Today I went straight from work to visit politics students at Christ’s Hospital and bore the life out of them and on the way home I passed through Horsham and remembered that there was a planning meeting going on which my colleagues in Horsham Labour party were addressing so I stopped off for that.

More about that later. Probably.

Today’s events made me all nostalgic for several reasons.  First of all, the visit to Christ’s Hospital remined me of my own time at school.  Obviously my school was nowhere near as grand, but it was still a co-educational boarding school out in the country and I was wondering how life in such an establishment will be different now, and how it would be similar.

I remember my last year at school very fondly.  Video games were very much in the future, as were video recorders, let alone computers and the internet.  If we had Spotify at school would it have made life better or worse I wonder?  Certainly we would have been exposed to more tunes, but would have missed out on listening to the same few Yes and Genesis albums over and over again.

If I remember rightly, our last summer was a glorious one and having got exams out of the way, we spent a lot of time swimming, sunbathing outside the pool, and making use of the athletics facilities – not that you would believe it to see me now.  And punk was just starting to filter through to us as well.

Chatting to the students, I speculated that mobile phones must make everything different. At my school there was a single pay phone between 250 pupils so phone calls home were a rarity.  Now they can be texting friends and family all the time.  They pointed out that mobile phones are not allowed for the junior years.  In my mind I was just thinking that bottles of Captain Morgan rum were not allwed at my school but they were stashed away in the senior common room anyway

The Horsham council planning meeting made me nostalgic in a different way, for a different time.  Although the set-up was totally different to Crawley’s committee rooms, there were enough reminders of my time as Chair of Development Control – the inaudible sound system, the press scribbling away, the endless maps.

I have been to a few of the Crawley planning meetings since leaving the council but at those I felt that I knew exactly what was going on because the people and surroundings were so familiar.  In many cases I could guess what the councillors were going to say before they said it, because they were returning to familiar favourite topics.  In Horsham tonight I appreciate more what it must have been like as a first-time visitor.

A few of the councillors are now familiar to me, as is the chief executive, but it took me a while to work out who was in the chair and which people round the table were planning officers and other staff.  Not being able to hear anything much that was said did not help of course.  Nice to see that a fandamental failure to understand that microphones work best if they are spoken into was not just a peculiar trait of crawley councillors!

Having sat through that I feel I should retrospectively apologise to every member of the public who ever attended one of the planning meetings I chaired.  I did try to introduce all the dramatis personae at the beginning and make some explanation of procedure to the public, but I now realise that I probably did not go anywhere near far enough.

Anyway, I think we got a result, of sorts, in the planning decision, and I had a thoroughly good time at the school, on top of a reasonably productive day at work so all together I think it was a good day.

I will be glad when people stop asking me if I am going to transfer from Horsham to Crawley as a candidate though.  There are four very good reasons why I can’t/won’t – the fifth of which is that Horsham Labour party has already paid some money towards printing election leaflets with my name all over them.

The BNP have a habit of booking their functions under false names like “British Heritage”.   The Morning Advertiser, the pub trade’s newspaper, is advising publicans and hoteliers to double-check bookings they have on Saturday 13th because experience has shown that hosting a BNP party can be bad for business.  Wherever the pub or hotel is, it is virtually guaranteed some money-can’t-buy publicity next week, but will it be for accepting a BNP booking or for cancelling one?

It is the second disc of a double-CD, and I will get the first disc tomorrow with a copy of the NME. It is all in aid of Love Music Hate Racism and their attempt to counter the BNP’s recent attempts to try recruiting in schools.

(See the Wealden UAF site for more info)

Do go and download the free CD, whatever you do – it has a track off Manu Chao’s new album so you can all see what I keep raving about. Right now I am getting seriously hooked on the New Young Pony Club track on there.

It is a little annoying that the download is a single 50-minute mp3, but I reckon it won’t take too long to chop it into separate tracks with Audacity.

It was a really pleasant morning all together, considering the chaotic run-up to it. On Friday evening we found out that the person who was going to print the leaflets had not been able to do them, so I ended up doing them on my laser printer at home, printing as many as I could before its ancient toner cartridge ran out. This unexpected election so soon after the group was formed has caught us out a little, but we have learned a lot from it and will be able to respond a lot better next time around.

I managed to do enough for us to cover a large part of the ward, and it was a great morning to be doing it. Not too hot, but not cold either. After we ran out of supplies we met up at the Rising Sun pub to compare notes. One group had encountered the BNP out knocking on doors, so it looks like we had got ourselves organised just in time.

While out and about a couple of our group met some ladies from the Conservative Association who were very pleased to see them and said they would be pressing for the Conservatives to get affiliated.

It was not just a matter trying to force leaflets on shoppers, but to try and talk to anyone who would spare the time to listen which is much more interesting and effective. That approach means that you can explain that you are not asking anyone to join anything (although it would be nice if they did) but just to vote whenever any election comes along instead of opting out of the whole thing.

