Well, like it or not, there’s an election happening in less than a week.
It’ll be your only chance for four years (usually) to vote for the person who will represent the Isle of Wight at a National level.
With such a long period between elections, some people have called this system an elected dictatorship – once you’ve voted, tough luck, you have to deal with the result, until the next election.
This may or may not be true, but we should count ourselves lucky – many countries don’t have the chance to elect their dictators.
The fact is that between now and Thursday 6th May, we’re not going to change the way the UK political system works, so let’s work with what we’ve got.
Presenting the candidates
So … taking the system as we have it, eleven people on the Isle of Wight have put themselves forward to stand as candidates for election to be the Island’s MP.
Even if you don’t agree with what they’ve got to say, they all have a right to put their points across to try and persuade you that they’re the ‘right one’.
To help you make that choice, we contacted each of the candidates and are publishing what they’ve sent back to us.
We asked for each of their manifestos, with a 500 word limit, and asked for something far harder – to summarise their campaign into 100 characters.
The fairest, non-political way of displaying the information felt like alphabetical order of the surnames
The candidate list
This page will be refreshed as and when we publish details, so keep coming back and we’ll add links to each of them – we hope you find it a good source for making your choice.
Mark Chiverton – Labour
Geof Clynch – BNP
Edward Corby – Independent
Ian Dunsire – English Democrats
Peter Harris – Independent
Bob Keats – Green
Paul Randle-Jolliffe – Independent
Paul St-John Martin – Middle England
Michael Tarrant – UKIP
Andrew Turner – Conservative
Jill Wareham – Liberal Democrats
Base map: open Street Map
