Andy D'Agorne

A trip to Sheffield with my bike on the train on Thursday gave me the chance to help the local party that I first joined in 1990 - a far more efficient election machine now, with two councillors and a push to get the third of the 'set' for central ward. The ward now has massive modern appartment blocks for the thousands of students, so business at the polling station that I was covering was very slow - more like one person every ten minutes, but then it did pick up a bit with some students and young mothers about 11am. The bike proved not to be so crucial as the whole operation of collecting numbers and identifying supporters to go out and 'remind to vote' was organised so efficiently for each polling station. In the past we have had to keep ferrying the returns back to one central 'committee room'. However I did use my bike later in the day to visit a few of the polling stations more as a 'tourist' might do and went out from one to do some 'knocking up' before leaving for the train home to York. 

The main concern and talk of the day was about an incident a couple of days prior to the election when the Green Party agent spotted a handful of postal votes being collected in a taxi. This was reported to the police with the registration number, that turned out to be the taxi belonging to the Labour candidate in Central ward. For the press report, see www.thestar.co.uk for Tuesday 29th Apr 2008. The consequence was an unpleasant verbal exchange when Green and Labour campaigners met outside a polling station.

I felt the effort was however worth it, with our third councillor getting elected in Sheffield ousting the Labour candidate by a narrow margin of 48 votes, to join Bernard Little who also got in on a narrow majority when I last went to help out in Sheffield. This means Sheffield has now overtaken York in terms of the number of Green councillors although they have lost the balance of power in the swing that saw the Lib Dems regain overall control of the city.