I think I may be a bit liberal about the BNP. Not at all a hard-liner. As far as I am concerned they are welcome to have a page on Facebook as long as they don’t put up anything illegal which incites hatred and I recognise that there is no reason why they shouldn’t hold their opinions and put up candidates – as long as they are staying within the law of course. If I come across someone who supports them I wouldn’t deny them the right to vote how they want to, though I would see if I can persuade them of the dangers. Really I am more concerned that the vast majority of voters, who really do not agree with the BNP, do not let them in or increase their influence by simply not voting.

Its hard to do, but I tell those who say they intend not to vote that they would be better voting Conservative, Liberal or Labour than not voting. In Horsham such an appeal is unlikely to result in many, if any, votes for Labour, but its still worth saying and I have to remember which hat I am wearing at the time.

One low point was seeing how many people out in Horsham were either sympathetic to the BNP or, more often, just apathetic. “No thanks, I’m not interested” they say. If an equivalent of the UAF had been out in Germany in the 1930′s they probably would have got the same response. Worst of all were those who came out with some comments about how they couldn’t support the BNP but “it isn’t right that so many people come over here and take over.”

I’m not sure who they were talking about. In three hours there I saw a handful of non-white faces. I don’t have statistics to hand, but if Horsham turned out to be one of the whitest towns in Britain I would not be surprised at all. its proof that these opinions are not based on any sort of experience but probably on the rubbish the newspapers print. If anything it shows a fear of the unknown.

But that was a minority view, and the high points were when others took the time to listen or even to challenge our arguments constructively, and when a few people took the time to actually thank us for giving up our Saturday morning to try and do something.

I don’t think there has been much, if any, organised anti-Nazi activity in Horsham before, so what we found was not surprising. The BNP thrive in a vacuum with no organised opposition. Its a typical bully attitude really. The problem is that Labour and Conservatives nationally (or Conservatives and Liberal Democrats in Horsham) are not threatened by the BNP and so they do not often waste space in their campaign literature to tackle the BNP’s wildly inaccurate claims which could be used to attack each other. The effect is that while all the main parties are against the BNP they are not opposing them at all in many areas – which is where the UAF steps in.

Anyway, it was a different way to spend a birthday.

Two themes emerged. Neither was really surprising , but both stand repeating and emphasizing.

Firstly, nearly all the 16 were totally committed to the fundamental principle of the NHS being free at the point of deliver, and for all its faults far preferable to the American system. The exception was an American who thought the NHS is unsustainable.

The other point is made just by looking at the names of the people: Karim Ahmed (A&E Registrar), Zhaleh Kaleeli (Researcher), Muna Ahmed (Clinical Genetics Specialist), Haseena Iqbal (GP), Shazia Jalali (GP), Ehsan Khondaker (GP), Nikos Gorgoraptis (Junior Doctor). Something to remember when the BNP talk about removing immigrants from the health service, or when others talk about shutting the doors and keeping foreigners out.

Not only are all these ‘foreigners’ (with a fair proportion of Muslim names) keeping the health service running, but they are passionate about the idea of universal healthcare provision. Isn’t that enough of an adoption of ‘British values’ for anyone?

Bear it in mind next month when the BNP stand in a by-election in Horsham with their usual calls to get rid of immigrants alongside claims that they would improve the NHS. The two things are mutually incompatible.

Anyone who agrees strongly and wants to help out with campaigning against the BNP in the Crawley/Horsham/Reigate-ish area, and specifically Holbrook West next month, can come along to a local UAF meeting in Crawley next week (details at wealdenuaf.org.uk) or just come along to help deliver or hand out leaflets (drop me a line).

The original plan was to discuss future plans, specifically to do some leafletting in Horsham and/or Redhill to raise awareness and maybe even increase the membership. Since then the BNP have decided to field a candidate in a by-election in Horsham in October, so I guess that is going to end up very much on the agenda and any work we do there is going to be a bit more focussed than we anticipated.

If anyone is interested in this they can just turn up on the 3rd or get in touch with me or the UAF (via its website wealdenuaf.org.uk) If you just happen to own a printing press, minibus or t-shirt printing company as well, then great, but even if you don’t you will be warmly received.

To avoid having all these tasks hanging over me and stressing me out, I tried to get some of them out of the way immediately so when I got home I went online and registered the domain wealdenuaf.org.uk, got it hosted, set up e-mail accounts for all the officers of the UAF and copied the old UAF page across to the new site.

The new wealdenuaf.org.uk site looks a bit sad at the moment. Just a single page of HTML written in Notepad, which is a waste of the 250Mb of space and unlimited bandwidth available, but it will do until we decide how ambitious we want to be with all the inter-webby stuff.

If so, are you willing to let us have a copy for future UAF leaflets or the website? No payment (we are saving funds for campaigning) but full attribution if requested.

Unfortunately I was out of town at the time, so I missed it all. I don’t know how successful it was at increasing membership, but going by the photos in this week’s Crawley Observer it certainly raised awareness. I lost count of the number of UNITE badges and stickers you could see being worn.