Another day and another Tweet from Valerie Vaz. The Walsall MP replied to us yesterday by, well, not replying to us at all. Merely saying she “will not make any further response on Twitter.” Good. We didn’t want a response on Twitter, all we wanted was to meet with her to explain the issues surrounding the fact that 200 of her constituents are being excluded from playing football.

There’s no point in going over this again, she knows the situation, so do you, you’ve read the blogs as well as she has.

But yesterday she referred to us as “nasty” and said that what we had said was not “a decent response”. We’ve read that blog through from top to bottom, and nowhere were we nasty or disrespectful in any way. We understand the good work that Ms Vaz and her parliamentary colleagues do throughout the land. We also understand that Ms Vaz, who is the Shadow Leader of the House Of Commons, deserves a certain type of deference that comes with her public standing and we’ll even concede that – ordinarily – a woman who has helped her community in this way, would not want a section of that community excluded from sporting activity.

So quite why she is now refusing to talk to us is beyond comprehension.

Isn’t refusing to talk to us the very opposite of the engagement that people have a right to expect of their public officials? Indeed – and without wishing to trivialise a situation which could have such a detrimental affect on the public health in Walsall South – isn’t refusing to talk to people the sort of reaction one might more reasonably expect to see from a child who had lost an argument and been sent to bed ?

We all did it when we were teenagers, didn’t we. You’d have a row with your mum, race up stairs, slam the door and refuse to come down for your tea. But come on, every time you did that, you always knew your mum was right, didn’t you? You always knew what she said made sense and when you made up with her later that night or the next day, even though you might not have said it in so many words, you wanted to apologise.

The thing is though, we haven’t done anything wrong, other than try and run football leagues like we do everywhere in the country and all around the world. All we were doing was sticking up for the rights of hundreds of footballers from Walsall that have lost their rights to play on a wonderful facility in their area. Nothing else.

So far for doing that we’ve been told to go away and talk to someone else and now we’re being ignored, all by the one person that was supposed to be on the side of her constituents (apart from us, that is).

So we make this appeal directly to Valerie Vaz, it’s not too late. We aren’t nasty, we are thoroughly decent, and we will happily prove it to you. You can’t just stick your fingers in your ears and pretend you can’t hear us like when you were a child.

Give us the chance for a grown up conversation – we’ve only been asking for four months.