As well as organising speaker meetings and other events, we also hold regular campaign sessions. Campaigning has always been a large aspect of CUCA, and as well as being important it can also be great fun.

Campaign sessions can take a variety of different forms, from distributing election material in Colleges and the local area, to canvassing support on the doorstep. In the past CUCA has worked closely with the Cambridge City Conservative Association. Occasionally we move further a field such as during the last general election, when we did some canvassing in Bedford with the local candidate.

Most recently, we have helped Boris Johnson in his campaign to be London Mayor, and have been very active in Cambridge City Council elections, where we helped elect Chris Howell in Coleridge Ward, our first councillor in four years. The Conservatives are the only party to have increased their vote across the city in each of the last three local elections, while the Liberal Democrat and Labour votes have gone down.

Our new Prospective Parliamentary Candidate (PPC) is Richard Normington. Richard used to run the international relations department at Conservative Central Office. He was formerly a Deputy
Chairman of the Party here and has lived in Cambridge for some time, so no doubt some of you who have been out canvassing before will know him.

He, and many of the others in the local party are looking forward to working with CUCA again in the near future to ensure that Cambridge becomes Blue once more. The local party wants to have many more campaigning sessions now we have a PPC and I hope that as many of you as possible will be able to help out as and when we are needed. The target for May is to have several councillors back on the city council and we should work as hard as possible to ensure this.

It would be great if as many members of CUCA as possible got involved with campaigns. Don’t worry if you’ve never done any campaigning before, it’s not at all scary and it’s a great way to learn about, and get involved in, grass roots politics, as well as meeting interesting people and having a good time. Invariably our campaigns sessions finish in the pub!

If you want to learn more about campaigns, please send me an email, or simply turn up to a campaigns meeting. They happen throughout term and details are posted to the main CUCA mailing list.

Henry Walton
Campaigns Officer, 2008