 years standing, and lots of younger members, left the Party in droves after this, because of the control freakery and the lack of genuine interest in Hastings issues that this signified, decimating the constituency Labour Party which had boasted 2,000 members in 2017.
I write from long experience within Labour as a former national Labour press officer, after a career in newspapers and TV. I ran two by-elections, helped run three Party Conferences, and was involved in the 1987 General Election when Neil Kinnock lost, then moved into Head of Comms roles at two large London Boroughs. It was a long hard slog to get to 1997 and, yes, it did require unity and discipline, not a strong point of the socialist left. But it was never as undemocratic as it is now. I even stayed loyal despite the Iraq war.
In Hastings, where I live, I was procedures secretary in 2017 for Labour, and experienced attempts to impose totally unsuitable candidates with no interest in anything but kick-starting the bandwagon of their own political career path to Parliament. Brexit, May and Johnson followed, and Labour took a beating under Corbyn – then collapsed under the onslaught of media vilification and, so I strongly believe, a central conspiracy to undermine him, the true facts of which are yet to be fully exposed.
The remaining constituency Labour Party in Hastings has been drained of energy and, I would say, integrity. It is deeply undemocratic. It allows no debate about anything that is not approved first by the General Secretary David Evans and the totally untrustworthy Keir Starmer – not even one of the most worrying issues of our time, Israel-Gaza, where CLPs have been ordered not to accept motions or to debate the subject.
It is my belief that Labour do not want members other than to knock on doors at election time and raise money. They are intent on becoming a national party without democratic policy structures, with an annual conference that simply rubber-stamps what the leading Labour elite want.
Dollimore was a councillor in Merton, using her position as a stepping stone for selection as a Prospective Parliamentary Candidate: not unusual, of course, but it is claimed she did not serve her ward as long as she should have done. These facts, combined with her habit of climbing onto other people’s hard fought-for campaigns and claiming them as her own – as with Southern Water – means to my mind that she is singularly self-interested and does not deserve election.
God forbid the Conservatives continue to destroy this country but Labour under Starmer does not represent a new kind of politics – rather, a self-interested, largely more-of-the-same kind of politics.
I will continue to vote Labour in local elections, as there are genuinely hard working and honourable councillors here, working within an impossibly tight budget. I couldn’t do what they do. They have stayed in the Party for the good of Hastings Borough – a principle and cause that is a lot better to my mind than inserting oneself into Hastings for the benefit of personal ambition.
Rosie Brocklehurst
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