MANY people enjoy the backbiting between and against councillors in these pages, and I must say their punctured pomposity is amusing, but it's like shooting fish in a barrel. It's too easy. Local politics is like that. And what depresses me is that next May, as if stricken with amnesia, the good citizenry will once more go out and vote for a set of local politicians. Or rather, 25 per cent will, while the other 75 per cent will as usual regard the whole business as not worth the bother. It's as if we're trapped in some endless loop, where the names may change but everything else is the same.

Is it any wonder that people hate politics, when it is dominated by petty parochial issues? The planet is in mortal danger, yet letter writers in the local area do not seem to live on the planet. Instead they inhabit some strange Ghormenghast where nothing matters but spite and fingerpointing. And the politics that they squabble about is such trivial fare: supporters of Labourtory without a shade of difference, except a competition to see which can become more anti-working class and repressive; MBI (mindless bloomin' insults?) without even that much originality; and well-meaning Greens now keen to be dragged innocently into this murky, dirty world, inevitably to be stained by it. Then there are the flag-waving foxhunting nutters who are more to be pitied than despised, and the only 'socialist' I can spot keeps telling people to nationalise everything and emulate the USSR, as if the last hundred years has not happened. Depressing indeed.

As readers with a memory will recall, I advocate a revolution. But first there needs to be a revolution - in these letters pages. Writers need to raise their standards. Instead of scoring points in a perpetual 'bored' game, they need to ask themselves, in an age which predicts a Siberian climate for Britain and world wars over water, what they and their organisations seriously propose to do about it. They need to challenge their own assumptions, about capitalism, about history, about people. I don't say I have a monopoly of right answers. But I do claim to know what's important. If contributors would stop pulling their ideas out of Second's Catalogues and Bankrupt Stock Responses Ltd they might, just might, make this letters page a very useful engine of social change, instead of a chortling local gossip column.

Paddy Shannon

Socialist Party (SPGB)

Green St Lancaster