At the Mapesbury Residents Association Annnual General Meeting on Thursday night I was hoping to speak to the assembled residents about the Community Wireless Network I am involved in running in Queen’s Park. Having been very impressed by the collective action that MapRA have motived in their community around the Mapesbury Dell project and the purchase of old-fashioned, sorry, ‘heritage’ street lights for some of the streets, I thought that a Community Wireless Broadband Network would have been something that the residents of Mapesbury may have been interested in working to acheive. However, due to time constraints I was unable to speak but I did distribute some leaflets to each seat in the room in the hope that people would pick it up and read it.
I was not the only person who had that idea.
Yasmin had also distributed her some campaign materials at the AGM, placing an A4 piece of paper, ‘Mapesbury Labour News’, on each seat on top of the MapRA AGM materials. I was distributing my materials and Yasmin asked me to not put my leaflet on top of hers. Well, I, like Yasmin, was only adding the existing pile…. And when further information leafets were distributed about the financial standing of MapRA to the top of the now quite high pile, Yasmin had a quick nip round the seats to restack the papers to ensure her ‘newsletter’ (or rather a seasonal round-robin), was outer most.
At the end of the AGM while people where visiting the stalls from various departments of the Council and other local agencies, an announcement was made by the Chair of MapRA…
Ladies and Gentleman. We have realised that we have been leafleted by the Labour Party this evening this evening without our permission. We apologies for that - we try to keep this event apolitical.
The leaflet drew attention to a ‘gaff’ made by Sarah Teather during an interview and gave Yasmin a ‘gaff’ of her own. Oh well.
You can download a copy of Mapesbury Labour News (front page / back page) from here.
