The Liberal Democrats have launched their manifesto for Europe: “Choose a different, better future”

Labour’s recession is hurting people badly.

- Unemployment is rising every day
- People are worried their businesses could go under
- Every week people are losing their homes
- Ministers are too busy fighting among themselves to govern properly

The Liberal Democrats will give people the help they need.

We will cut income tax bills by £700 for the vast majority of people, and close
loopholes exploited by the wealthy

No one earning less than £10,000 will pay income tax at all
20 hours of free, quality childcare a week from 18 months to five years old
The European Parliament election is a big choice for Britain.

Labour’s arrogance has messed up Britain’s relationship with other European countries

The Conservatives and UKIP think that on its own Britain can face the economic storm, climate change, international crime, people-trafficking and terrorism

Liberal Democrats know effective cooperation creates prosperity – more than 3 million jobs in the UK depend on trade with other EU countries.

Liberal Democrats are working with our European neighbours to protect Britain and catch terrorists and criminals who operate across national borders.

Liberal Democrats know that countries have to work together to tackle climate change.

Vote Liberal Democrat and make a difference

Nominations have now closed for the elections for the European Parliament on 4 June 2009. This is the full statement of persons nominated.

Liberal Democrat list is headed up by our existing Member of the European Parliament Chris Davies MEP. Chris is a great friend to our area and has been to Prestwich on many occasions. Here’s his campaign website.

Meanwhile Prestwich residents are being encouraged by Bury Council to “vote early” or vote by post” with the following message:

Prestwich residents are being encouraged to vote early, or use a postal vote, in the forthcoming European elections.

The poll is held on Thursday June 4, the same day as the first of three Oasis gigs in Heaton Park.

The concert means that two main roads bordering the park – Sheepfoot Lane and Bury Old Road (south of Heywood Street) - will be closed to traffic at 9.30pm, half an hour before polling stations close. This means that some residents who leave it to the last minute to vote will not be able to drive close to their station.

Elections officers in Bury say that one way to avoid any potential problems would be to use a postal vote – the closing date to apply for one is May 19 at 5pm. Alternatively, some people might choose to go the polls a bit earlier. The polling stations open at 7am. For a postal vote, or to make sure you are on the electoral roll, contact Bury’s elections office on 0161 253 5224 or email electionservices@bury.gov.uk

You can apply online to vote by post - this site fills in your form, but you do need to print it off to sign and send off to the Council

What better way to spend a bank holiday weekend than ploughing through a head-high pile of European election leaflets, appending an address label to each and every one until your hands wear away to leave nothing but stumps behind?

It’s a good job I’m saving for a wedding and thus financially unable to leave the house, because that’s exactly how I’ve spent this bank holiday weekend, sticking labels to more Euro leaflets than there are people in the North West actually likely to vote in the European elections.

If the Labour government have suffered from “lamentable failures in communication” (copyright H. Blears 2009), then the European Parliament’s failure to communicate its role and purpose to anyone except those elected to it is probably just as bad. It’s a great shame, because it and its members have done some tremendous work. And yet, for some reason, very few people are bothered enough by this to vote in European elections, the turnout for which hovers at or below the turnout for local elections. MEPs get paid the same as MPs and have the potential for gigantic influence. Councillors don’t. And yet the same levels of people vote for the two groups.

Another oddity of course is that Europe has traditionally been a massively controversial issue. Nothing vexes my mother-in-law to be more than the types of drivel the Daily Express print about the “crazy laws” coming from the EU (straight bananas etc). The Tories were wracked by divisions over Europe for years, and probably still would be if it weren’t for their overpowering collective glee at the prospect of power here next year. Labour and us Lib Dems got into all sorts of bother over the Lisbon Treaty, and farmers, fishermen and truckers all have plenty to say about the EU too. And yet nobody votes in the elections to the European Parliament.

I doubt it’s because of a massively developed understanding of the EU decision-making structure. I don’t think people sit at home on Euro election day and think say “Do you know what dear? I’m not going to vote today because actually real power in the EU resides with the European Commission and the Council of Ministers, rather than the Parliament.” Only a few hardcore and insane politicos know the arcane ins-and-outs of it all. Most people seem not to vote for other reasons. And I wonder why.

