Candidates Meeting

On Thursday 25th February 2010 at 7:30pm at the Labour Group Room was the first candidates meeting for the Milton Keynes Council 2010 elections, I met Cllr Kevin Wilson outside the entrance with a big box next to him while he was having a cigarette and also came along Cllr John Goss.

We were the first to arrive and got ourselves comfy when others turned up.

Kevin asked everyone to introduce ourselves and I was quite tired as I had hot footed it to the meeting following a Finance and Resources Committee meeting which I had clerked at the Woughton Community Council offices on Netherfield, and when it came too my introduction I made a slip of the tongue and said hi i'm Brian Barton candidate for Milton Keynes North instead of saying Newport Pagnall North to much laughter in the room I quickly added that I had no designs on replacing Andrew Pakes or getting above my station I said this after making eye contact with his Election Agent Pete Marland, whilst at the same time half closing my eyes hoping the ground would swallow me up! Cllr Rita Venn who sat opposite me kindly muttered I would make a good candidate.

Kevin then proceed to hand round blank nomination forms and was going through each page like the good teacher he was advising what and what not to fill in and gave us the deadline to obtain the ten signatures that are needed and to hand back to him.

He also handed out some glossy general election literature on the theme of a Future Fair To All with nice pictures of people quoting the success of their lives thanks to a Labour Government Pete commented that the typeface of the booklet was all over the place which is a fair comment.

We then split in to two groups north and south so that the candidates could discuss in more detail the campaign organisation of the two constituencies, which were led by the two election agents, Dan the national party organisor depressed me about the voter contact targets which we had to achieve per week (from memory) 2,000 a week and we were at present no where near that.

When we huddled round to hear Pete he certainly was much more upbeat thanking us in the north for all our hard work and the fact we can only do what we can and should not burn ourselves out as if there is a hung parliment there could be another election around the corner and we would need some energy to fight that one as well.

For the rest of the time we just generally talked politics, Pete made a very valid point that win draw or lose there still would be a Milton Keynes Labour Party and we need to plan for the future and increase the size of the Labour Group.

I was getting tired and we all decided to call it a night any way and wrapped up at about 9:30pm, Pete asked for a lift but decided to ask Kevin instead, it would of made more sense for me to drive him home as it would be out of the way for Kevin but I was hungray and just wanted to go home.

When I got to my car I spotted an Easter egg given to me by someone at work and so I eat it all and felt a lot better driving home.