Local elections - 7 May 2020

Assuming they don't cancel them because of coronavirus, there will be local elections in many areas on 7 May.

Please check on your local council website to see if there's an election where you live and get in touch if you'd like to stand as a YPP candidate.

There's a bit of form filling involved, which is like anything else in life, tricky the first time and pretty easy the next time.

The good news is, you don't have to pay anything to get on the ballot paper, and it's all good practice. We have found - despite doing no leafletting or campaigning whatsoever - that the number of votes you get creeps up every time you stand, which is good for morale, if nothing else.

Local elections result, 2 May 2019

Thomas Hall, 51 votes, Buckhurst Hill West, 2.5%

This is the sort of reaction I expected...

The Sunderland Echo covered a Press Assocation write-up about YPP. It was a bit of a hatchet job and the fox hunting bit was taken completely out of context, but hey, all publicity is good publicity:

From the comments:

Tobster:

That's why the voting age should be raised to 21 or they bring back the property criterion. The latter means that only those who own property and therefore have a stake in society are allowed to vote.

Psychlops:

So as a renter, who couldn't afford to buy property... I'm to be denied a vote?

As a renter I don't have a stake in society?

Gee, thanks...

YPP's three candidates in the 2017 General Election

Now confirmed:

Thomas Hall - Epping Forest (west Essex).

Ben Weenen - Cities of London & Westminster.

Jon Collings - City of Durham.

If you live in or near any of those places and have time, energy and/or money to contribute, please get in touch.

YPP (London) meet-up, tomorrow Friday 21 April

We'll be at The Brewmaster from 5.20 onwards or so - if you think you'll turn up later than 6.30, please get in touch gmwadsworth@gmail.com or 07954 59 07 44.

Leicester Square Tube Exit 1, turn left and left again into the alleyway (St Martin's Court). We put a yellow YPP leaflet on the table so that you can find us.

Topics: Two people have put themselves forward to stand at the snap General Election - any more takers?

And the result just in...

I appear to have made a modest improvement compared to the result of the same election two years ago, up from 2.0% to 2.6%.

(My mistake was I couldn't find the laminated poster to staple to our fence, it was right by the front door, duh.)

Ha ha, serves them right.

From Open Democracy:

The Government’s rush to implement Individual Electoral Registration (IER) – against expert advice to phase-in the policy over a longer period – has knocked more than 800,000 people off the electoral register over the last year. The House of Commons Library warns: “Local authorities with high concentration of students appear to have been more affected by IER as their registers decreased more significantly than the average.”

Fewer young, poor and left orientated voters on the electoral register is likely to help the Conservatives in local and national elections on May 5, as well as skewing the soon-to-be redrawn boundaries of parliamentary constituencies to their advantage.

In the context of the European referendum though, that is a substantial number of likely Remain votes lost. The changes to electoral registration also puts Remain at a geographic disadvantage. Five of the ten top Europhile locations in Britain are London boroughs, according to YouGov.

But London has lost the highest number of voters, with 394,000 falling of the register since the 2012 Mayoral election. In Hackney alone, which was the eighth most pro-EU place in of Britain, there has been a 6 per cent slump in voter registration. A double victory for Conservative Mayoral candidate and Brexiteer, Zac Goldsmith, but more bad news for Remain.

H/t MBK.

Officially on the Ballot papers

Well that was satisfaction.

Yes you can write to me there.

I've got the signatures on my nomination paper.

To stand in a parliamentary election, you need to get ten registered voters in the constituency to sign your so-called 'nomination paper' (the reasons why are lost in the mists of time). So I asked the local council to email me the electoral register and printed off my road.

Yesterday, I set off up the road at about 11.30 once it had stopped drizzling, knocked on every door, told people who I am, where I live ("You might have seen the yellow YPP poster attached to my fence…") and asked them to sign.

To my pleasant surprise, half of people were in and opened the door, and apart from one who refused point blank, they all signed quite happily. So I was back home within twenty minutes.

