Remember to vote today
Polls are open today in the elections for Cumbria County Council and all the other County Councils in the country.
Polling stations are open until 10 pm. You do not need your polling card to vote.
I am standing as the Conservative candidate in the Egremont North and St Bees division which includes St Bees, Moor Row, Bigrigg, Rottington, and much of the western part of the Mirehouse estate in Whitehaven.
Obviously I would prefer as a Conservative that people vote Conservative but the most important thing is to use your vote. People have died for the privilege of having the right to vote and refusing to use it doesn't "punish" the politicians - it only deprives you of your voice.
Polling stations are open until 10 pm. You do not need your polling card to vote.
I am standing as the Conservative candidate in the Egremont North and St Bees division which includes St Bees, Moor Row, Bigrigg, Rottington, and much of the western part of the Mirehouse estate in Whitehaven.
Obviously I would prefer as a Conservative that people vote Conservative but the most important thing is to use your vote. People have died for the privilege of having the right to vote and refusing to use it doesn't "punish" the politicians - it only deprives you of your voice.
Comments
But, whilst it does seem big and clever to not bother, it never helps. I have learned this after years of spoiling ballots, and not going its just ignored.
If you wanted to hit conservative or labour where it hurts most then its much more effective to go and vote for UKIP or an independent.
Following my last comment about voting UKIP or independent, it seems many people were looking that way
This forced Mr Cameron to "up his promise" on his EU referendum.
Mr Cameron, it appears, has indicated that he is preparing to hint that he is ready to give serious consideration to thinking about conceding, maybe, that there might be a possibility, sometime, of his schedule permitting him to explore the feasibility of drafting a proposal that might have a chance of going forward, the effect of which will raise hopes that there will be an elevated likelihood of a genuine debate on whether to table a motion suggesting that EU referendum legislation could be placed on the statute book before the next election, or perhaps the one after that!
That will show the UKIP who is in charge.
Mind you anyone who can remember that last time it was a cast iron promise, will take this exatly for what it is.
I do want to come back about the Conservatives' promises about an EU referendum. David Cameron has promised that if the Conservatives win the next election we will hold an in-out referendum.
If we are in a position to deliver that referendum there is no possibility whatsoever that the party would let DC break that promise even if he wanted to, which I don't believe he would.
The previous promises on Europe were,
1) in our manifesto for the 2005 election, that that we would support a referendum on the EU Constitution, which later became the Lisbon treaty. All three main parties promised this, but when the issue was debated in the House of Commons in March 2008 the Conservatives were the only one of the three which kept the promise. The Conservatives moved the amendment to hold a referendum and 98% of Conservative MPs supported it.
Labour voted against and the Lib/Dems ordered their MPs to abstain. 29 Labour MPs voted to keep their manifesto promise rather than obey the whips, and so did 13 Lib/Dem MPs, three of whom resigned as frontbenchers over it.
So there are 42 Labour and Liberal Democrat MPs who can claim to have kept their 2005 manifesto promise, but only the Conservatives kept it as a party.
2) David Cameron then gave a "cast iron" promise that IF he came to power before the treaty was ratified he would suspend ratification and put it to a referendum.
He had no opportunity to keep or break this promise because the treaty was ratified by Gordon Brown before David Cameron became Prime Minister.
So the question of an EU referendum is one of the two issues (the other being student tuition fees) on which the Conservatives are the only one of the three major parties who have not broken an election promise.