Maybe it’s because the EU seems distant. But it can’t be that because, as I’ve said, the papers go on and on and on about it.

Maybe it’s because MEPs represent gigantic constituencies, like my one which stretches from Gretna Green to Stoke-on-Trent, and so there’s no way people could find out who they are. But I don’t think it’s that either. If I wanted to contact one of my MEPs I could find out how in about two seconds on Google.

Maybe it’s a mixture of reasons. But at the heart of it lies the EU’s own “lamentable failure” to convince a great many people that it’s a good thing and that its parliament is its democratic heart. 

Lots of people don’t understand how the EU works, what laws are made where, and why you might seek the help of an MP rather than a Councillor. It’s the same problem at a local level too. Many people contact me when they really should contact the local MP, and vice versa. It’s a great shame that the EU hasn’t engaged with its citizens well enough to show them that these elections are hugely important.

They’re not just important because the European Parliament has influence in our lives. They’re also important because the EU itself is important. When the economy is both up the spout and down the chute simultaneously, as it currently is, we need close relations with Europe more than ever. And when global security is constantly under threat from forces aimed at destroying the western way of life, it’s worth remembering that the EU has kept peace in Europe for a longer continuous period than anything else managed in the previous 2000 years. We should celebrate the EU for its successes. And its Parliament has been crucial to many of these. Yes, the odd law has come about that irks people, but then so has the right to travel freely, get equal pay if you’re a woman, get four weeks paid leave a year, study abroad, fly cheaply most places in Europe, make cheap calls when you’re there, and take advantage of cleaner air and water and safer food across an entire continent.

But the elections are also vitally important here at home. Fair enough Labour will still be in charge come June 5th, but the message we can send to Westminster by the people we send to Brussels and Strasbourg will be enormous. There’s no better chance this year to tell Gordon Brown what you think of him than the Euros. I hope you do that by voting Liberal Democrat, but he’ll hope you do it by voting Labour. One way or another, it could be a bounce or a bump which carries all the way to our own general election.

And of course the European elections and their different system of voting to normal gives fringe parties like the BNP much more of a chance of winning a seat and a voice than local and general elections. If for no other reason, we should use our votes to stop racist extremists like them from gaining undue exposure.

But the biggest single reason people should vote in the European elections is this: God did not grant me a bank holiday weekend so that I may spend it in the company of 4,000 election leaflets for no reason. Were my fingers still flexible enough do do so, I would now clasp them together and beg you, for the sake of my aching hands, not to let my efforts go to waste, and use your vote on June 4th.

Rick

So David Cameron is going to sue the Lib Dems about a leaflet we’re putting out in Henley? Well, I haven’t seen the leaflet, and I don’t know whether what it says is true or not. I certainly don’t know if it’s actionable, but I suspect there are lots of Tories who think it is, and lots of us who think it’s not. Chances are it’s neither absolutely true or absolutely false, which is why a judge somewhere might get to decide. Whatever it is, there are so many borderline lies that inhabit election leaflets from every party, and they’re the types of thing that drives me mad and makes me wonder why I’m doing this kind of thing at all.

It’s no surprise that temperatures are running a little high down there. This is a by-election on top of another by-election, right after the local elections. There are some people who’ve barely slept in three months, and I’m surprised they still remember the candidate’s name let alone write only lovely things about his opponent.

But it’s pretty rare for any leaflet to be greeted with cries of “See you in court!”

Maybe the threat of legal action might reign in some of the more outlandish leaflet claims from all sides, and maybe it will cascade down to the lowly likes of us campaigning in local elections. Because even here our leaflets can sometimes go way over the top. And screeching half-truths about opponents makes us all look like bickering idiots with nothing positive to say.

Political leaflets are odd. It seems as if we consider it unacceptable to think the same as our opponents on any issue, even though we do think the same thing on many especially at a local level.

