Your splendid annual columnist, Graeme Robertson, does me wrong in supposing that I write letters to the Evening Press only under the stimulus of pending General Elections.
Newspapers have been publishing my letters for the past 42 years and, in all that time, I have been a parliamentary candidate only twice.
People who write and read newspapers fashion our minds more than parliamentarians.
No, Graeme, what motivates me is the world I grew up in as a child.
I am one of that rare generation which, at a very impressionable age, first saw the fruits of the world's puny nationalisms flowering at Auschwitz and blooming above the incinerated city of Hiroshima.
Those of us who looked aghast into hell on earth at that pivotal time (and who are not yet overwhelmed by cynicism) owe a duty to our children's children to speak out constantly against the ancient bigotries which brought us where we were.
Coun Ted Batty,
Selby Liberal Democrats,
The Old Vicarage,
York Road,
Selby.
Converted for the new archive on 30 June 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.
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