Back a while ago, I started writing my own manifesto. I didn’t get far! Got stuck with God. May come back to it in the future. I was getting fed up with hearing bad news politically and rather than continue to get upset and with nowhere for my anger to go, I decided I’d better do something. I did get to voteforpolicies.org and discovered the Green Party was for me. Plus it didn’t cost very much to join and Sandra joined too. Found out about meetings, went to a couple and they needed someone to stand for the local elections in Elland. So because that’s where I live, I decided to give it a go! A few frustrating meetings later and 2000 leaflets, the election came and 364 people voted for me. Thank you.
Here is the leaflet me and some very good friends delivered round Elland.
My 364 votes were 7% of the vote on the day and were 10% down on the local election result last year but 66% up on the vote at the last general election in 2010. Which is nice!
The count was an interesting experience. We could scrutinise the counters! Scrutinise means look very carefully and we could sit opposite them and were encouraged to point out mistakes – we were so close you could smell the ballot papers! The Elland station seemed well organised compared to other stations for other wards and our result was second out in about 2 hours. The Greens did pretty well overall, but didn’t win any seats. Boo.