General Election 6th May 2010

In the run-up to the General Election our Assistant Pastor, Tim Ambrose, wrote to each of our local candidates along these lines …

"We as a church seek to support the democratic process. We do this by providing our building as a polling station, by regularly praying for those in government (and now for the election process) and by encouraging all our members to be conscientious voters. It would really help us to this end if you would be willing to take a few moments to answer a few questions. We will be asking all the candidates the same questions and circulating the answers within the church as well as posting the 'interviews' online at our church website."

The questions we asked can be found here

The responses we received

Each of the parliamentary candidates (with the exception of the BNP candidate) replied to our email. First we heard from Malcolm Ford, the UKIP candidate, who responded all the questions we asked. You can find his response here

Next we heard from Sadie Smith, the Liberal Democrat candidate. She chose not to respond to the questions. Instead she sent a statement pointing to the Liberal Democrat Christian Forum – see here

The Conservative candidate, Dr Andrew David Hardie, was the next to respond. Rather than provide answers to the individual questions he chose to make a statement outlining his general position on the issues raised. This can be found here

We then heard from Adrian Bailey, the Labour candidate. Mr Bailey addressed all the questions and his response can be found here

We are grateful to each of the candidates for the trouble they have taken at a busy time.

Anyone wishing to understand more about the position of the various political parties on a range of issue of concern to Christians is recommended to check out the Election 2010 pages on the Christian Institute website here