Equal Parenting Alliance News – July 2006
© 2006 The Equal Parenting Alliance
LONG TERM PLAN
Page 3
Thoughts on our first By-Election
As you can see, we plan to fight at least two by-elections before the next general election.
So how much will this cost?
Before the last general election various figures were floated around, sometimes quoting costs up to £100,000 to fight each seat. However, we believe this was deliberate disinformation put about to justify inaction and the failure to mount an effective political campaign.
While this figure may indeed be the sum one of the big-three spend on an election, of course we could not begin to spend anything like that.
Rather, we have to look at the minimum possible cost, and then work out how much added value we get out of any extra amount we spend.
So what would the minimum worthwhile campaign entail and how much would it cost?
The basic cost to put up a candidate for MP is the £500 deposit needed to get on the election ticket. (You forfeit this if you get less than 5% of the votes cast, so we expect to write the deposit off at this stage!).
When you stand for election as an MP, the Post Office, by law, has to deliver one election publication per candidate to every household in the constituency (or to every constituent by name) for free. This is a major benefit to us, and indeed part of the justification for running a campaign at all.
With the average constituency of around thirty thousand households, this represents about £7,000 worth of postage. Not bad for a £500 investment.
Of course, we pay for the leaflets and envelopes ourselves, so a costing for our basic election so far is depost (£500) + 30,000 A4 B&W leaflets (£600) + envelopes (£150) = £1250 in total.
So, at a bare minimum, we could do nothing else for the campaign and still have our leaflet in every house in the constituency and a candidate under our name on the ballot paper for a touch over one thousand pounds.
We would also need some on-ground support, which is why choosing a campaign where we have local members would be very important at first.
This probably means our first seat fought will be in north west England.
Clearly, we would never be in the market for a smoothly oiled publicity machine, chartering helicopters and painted buses. But what we would expect to do is have groups of volunteers leafleting and chatting to people in the constituency in the month leading up to the campaign, concentrating mostly on the final week.
Most of the actual ‘campaigning’ would consist of this leafleting to promote awareness, and the candidate him/her self would hopefully be able to get coverage on local radio at least.
Although a dedicated ‘election office’ would be nice, we don’t believe it would be essential or give us value for money.
Ideally the candidate could be available for much of that month, or on the ground for at least the whole of the final week. (Of course, we have to find a candidate as well, but that’s another story!).
Apart from some travel costs, there would not be too many other costs associated with this style of campaign. Our hope is we can run a minimal frugal style campaign like this for about £2000 a seat.
Although this may sound disappointingly as if we are not being very optimistic, we won’t aim higher until we have both the funds and member base in place to support anything more elaborate.
We firmly believe in planning for what we think we can realistically achieve.
Even with this type of campaign, we still think it’s worthwhile. Every one in an entire town can read what we really stand for, and we can hopefully challenge the other candidates to address family law issues more sensibly by our presence.
Our first election will be an experiment. By the time we run our second we will have better idea of what works and how to fight the bigger challenges ahead.
Our value in being a political party is not simply about maximising the number of votes cast for us. It’s more about using the party and election paraphernalia to allow us to punch above our weight – and getting our true message to the masses at last.