How can I help to make this the Peace Election which politicians won’t forget in a hurry?
How you can help depends on what kind of seat you live in. We have listed some suggestions below for safe and marginal seats.
It is the marginals that will make all the difference, so if you live in a safe seat you might consider helping out in a marginal seat near to you or where there you know some friends or fellow activists.
There are also things you can do wherever you live and if you want to help us out on this site we’ll be very grateful!
In Safe Seats
First, there are useful things you can do besides seeking to achieve a better result in this one election:
- Concentrate on all the other ways of changing the world – we mustn’t just focus on elections!
- Use the election as an opportunity to campaign for a fair voting system in which every vote counts across the country and not just in the marginals!
- Concentrate on reaching out to a non-geographical constituency, such as people in your union or faith group or elderly forum, or other organisation.
- Become a cyber-campaigner and patrol cyber-space, seeding little links to our site
- Help your local Green candidate (if standing), or whichever other poorly-placed local candidate is closest to your heart
Or, if you want to help make more of a difference in this election –
- Find the marginal seat(s) closest to you, contact the campaign team of the best-placed progressive challenger – or the best-placed challenger – to see if they need volunteers.
In Marginal Seats
- Tell your friends, work colleagues and family;
- Carry the argument to those who are so disillusioned or ‘cool’ that they think there’s never any point in voting
- Contact the campaign team of the best-placed progressive challenger – or the best-placed challenger if there is a need for strategic voting – to see if you can help deliver leaflets, provide transport, etc
- write letters to local and maybe regional papers at every opportunity
- Read our tips on letter writing and how to put poorly-placed candidates on the spot!
- Go along to public meetings
- Visit http://www.vote-2005.co.uk and register to log in regularly to the on-line discussions about your constituency (each seat is its own topic) – use the site’s potentials to link up with others on the same track.
Further suggestions which people with more experience and/or confidence may like to consider.
Wherever you live
- Write letters to local paper and national press
- Find out about discussion programmes or phone-ins being planned on local or
national TV or radio, or join in the fight on relevant discussion forums (e.g. Advice to GuadianUnlimited’s floating voters, or a lively MP’s website such as Boris Johnson’s)
- Spend an evening going through your postal and e-mail address lists to identify friends and family living in marginal seats
- Consider what organisations you are a part of: e.g. can you contact people in your church and world development networks, or Saga friends or fellow union members or student unions in your city or region, etc.
- E-mail your friends with your own personal recommendation about this site, encouraging them too to forward it on. The best ways for a website to get publicity are by word-of-mouth and the e-mail grapevine. Remember the power of squares – if we all tell five folk and they (ditto, ditto, ditto) then soon the whole world will know! (so long as we consciously think how to ‘circuit jump’ beyond the usual circles of the like-minded)
- Put a note in your diary to check this site from time to time (in case changes in the national polls suggest a danger of the Tories getting an overall majority and hence a switching of our strategic recommendations.
Help out this site
There are several ways you can keep in touch with us and help out with what we are doing:
- Contact us with your feedback, praise, criticisms, suggestions, questions. Please note that any nice things you say about our website or strategy may be recycled as a public endorsement unless you ask us not to, or to not use your name
If you can volunteer to help us there is lots to do e.g. researching MP’s records and/or willingness to commit themselves to voting reform; or developing our database of celebrities for an advert in the national press;
Or can you help financially? This site is paid for and will run on volunteer energy from the point at which it can fairly be said that an election is actually imminent, and not merely due quite soon. But before this point (probably towards the end of March) it would be great if people could come forward to produce local materials.