Next week I'll take the forms and my five hundred sobs to the Town Hall and I'm on the ballot paper.

Nomination papers in, On the Ballot paper for the Folkestone and Hythe Constituency #GE2015

Dr Rohen Kapur has been officially put on the ballot papers for Folkestone and Hythe Constituency running against  Damian Collins, Lynne Beaumont, Claire Jeffrey, Martin Whybrow, Andy Thomas ( Andrew Thomas Emans) Seth Cruse, Harriet Yeo.

This was confirmed at 4pm on Thursday 2nd of April.

He would like to extend a big thank you to the neighbours and friends and total strangers that signed his forms.

He will be attending the Prime Time Hustings at St John's Church in Folkestone on Wednesday April 8th 2015 at 2pm  Doors open at 1.30 pm and the start is prompt.

I shall be speaking first so get there in time.  You won't want to miss this.

I shall be mentioning our Higher Education manifesto which will abolish tuition fees for Higher Education.

Anymore information please contact me through the link at the right hand side bar.

Yup, this is how democracy works.

From the Evening Standard:

Take this month: we’ve had a Budget whose headline £1,000 tax-free interest allowance for savers only accrues to people with £30,000 or so in the bank. We’ve heard strong suggestions that a Tory government would cut inheritance tax. We’ve seen a pledge card from Labour that didn’t even mention the enormous house-building programme that the party admits is needed.

The Budget did raise the pay of apprentices, and it pledged to top up the deposits of first-time-buyers impossibly lucky enough have the other £61,000 needed to reach the average London first-time deposit. But (older) people with money in the bank comprehensively won the day.

Why? Because they vote. Older people and richer people are much more likely than younger and poorer people to vote, and the gap has widened dramatically. In 1970, turnout among the over-65s was already 18 points higher than among voters aged 18-24 — and that gap has more than doubled since then. Similarly, the turnout gap between the poorest voters and richest voters has widened from four points in 1987 to 23 points in 2010.

Registration levels for this election are strikingly low among younger voters, particularly London’s transient young. According to a recent report, almost half of those turning 18 just in time for this election are not registered; that figure is about 30 per cent among all 18- to 24-year-olds.

But a new online registration system means that plenty can change between now and the April 20 deadline. I felt oddly elated when I registered on the site recently — it takes two minutes and just requires your NI number.

That online registration thing is here, by the way.

YPP meet-up, Friday 6 March

Tomorrow Friday 6 March at The Brewmaster nr Leicester Square Tube (Exit 1 and turn left at the top of the stairs into "St Martin's Court") from about 5.20 onwards.

We put a yellow leaflet on the table so that you can recognise us.

Topics: Rohen and I are going to stand at the next General Election. If anybody else is up for it, please let us know.

I'd call that a pretty good result :-)

I stood for YPP in the local elections yesterday.

I stood in a much larger ward for the county council elections last year and got 21 votes (0.5%); this time round I got 37 votes (2%) and that was without doing any campaigning or leafleting whatsoever.

All I did was stick up a yellow poster with the YPP logo in my front window (handily, we live on the high street so quite a few people must have seen it).

So thanks to everybody who voted YPP!

Who should I vote for in the EU Parliament elections tomorrow?

YPP do not have the money or the membership to stand at the EU Parliament elections, but speaking for myself, not YPP's entire membership:

1. If you live in the north west, please please please vote for the Pirate Party, whose manifesto is not entirely dissimilar to ours (to the extent they are bound by the general pan-European Pirate Party overall policies).

2. If you live anywhere else, UKIP is not the only anti-EU party on the list, you can vote for a left-wing anti-EU Party, namely No2EU.

Funny thing is, the traditional "right wing" arguments against EU-membership (typified as Little Englander mild racism, but there is more to UKIP than that) get much more airtime (because they are easier to ridicule) than the much more legitimate "left wing" arguments, i.e. the EU is a massive corporatist power grab whereby the powerful get more powerful, the wealthy get wealthier, the core nations benefit at the peripheral nations' expense... and the landowners get all the tax breaks and subsidies.

