The citizens of Prague were in despair. For years now, their city had been overrun by a plague of politicians...



But, when begins my ditty,
Almost five hundred years ago,
To see townsfolk suffer so
From vermin, was a pity.
The Pied Piper of Hamelin by Robert Browning


The citizens of Prague were in despair. For years now, their city had been overrun by a plague of politicians, and these, as you well know, are much worse than those Hamelin rats of old who perished in the waters of the River Weser.

These politicians were everywhere and wherever they were they took things that did not belong to them. For twenty years or more, in election after election, all the people’s efforts to remove them from the city’s parliament had come to nothing.

Then one day, when the people had abandoned all hope of ever being rid of this democratic pestilence, there came into the city from another land a thin man with spiky hair and a strange way of speaking. He had very long fingers and was dressed in an exquisite striped suit of the finest wool. And around his neck he had a simple shepherd’s pipe of the kind you still find in the high mountain pastures of Slovakia.

He saw that the people of Prague were troubled and he promised to remove the political pests forever. The people asked how he meant to do this and he smiled: “I play my pipe and they will vanish. And in payment, all I ask is that you give me one half of their power”.

“One half! We will give you it all if you can rid us of these vermin!” they cried. And so the people agreed to the stranger’s terms. And low and behold! Within a few short months, the stranger had piped the politicians out of the city’s parliament and into the dustbin of history. And the citizens of Prague were happy to be free of this party political pestilence at last.

But when the stranger asked to be paid with one half of the power once held by the politicians, as he had been promised, the people laughed at him and told him that they had no intention of giving a stranger so much power over their city, not now that the plague had ended. And so they gave him 22 per cent (which, as you all know, is a little less than half what he had hoped to receive).

The stranger was angry and replied that if they would not give him half the power, which they had promised, then he would take half their freedoms instead. The people did not believe him. But within a few short months, the stranger had indeed piped half the freedoms of the people out of their lives. The other half he left them, such as the freedom to choose their morning newspaper and pastries, and the freedom to forget just how very foolish they had been to believe in a charming stranger offering to save them from crooked politicians.

What happened to the people of Prague after the stranger left with their freedoms is not known: some say that a new stranger appeared among them, even more exquisitely dressed than the first, promising to return all the freedoms taken from them. “But how much power do you want in payment?” asked the people, to which the new stranger replied: “I want none for myself. Power belongs to the people.”

And the people, free to forget how foolish they had been to believe in strangers promising to solve their problems for them, forgot, and lost all their freedoms, some say forever.