If there’s a hospital to be closed, we’re against the closure and we strain every sinew of our being to find even the most tenuous reason why our opponent might not be. “The government of his party wants to shut hospitals” is reasonable, if there’s evidence to back it up. But is it fair to say “The Council run by his party 150 miles away shut hospitals”? Or “25 years ago his party shut another hospital”? I don’t think that it is. But if there was the chance to write it then I can bet my bottom dollar that somebody would.

And we do it all the time – all the parties do it all the time. I don’t even care if it works to win votes, because if it does it also works to convince voters that we’re all drones incapable of doing anything but degrading our opponents who are, on the whole, perfectly decent people who wouldn’t want to shut hospitals in an ideal world.

Even at my most local of levels, at the last election we screamed at Labour and they screamed at us on things that, really, we weren’t miles apart on. Rainsough for instance. So much was made of the failure to renovate the shops. We blamed Labour and Labour blamed us, when the truth is that it’s neither of our faults. It’s a symptom of neglect caused by people who’ve long since retired or died and who could’ve been wearing any colour of rosette under the sun back in 1981 or whenever the hell it was. Luckily for us it was a red one so we could blame them. But I don’t think it was fair to, because they’re not standing now and the guy who is seems a perfectly nice chap with a brain in his head and some good ideas.

Of course, there are times when we genuinely disagree. When there’s clear space between us. And we should let every voter know where both sides stand on these issues. But even here there’s surely a better way of doing things than we manage in our elections. We paint ourselves as haloed saviours, and the opposition as salivating attack-dogs ready to rip communities to shreds simply because they’re too stupid to see the obvious solution we’ve seen.

Neither of these two personas is right, yet why do we treat the voters as too ill-informed to recongnise that issues are nuanced and that there rarely is a black and white solution? Surely we can’t believe what we’re saying?

Is it any wonder that people are disengaged, when what we give them to be engaged with is a cartoon version of the issues which they probably already know isn’t very well connected to reality? In a by-election, whoever wins will have been called a bumbling buffoon by his opponent in at least half a dozen leaflets on every doorstep in the constituency. This hardly does much to help with a respectful society, does it?

I know that there’s an end game to campaigning. I know that the more Councillors we elect, by fair means or foul, and the more MPs we get by tipping the swing our way through no-holds-barred campaigns, the more likely it is that one day, one day, we’ll have the chance to put our policies into practice and make a real difference. But do those ends justify the means that we sometimes use? And would it only be a pyrrhic victory if we obtain power and influence by shouting down our opponents with smears and out-of-context quotes? How can we strive to be leaders when our journey to leadership is marked with such questionable moral judgement?

We should all try and do something different, I think. And it’d have to be all of us at once, because if we alone became the party of nice leaflets I suspect we’d get truly panned.

I doubt it will ever happen. Campaigning is so targeted and sophisticated now that before too long the likes of Mosaic and hacking into the Tesco Clubcard database will mean we can just leaflet half a dozen swing voters until they collapse under the strain of it all, and then fill in a proxy vote for them at their hospital bedside.

But I just wish we would all take a breath, lose the tunnel vision and remember why we’re in it in the first place. It’s not to hire lawyers and fight over leaflets full of mis-quotations in the High Court. It’s to spread our good ideas and change things for the better.

Rick

Another deeply malicious article in the Advertiser this week on the elected Mayor.

Voters in Bury will be asked on July 3rd if they want to have an Elected Mayor running the Council. The referendum has been called because 10,000 or so signatures were collected, allegedly in favour of a Mayor, but in reality in opposition to congestion charging. Those behind the petition have linked the two issues without a single fact to back them up, and are continuing their catalogue of lies in the run-up to a vote which could forever damage the relationship between Bury and its local leaders.

The article “Vote to veto the toll tax” in today’s paper is hugely misleading, and potential voters should be very wary of the claims made within it from both the author and pro-Mayor campaigner Geoffrey Berg.

Mr Berg is right that this congestion charging is a massive issue. But the Mayoral referendum will make absolutely no difference to it at all, and voters should be made aware of what will and won’t change if they vote for a Mayor.

