If you’re reading this column, it’s safe to assume that you keep an eye on the news pages of this paper. Therefore, you will almost certainly have seen that the Labour Party in Watford is undertaking the process of selecting its parliamentary candidate to fight the next general election, whenever that may come.

In this column, I usually talk about broad political issues of relevance to the town, detached from focusing on party politics, but in this case I shall make an exception.

In the 2015 general election, I was the Labour candidate when we clawed our way from third place to second, which represented some success up against Richard Harrington and Dorothy Thornhill. However, the election in June of this year brought Labour tantalisingly close to winning the seat, with just 2,100 votes in it.

Not surprisingly, there is a great deal of interest in becoming the candidate for the next election. When asking “What’s going on?” about the current selection process, the answer isn’t that Watford Labour is washing its dirty linen in public. Rather it’s how much everyone involved truly cares about winning this seat for the benefit of our town.

Once a candidate is selected, you can rely on a united Labour Party here, committed to winning the next election and governing for the many, not the few.

There’s an expression for all this: thesis, antithesis, synthesis. If you openly debate and challenge ideas then you will probably end up with better decisions being made. That is precisely what is happening.

So, the next time you see a political party presenting its candidate to the world, don’t assume there hasn’t been this kind of debate raging behind the scenes, there will have been.