People sometimes say to me “Liam, don’t you ever find politics boring?” Believe me, when you are sitting in a room listening to a discussion about the distinction between A4 and A5 pages which feels longer than the longest, most excruciating piece of free form jazz in the world, there is only one answer to that question. Especially when I had vaguely assumed in my younger days that by 2026 I would be representing a British or Irish socialist republic in somewhere like Verona or Avignon and would have a flying car. This is probably why God has given us the option of slipping out early to go to the pub.

As I have been noting for some months now, the wave of young people coming into the Green Party is a very exciting development. A taste of that is here and here. Then there are the things that are just downright odd and thus have some entertainment value.

Step forward, Tower Hamlets Independents, which announced their mayoral candidate and a couple of aspirant councillors earlier this week.

My cats have a better chance of understanding the differences between ninth century Byzantine Christian sects than most people have of grasping the ideological differences between the Independents and Aspire, the party which currently administers Tower Hamlets through its executive mayor Lutfur Rahman. The not exactly a party had a split just over a year ago. I have asked my cats if the Independents are in some way linked to this, but they started meowing incoherently about the emperors Leo III and Justinian II.

I used this as a pedagogical opportunity and explained to Ernest and Pablo that to understand an organisation you look at what it does and what its programme is. The Independents’ programme at least has the merit of being concise and can be republished in its entirety:

“Community first, every day. Championing local voices, backing small businesses, and creating safer, greener streets for everyone. Proud to stand with residents, traders, and young people.”

This is inarguably better than standing with the community every second Tuesday of the month, saying that everyone should do their shopping online and that they plan to chop down all the trees and turn the parks into high rise car parks. We can add that it is a positive they don’t want compulsory military service for 16-25 year olds and want to get on with local people. More than that it is hard to deduce.

Reading the available information about their candidates is not much more helpful. The mayoral hopeful is described as Barrister Zami. It turns out this was not the first name given to him by his parents and he is an actual barrister. We can speculate if they would have done the same if their mayoral candidate were a barista or a plumber. He does have the sort of moustache more usually seen on RAF squadron commanders in 1940s English war films.  However, he does seem to be a serious person and is involved in a war crimes tribunal in Bangladesh.

Now I would be reluctant to brag about my grade A Italian and French O-levels or my A* Spanish GCSE which I got in a year through evening class. Not so Independent council candidates, one of whom gives us his entire educational history in local schools, the subtext being I might not have much to say about politics but I deserve your vote because I successfully got through primary school, secondary school and college. At the risk of sounding cynical, most other people in the area have done the same.

There are two genuinely interesting things about this new electoral formation. The first is that they have nicked the revolutionary clenched fist symbol, even if they have made it a sort of old style UKIP purple and softened it a little. OK, maybe that is not hugely interesting to most people.

The second thing is that they are very much competing for Aspire votes. Lutfur Rahman has run a mildly left-wing administration and is popular. He gets a lot of racist abuse and while there is some dodgy stuff, it is as nothing compared to what outfits like the Labour Friends of Israel do. However, his councillors are an unimpressive bunch with a reputation for being lazy and have cheesed off a lot of their Bangladeshi voting base. Half serious campaigns by another party pitching for the Bangladeshi vote could see some of them unseated in May’s election.

The electoral arithmetic might get very unpredictable in a way that could massively inconvenience me. A residual sense of proletarian duty compelled me to put my name down as a paper candidate on the certain calculation that while I might scrape a credible vote, I hadn’t a snowball’s chance in hell of getting elected. Now, with the utter collapse of the Labour vote and the emergence of what we might describe as the Continuity New Aspire, I am getting cold sweats anticipating long evenings in which those discussions about A4 pages are a comforting memory.