Local elections are upcoming. All we’ve had from each is an A4 leaflet through the door. Any actually useful information seems pretty hard to come by.

Is it really just like those pointless reality shows where the winner is the one with most friends in the audience? Or is there any hope of me being able to make an informed decision?

Foregone conclusion in our area anyway, stick a blue tie on it & it gets in.

At a local level, political parties have limited funds and time so have to prioritise where they focus.

If your ward is a safe ward, the opposition parties will almost certainly just stand paper candidates, but won’t expend any effort.

I’m involved with the Green Party. We have a candidate in every ward here, but we have one ward which is our target ward and that’s where all our effort has gone. If you lived there you’d have had someone knock on your door at least once and had several leaflets over the last 12 months.

Fairly lucky to even get a leaflet. I have heard rumours that sometimes people actually go round door to door knocking as well but never seen it myself.

Shows what a bad politician I’d make:

I forgot to say, if you live in the Haughton and Springfield ward of Darlington, vote for me 🙂

Yeah I turned a poor canvassing Tory away today.

If your local parties have been putting the ground-work in, they should now have accurate “Voter ID” lists. Residents will fall into the following categories:

Never vote – so don’t waste your time
Always vote for the other side – again, don’t waste your time
Always vote for your side – so encourage them to actually vote
Marginal support/floating – worth talking to, to persuade them to vote for you

This might sound a bit cynical, but very few people are members of political parties these days, so it’s essential to use marketing techniques to make best use of limited resources.

Go to your local council website and there might be a section under ‘your council’ and then ‘voting and elections’ or just google your council name and the words ‘local elections’.
You should then find a link to nominees for Parish and District.

See if you can get their email addresses. It might require a bit of googling but you have their name and you have the name of your parish/district and then copy an email to them all with bullet points for them to address. It’s a bit of leg work but well worth it once you receive the responses.

I’ve been emailing the leader of my local residents group who are trying to get more councillors in to direct policy. I’m concerned about local planning issues amongst other things.

I’m sure they’d be keen to correspond with you.

We’ve had a flyer from the independent candidates but nothing from any of the main parties. The flier says nothing useful.

Most of what I read on the leaflets we get is less about what each has, or plans to do well, and more about what the others have done, or plan to to poorly.

Volt for me because the others are crap doesn’t actually work for me.

I turned a poor canvassing Tory away today

A poor Tory?

A poor Tory?

🙂

Trust me. It’s Worksop.

We’ve had a shit load of green belt suggested for revocation in the area and it was all down to the nasty Tories and their evil developer paymasters. Well that’s the general gist. This is gonna be Labour’s biggest chance to make a dent in the tory stronghold as it’s ruffled a lot of feathers.

We don’t have an official greenbelt, but the Labour council are doing their best to build over every piece of green land around the town

Central Government have set targets for housing land that Council must meet in their Local Plan. If they don’t, Govt has the power to take over the plan and put in what they want. So in many cases Councils are forced to put some Greenbelt housing in the plan; at least if they do, they can choose where it goes.

A while back I had a leaflet through my door from the conservatives moaning about  all the building going on.

We are in a Tory stronghold.

Brown or white bread with your shite sandwich ?

We’ve had leaflets from Blue and red.
Both were wishy washy and non-committal.

They may as well just say ‘we gonna do good stuff, vote for us’.

In fact that’s exactly what they say.

The only time you ever hear about them is when they are sniffing for votes.

Central Government have set targets for housing land that Council must meet in their Local Plan.

They need to show that they’ve identified a ten year supply, to meet the ONS growth prediction. Round here that’s something like 50 houses a year, but the Council have identified several thousand…