Richard Allanach Says Thank You (Kenilworth and Southam Liberal Democrats)

Richard Allanach Says Thank You

May 7, 2005 8:15 PM

Richard Allanach 2 I should like to thank everyone who voted for me during the election campaign, and I should like to thank everyone who helped in our election campaign.

We added three thousand votes to our total in Rugby and Kenilworth.

We made broad nationwide progress - as is illustrated by the following list of cities which have Liberal Democrat MPs but do not have Tory MPs: Cardiff, Edinburgh, Bristol, Sheffield and Leeds. Liberal Democrats now represent Britain's three oldest universities Oxford, Cambridge and St Andrews.

Whatever the national media says there was a lot of local interest in the campaign - each of the hustings events was well attended and I had a constant stream of queries from interested voters by phone, by e-mail and by letter.

During the election campaign I said that there were three big silent issues:

How to restore peace
How to curb climate change
How to respond to an increasingly ageing society

In the end only the first of these issues got even half a hearing. We spent far more time talking about whether or not Tony Blair knew there was no threat from weapons of mass destruction before the invasion than we did about where we should go from here. The Liberal Democrat policy was and is that British forces should be withdrawn from Iraq before 2006.

Climate change will come back to bite us all.

I believe our ageing society will become a big issue in the next Parliament - particularly now that David Blunkett has been put in charge of our pensions. Has Tony Blair learned nothing at all?

As all the candidates made a speech after the count I said that Andy King had been a good constituency MP but had lost the election because of his vote for war on 18 March 2003. The Labour party members at the count closed their ears to the truth and booed and jeered.

If you want to pursue the question of what this election was all about you may want to click on the attached link.

Kenilworth and Southam Liberal Democrats