WHEN you join a political party, you usually join one that shares your principles and ideals. How else can you serve your electors if you don't share their views? And furthermore, if they don't trust you to represent them in council.

If you join a party because they are the ruling group and then hope to change their views, then you are naive in the extreme. On the other hand, you may have joined them because opposition parties can't promise you anything apart from hope for the future and you may want to change the world too quickly?

Old Labour in the form of Don Rishton and Peter Greenwood stuck to the principles of the Labour Party and look what happened to them. New Labour have no principles and it must be difficult to recruit membership to a party without principles.

If you don't find a political party which shares your ideals and principles, you should start your own party as many have done before you. It will be tough trying to get a new party off the ground but if you are successful, it will be worth your while.

There has been quite a bit of swapping and changing of political parties recently, due to single issues and by labelling other parties for the wrong reasons:

Because the Conservative Party supported the invasion of Iraq, it was because the major opposition party in Parliament supports our armed forces when the Prime Minister of the day takes the country to war. The fact that the 'dodgy dossier' turns out in fact to be truly dodgy, the full responsibility for the conflict lies squarely on the shoulders of the Prime Minister.

He and his office decided to go to war and he alone must 'take the can back'.

ALAN COTTAM, Conservative Councillor, Livesey with Pleasington.