3. If you live in Buckhurst Hill West ward, vote YPP in the local elections.

4. If you'd vote YPP, but there's no candidate in your area, then next time, just stand as a candidate yourself, all it involves is a bit of form filling for the Town Hall, we can talk you through that.

I've got my nomination form signed

When I checked my local council website a few weeks ago, it wasn't showing any local elections, so I thought they'd missed a year, but our Polling Cards arrived last week, giving me just enough time to get the forms filled in before next Thursday's deadline.

The only tricky bit, psychologically, is going round your neighbours and persuading ten of them (or nine actually, because you can sign for yourself) to sign the nomination form. Two of the people who usually sign for me are away, which is a bit annoying.

It took me exactly one hour. I knocked on about thirty doors, most of them were out, two or three people refused to sign (fair enough) but nine people signed quite happily, most of them even had their own Polling Cards handy so that they can enter their number on the form, and that was the end of that.

Next step, bodge a big yellow poster and stick it in the front window.

PS, the good thing about local elections is that you don't have to pay a deposit.

It's quite nice being able to vote YPP

I thought the logo came up pretty well on the ballot paper and was easy to spot.

And it's also quite nice being able to vote for yourself :-)

No doubt tomorrow's result will be a bit depressing but you never know, sooner or later we'll move up from "last" to "also ran" to "fringe party" to "minor party" etc.

My leaflet for the Essex County Council elections, Buckhurst Hill & Loughton South Division

My motto is, if in doubt, be honest.

Converted from jpg to pdf using the fine free service at pdf2pjg.net:

All politics is local politics

I'm drafting my own leaflet for the county council elections, and Rule One is read the competition's leaflets first.

Somebody standing for the local residents' association delivered a leaflet today which includes the following NIMBY gold:

• We know that weak representation has resulted in Buckhurst Hill being forced to accommodate many more flats and housing - worsening our infrastructure problems.

• LRA opposed construction of huge car parks beyond Debden (suggested by a Conservative County Cllr) on the already over-capactiy Central Line - which would mean YOU would never get a seat.

• Remember: LRA fights to keep and improve our attractive greens and open spaces...

We've much to protect in this lovely area from our open spaces to our vibrant shops. I've four grandchildren and walk my dogs in the Forest daily. I was 25 years at Epping Forest College, now I'm an Ofsted Inspector.

Or to translate that into English:

• The hundreds of people who live in the few new homes which have been built over the past few years can fuck off and those homes should be demolished. Only homes as old as mine or older should be allowed to stand.

• I'll campaign for the car park near our local stations to be closed down so that people who want to get on the train at the next few stations are more likely to get a seat.

• We are a grass and tree-based economy. People don't matter. In fact the fewer of them the better...

We've much to protect in this lovely area from our open spaces to our failing shops (there not being enough customers or young people prepared to work in them for low wages). I've four grandchildren and walk my dogs in the Forest daily. They need somewhere to shit more than you need a home. I've worked for the government all my life.

County council elections 2 May: Stand up and be counted

There are going to be elections for county councils etc on 2 May 2013 and the clock is ticking.

If you live or work in an constituency or ward which is having an election, I hope you'll seriously consider standing. All you have to do is get the nomination forms from the local town hall and get ten people who are entitled to vote in that constituency or ward to sign it, get the form submitted in time and ask our nominating officer Joe Momberg to confirm you are an official YPP candidate and that's it.

How much actual campaigning or canvassing or leafletting you want to do is entirely up to you, we don't need to agree a common national manifesto for this, it's the same old same old wherever you are, high rents and high house prices etc. For those that haven't officially joined YPP, if you officially join first, then so much the better.

Remember: if we're not on the ballot paper then people will never vote for us!

Elections 2 May 2013

There are going to be lots of county council elections on 2 May 2013.

If you live or work in an area where there's going to be an election, then please seriously consider standing as a candidate.

There is no deposit to pay at the town hall, and even if you do no campaigning whatsoever, it's always good to get "YPP" on the ballot paper.