New Broadstairs & St Peters town mayor, Mike Garner, and his Green Party colleagues pathetically delight in the fact that this medallion wearing chump is following without question the ridiculously outdated tradition of being non-political throughout his year-long term of office.
Blinded by his elevation to the highest public office a tiny seaside town can offer, his decision to forego the political rights his election to the town council conferred on him is both stupid and unnecessary.
There is no law compelling the mayor of a town or district council to act non-politically. And just because it’s the tradition to do so doesn’t mean you are obliged to follow like a sheep.
To voluntarily surrender your political rights is an extremely serious matter which should not be done lightly, if at all.
Many, myself included, would go further and condemn such an action as a sickening insult to those who have no political rights to fritter away as Garner so cheerfully does.
His is the gesture of a privileged politician in a privileged country who doesn’t have a clue about the international struggles to gain the rights he so readily and carelessly disposes of.
Across the world tens if not hundreds of millions of people are prevented by despots, dictators and totalitarian regimes from exercising even the most basic of political and human rights. To try secure these rights is likely to lead to arrest, imprisonment, torture, rape and murder.
The type of Greens I support are radicals who are determined to use their political rights to extend and strengthen democracy . But sadly Garner's deeply insulting actions here in Thanet suggest that there are some in the Green Party who prefer opening village fetes and picking litter on the beach, to campaigning against poverty, injustice, oppression and the captalistic destruction of our environment.
Comments