Local council elections for Cambridge City Council, South Cambridgeshire District Council and many other local councils are just a week away, on 3 May. Please write to ALL prospective councillors in your Ward. It’s a really good opportunity to raise concerns about EU citizens’ rights, Brexit and its impact on your family and/or local community and ask them to support the People’s Vote on the final Brexit deal.
We know that Brexit will not be the only important issue when it comes to deciding who to vote for, but Brexit will harm local services through loss of revenue and critical staff, and candidates will let their Parliamentary colleagues know what they are hearing on the doorstep and in their mailbox. All EU and Commonwealth citizens who are resident can vote in the local elections in their area.
Although a personal letter/email is likely to have the most impact, if you’re not sure what to say – or just short of time – we have put together a couple of templates for you to edit to suit your own preferences or just add your own details (remember to include your address). We took suggestions from various websites, including St. Albans for Europe, the Local Government Association for UK citizens, and the 3 Million for EU citizens to help us with the content.
There are two letter templates. Download the template focusing on EU Citizen’s rights here and download the template focusing on the more general impact Brexit here. Please adapt and combine these to fit your own priorities.
Letters can be written and posted to the addresses of prospective candidates in your Ward. Not all wards and districts are being contested in the 2018 local elections, so it’s important to check first before writing.
Finding the contact details of candidates in local elections is not always an easy task. If you have received campaign literature from them they should include their contact details, and they may also be published on their local Party website. The Who Can I Vote For? and Your Vote Matters websites are very useful resources for finding out who your local candidates are, and often have their contact details too. If that fails, and you can’t find their contact details with an internet search, you can always write to the local party, remembering to include the name of your ward and candidate.
For Cambridge residents you can first check the Ward Map to find which city ward you are in, then check the published list of candidates, and once you’ve found the name of the candidate you can find their contact details on the local Party website (Labour, Conservatives, Liberal Democrats, Greens) .
You can find a list of the wards and parish councils that make up South Cambridgeshire District Council here, and a list of the wards and parish councils where elections are being held has been published.
Huntingdonshire District Council has a handy online tool that allows you to find your ward and councillor, and have published lists of the Wards and Parish councils where elections will be held on 3rd May, as well as the candidates.
It’s really important that as many people participate in this initiative as possible. We have only a few months left to secure a final say on the Brexit deal and EVERYONE’S VOICE COUNTS.
Please let us know by emailing info@cambridgestays.org.uk if you get replies from your candidates and in particular if they make a commitment to signing up to the People’s Vote campaign – www.peoples-vote.uk
