Gareth: Hi. It’s Gareth McNab, Director of External Affairs at Christians Against Poverty and momentum’s building, isn’t it? The debates are all done, postal votes are going in, I submitted mine. I’m gonna be busy on July 4th, either in London or in Bradford – and it’s my birthday on July 4th , so I decided I would get my vote in ahead of time –maybe you did too.
If you ask for a postal vote and don’t get it off in time, you are still able to vote in person on July 4th in your local constituency. There’s a bit of a form you need to fill out at the time, but do please vote.
Momentum is also building, though, isn’t it, in terms of poverty getting on to the agenda? We finally had some discussion about it in leaders’ debates. You will form your own views about the quality of discussion on those debates, and from our perspective at Christians Against Poverty, any thought about reducing the overall welfare bill has to come after considering how to reduce the need for that welfare bill.
The nation is ill-er and more people are less able to work through long term health issues or disability. And we need changes, don’t we?
We need workplaces to be more accessible to people who are are poorly or disabled We need Social Security support to people in those circumstances to to be sufficient to meet those extra needs that do come when somebody has a long term poor health or lives with disability, and it just doesn’t sit right, does it, to take money out of the pockets of people who really need it? Unless they no longer need it because we’ve managed to invest in our health service, in mental health support, in accessible workplaces.
So we understand that challenge that whoever forms the next Government is going to have of looking to work out how do they pay the nation’s bills? And we know that that’s a real pressure because of how much of a challenge our clients experience in paying their bills.
One of the reasons it’s getting on to the agenda is because of you! Because of you, our supporters and campaigners, all of you who’ve taken our ‘write to candidate’ action. I’m seeing emails come in to [email protected], where some of you are sharing the responses that your candidates are sending to you.
And I hope, I hope you’ve had some, I hope you found some encouragement in some of them. Some of you may be getting quite copy and paste policy responses, and maybe that’s OK. Maybe that’s exactly what you needed to try and work out, ‘What does this person stand for?’
I hope that you’ve had responses a bit like I and some of my colleagues have, where candidates are sharing some more of their personal stories, what is their motivation to see an end to UK poverty? What’s their commitment to engage with you and churches and centres and charities in their constituency to to really see the coalface of poverty? And what’s their commitment to listen deeply to people with experience of poverty? As the successful candidate will get sent to Westminster to be their representative, and people who are noisy will get listened to.
And that’s part of the problem with politics in this country for so long, isn’t it? Is that the people whose voices really need to be heard just don’t feature. So more than 5,000 conversations have been started. through the tool at capuk.org/ppc. We’ve got more than two thirds of the map coloured green.
Can you help still further? Can you share the action with anybody you know, and especially if they’re in one of the yellow constituencies on the map that’s linked to in this email?
If you’d like some help in reaching more people, I’m hosting a drop-in with me and some colleagues over the course of the next week, first couple of days of the week, more details in the email, where you can join with me on a Google call and we’ll, I’ll walk you through the map. I’ll show you ways that you can find people on LinkedIn or social media, how you can WhatsApp and energise your friends and family to join in this final push to get poverty firmly on the agenda.
Together, we can make sure that the public urgency that we want poverty dealt with is matched by an increased political priority.
Thank you for all you’re doing. May God be with you this week as you get ready to vote on Thursday.