The article says “if Bury votes for an elected mayor who is opposed to the congestion charge in the July 3 referendum, the borough could become exempt from the charge.” But this is simply not true. The two issues are absolutely un-connected. It is as simple as that.

At present Bury Council has made it very clear that it opposes congestion charging. When the issue comes to a final vote at the Association of Greater Manchester Authorities (AGMA), the Leader of the Council will vote against the charge. Replacing him with a Mayor can do no more than bring exactly the same result. The only difference will be that it will be the Mayor voting against the charge, not the Leader. The vote will carry exactly the same weight.

And remember of course that there is no guarantee that an elected Mayor would vote “no” at all. An elected Mayor won’t be bound by the will of the Council, and if we elect a maverick then he can vote how he wants and we’re stuck with him for four years. Putting that much power in the hands of one person is dangerous. Add to that the cost of a Mayor (£100,000 for the referendum, same again for the election, another £100,000 annual salary and maybe another £75,000 salary for his deputy), and over four years we’re looking at nearly £1m taken out of front line services like caring for the vulnerable and cleaning the streets.

I have personally led the fight against congestion charging in Council. In council, I proposed the amendment opposing the charge, and this opposition was adopted as Council policy. I remain stridently opposed to the planned charge. But I will be voting “No” to a Mayor in the referendum because I see absolutely no connection between the two issues. I urge my fellow voters not to fall for Mr Berg’s lies. A Mayor would be bad news for Bury. So would congestion charging. So we should reject a Mayor once and for all, and pull together to oppose this charge.

Rick

I am at a bit of a loss at the moment, and I wonder if I’m the only one feeling the pain of election cold turkey. This is an odd time of year when the elections are finished and the Council has yet to kick off. A kind of hole in the political space-time continuum that sucks people in at the conclusion of the count, and spits them out at annual Council with nothing in between except for a black and empty week and a half.

I do miss the campaign though, despite disliking every minute of it. I don’t have a mother-in-law, but I suppose if I did, and she came to visit for an entire horrific and unendurable month of ceaseless horror, before abruptly leaving, I’d feel the same kind of confusing sense of loss. I’d have done anything to end it sooner, including acts of criminal violence, but now that it’s gone away and left me with nothing to think about but the good bits, I wonder if I wasn’t just wasting time complaining instead of appreciating it. It’s not often a team comes together to achieve something that is genuinely good. It’s even less often that I am a part of it.

For weeks on end I was immersed in the election – leafleting all day every weekend, canvassing every night, and thinking of little else but how much I wanted to win a contest which, it turned out, even fewer people cared enough about to vote than last year. In the last week I was literally doing nothing but sleeping and election-ing, and in the last 24 hours even the sleeping was jettisoned in favour of about 5,000 leaflets and lots and lots of knockabout knock-up fun. It is not the nature of elections to have soft landings, but I wish there was some way of scaling down activity gently, rather than ramping it up until the last minute and then just stopping.

I miss it now, despite wishing the whole thing over throughout. It’s the people more than anything, of course. Although I wanted to commit an act of savage harm on the person who asked me to go knocking up 100 more people at 20:00 on election night, I’d really quite like to be back there now with the rest of the team, knowing that he was as tired as I was and that we were both going through it together. Thankfully my sleep-deprived and leaflet-addled body couldn’t muster the beating I so longed to meter out, because if it had then I probably wouldn’t have been invited back.

I spent the weekend away from Prestwich. In Cumbria, at a hotel I am loathe to call “my favourite hotel” because I think it makes me sound worryingly middle-aged. Is it right for me to have a favourite hotel when there is 99.8% of the world left to explore? People retire to their favourite hotels. People my age should have favourite bars or something. Is it wrong that mine is becoming the one at Bury Town Hall?

Well, I suppose this hotel is my favourite one so far. And in it I returned to normality, of sorts. It’s a “foodie” place, and whilst on six nights a week the menu is more or less normal (with only one or two dishes that I am not cultured enough to understand), the Sunday night tasting menu involves bizarre dishes which this week included filet of python. There were only about six guests, and one man declined the python on animal welfare grounds, only to tuck in with gusto to the replacement course of veal. I can only hope he didn’t vote.

