It may come as a surprise to a lot of people to find that politics has rules. To prove it, here is a collection borrowed from the Romiley Literary Circle Website.

the rules for politics
Don't vote, it only encourages them. The art of politics is to be able to tell the lies which will get you elected and then keep you on the gravy train. If a politician tells you something 3 times – it's a lie. Democracy is rarely attained as politicians will pervert the democratic process for personal gain if they think they can get away with it (or if they think they can get away with enough loot to make a period in disgrace worth while). If a politician quotes a statistic to prove that something has been improved, the figure is either exaggerated or irrelevant because the politician played no part in making the change. Power tends to corrupt, absolute power corrupts absolutely. Anyone who wants the US Presidency so much that he'll spend two years campaigning, bribing and making deals to win it is not to be trusted with public office. Anyone who says he isn't going to resign four times definitely will. In a democracy, politicians may be respected by the poor but they shouldn't count on it. The Deterrent neither knows nor cares what is coming. The whole point of it is that anyone who knows the Deterrent is waiting will go somewhere else. When you're in the merde up to your nose, keep your mouth shut. When in doubt, mumble. When in trouble, delegate. When in charge, ponder. Both expenditure and revenues rise to meet each other, no matter which one is in excess. When more and more people are thrown out of work, unemployment results. An acceptable level of unemployment means that the Minister still has his job. The Three Laws of Politics: 1. Get elected. 2. Get re-elected. 3. Don't get mad, get even. You cannot have democracy when you involve people. No Cabinet leak is worth a damn. Democracy is government of the damned by the daft. Dimocracy is government by the pushy but stupid. An honest politician is one who pays a bribe out of his own pocket. Never trust a politician; they're all salesmen without an advertising code of ethics. The importance of the speaker is directly proportional to the likelihood that an apparently wise and impressive statement will be shown to be absurd by subsequent events. The secret of success in politics is sincerity; once you can fake that, you've got it made. A welfare state is one which assumes responsibility for the health, happiness and general well-being of all of its citizens; excluding only the taxpayers. The concern a MP shows for his/her constituents is inversely proportional to the size of his/her majority. The regime with the biggest and best-staffed Ministry of Justice and Ministry of Culture can offer neither justice nor culture. Whoever has the gold makes the rules. Speak softly and own a human Rottweiler with a bad attitude. If a journalists gets it right, politicians from all parties will write letters of complaint to his editor. The probability of a government doing anything is inversely proportional to its desirability. While you can't fool all of the people all of the time, you can keep them bamboozled for the length of a parliament. No one every got poor by underestimating the intelligence of politicians. The Milosevich Rule: Anything is for sale as long as the size of the bribe or the amount of the international aid is sufficient. Things go wrong only when the government tries to do something. Life would be a whole lot better if polticians would sit on their meddling hands. New Labour's Rule Number One : Changing the name of something makes it better, e.g. giving us New Labour instead of The Labour Party and Offender Management Centres instead of prisons. If the Minister swears it's true, it isn't. If the Minister swears it never happened, it already has. All political parties die eventually of swallowing their own lies. Under democracy, each party always devotes most of its energies to proving that the others are unfit to rule; and events prove all of them right in this aspect. The amount of effort put into a political campaign by a party worker is directly proportional to the personal benefits which he/she will derive from the party's victory. Politics has always been the systematic organization of hatreds. Politicians are acrobats, who keep their balance by saying the opposite of what they do. A politicial leader must keep looking over his shoulder to see if his party is behind him. If it isn't, he is no longer a politicial leader. Politics is a battle of vested interests posing as a contest of principles. In politics, prejudice masquerades as truth, passion as reason, and invective as fact; the people are all heroes or villains; and everything is black or white with no shades of grey. Half a truth is always better in politics. The skill in politics is being able to foretell what will happen tomorrow, the next day, next month and next year; and having the ability to explain afterwards why it didn't happen. Persistence in one opinion has never been considered a merit in political leaders. As politicians never believe what they are saying, they are always surprised when the voters swallow it. Politics is not the art of the possible; it is a choice between the disastrous and the unpalatable. The most distinctive characteristic of the successful politician is selective cowardice. Politicians are the same all over; they'll promise to build a bridge even where there is no river. Politics is a branch of the theatre in which there is generally much ado about nothing. A candidate for office can have no greater advantage than muddled syntax and no greater liability than a command of language (e.g. John Prescott, George W. Bush). Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun. A good politician under democracy is as unthinkable as an honest burglar. Politics is the diversion of trivial men who, when they succeed at it, become important in the eyes of more trivial men. Politicial language is designed to make lies sound truthful, murder respectable and give an appearance of solidity to pure wind. All politics are based on the indifference of the majority. If truth is ever injected into politics, there is no politics. Under democracy, the voters tend to think a stupid man is more likely to be honest than a clever one; which is why politicians always pretend to be even more stupid than Nature made them. When political ammunition runs low, the rusty cannon of abuse is always wheeled into action. Politics is the art of preventing people from taking part in affairs which properly concern them. If you have any additions, please email them to Garbagegate today!    [we're garbagegate at tiscali.co.uk] from the Specials 1 section of the romiley literary circle website.