Jumping on the band waggon

It is always mildly frustrating when people who have remained silent on an issue for months or years suddenly claim, “I always felt X was corrupt/incompetent/bone idle” or “Martin is quite right. The current system for doing X, Y or Z simply doesn’t work.”

I find myself wanting to ask them, “Where were you when I was saying exactly the same thing five years ago?” “What support, covert or overt, did you offer me when I first raised the matter - long before it was fashionable or politically correct to do so?”

I don’t think for a minute that in most cases the band waggon-jumpers as I call them suddenly changed their collective minds just before deciding to speak out. Almost certainly most of them agreed with my opinions for some time before they plucked up their courage to go public. To me they lacked the moral fibre to speak out until the tide of public opinion was clearly flowing in their favour.

Sometimes it can years before the truth about a person or organisation emerges into the full glare of public scrutiny. To me what makes battles of this type worth fighting is that eventually the whole story almost always does come out and it can be very satisfying to know that events have proved me right.

At the moment I only have three campaigns on the go. Of these one is nearing completion and my “gut feeling” about the person, negative as it was, has been shown to have been over-optimistic. The other two issues have been rumbling on for years but the evidence base is building up and the tipping point might be quite close. I remain optimistic.