But throughout the weekend, where I did normal things like sleep in late and watch TV and drive off to see attractions that weren’t related to local pot-holes or derelict shops, there was something missing. It is depressing to think that I am almost certain it was a pack of leaflets and a canvass sheet.

Rick

Last night’s results were a triumph for local Lib Dems in Prestwich, and my thanks goes to everyone in the ward who helped and supported us through a long and tiring campaign. Congratulations to the newest Lib Dem Councillor in Bury - Mary D’Albert, who joins Donal O’Hanlon on the St Mary’s team. Re-election for Vic D’Albert in Holyrood and Ann Garner in Sedgley means that we now have all 9 Councillors in Prestwich, the culmination of work that started in Holyrood 22 years ago when we had no Councillors and not much else either!

I am very tired this morning. Yesterday could not possibly have lasted a mere 24 hours. It felt like it lasted about a fortnight. The count alone seemed to drag on for days. If I had the strength or inclination I would investigate the clear flaws in the space-time continuum that affect campaigners on election day. But, perhaps to the relief of us both, I don’t.

In the end the result was a good one for us, and I hope that the good work we’ve started locally will continue now that we have 9 Councillors out of 9 in Prestwich. We are moving forward now in Whitefield after an excellent second place in Besses.

I am taking a couple of easy days now where I will not cast eyes on a single leaflet, and then it’s back to work with a full team of Lib Dems in St Mary’s. I will write more then. At the moment my eyes are heavy.

Thanks again for eveyone’s support. And well done Mary.

Rick

The rain battered me this morning when I was leafleting - I have taken the week off work for the conclusion of the campaign, and our candidate Mary D’Albert and I were out in the storm this morning. Mary is obviously significantly cleverer than me, and had remembered a coat. My t-shirt did not take kindly to the soaking it received.

Remember, there’s only two full days after today, and then it’s polling day, when the people of St Mary’s get to choose who will represent them on the Council for the next four years. Will it be the local hard working Lib Dem who has lived in Prestwich for years, understands the issues, and whose party campaigned to save our local school and who started the Village regeneration at last? Or will it be the Labour Party insider who has moved to the area to replace the Labour councillor who proposed the school closure, who represents the party bidding to close local post offices, and whose party let Prestwich decline over 21 long years of maladministration?

It’s as simple as that, and I believe that the evidence speaks for itself. We’ll be out on the streets of St Mary’s more or less non-stop over the next 72 hours, so if we see you, do stop and say hello. At busy times like this it’s always nice to stop and chat to the local people we hope to serve in the future.

Rick

I am a bit damp at present, having just returned from leafleting in a downpour. Obviously now that I am back inside, the sun is shinning, but that’s just the typical fun God likes to have with me.

With just three days after today left until polling day, it’s full pelt for the Bury Lib Dems as we campaign for the local elections. As well as Mary D’Albert in St Mary’s, long-standing and hard working Councillors Ann Garner and Vic D’Albert are standing for re-election in Sedgley and Holyrood wards respectively, and we have candidates in all the other wards across Bury too. So there are soaked Lib Dems up and down the Borough right now.

My finger is still attached to the rest of my hand, which is an unexpected bonus given the amount of blood pouring from it on Friday night. I nearly lost the plaster in someone’s mailbox this morning, but managed to retrieve it despite the overwhelming temptation to leave it on top of the Labour leaflet which it had fallen on to. So right now the wound is being given a chance to breath before this afternoon’s leaflet-fest.

I am not sure how frequently the blog will be updated in the coming days. My fingers should be doing things involving leaflets, envelopes and doorbells, rather than typing, I suspect. But I will try to make it every day nonetheless. It’s important that we remember the key choice for Thursday - between a Labour Party imploding across the country and trying to make poor people poorer still, whilst shutting down schools and post offices here in Bury, and a Lib Dem candidate in Mary D’Albert who campaigns for stronger local facilities, a better Prestwich Village, and really gets things done locally.

Rick