During this week Jayne & I have both been quite disenchanted by local politics and the Crawley Labour party to the point of considering whether to stop bothering to be involved.

This morning we went out canvassing in Broadfield, and feel a whole lot better about it. Maybe it was just the fresh air and exercise having an effect, but I think its a lot more than that.

For a start, most of the people I talked to were very supportive of the Labour party. They were not just saying “well if I have to go for one or the other I’ll go for Labour, I suppose” but were very positive and enthusiastic. I even had one chap who wanted to join the party, so I gave him the membership form.

We had a couple of ladies from the Brighton & Hove party join us as well, one from Portslade and one from Hove Actually as we call it. I do like to meet people from other constituencies and hear about their experiences. Brighton & Hove have all-out elections instead of voting by thirds, and they do not have their elections until next year. I know they still need to campaign all the way through, but their urgency is not the same as ours so its probably right that they help us out at the moment.

I would like to go down and help them some time. Its difficult as we have an election of one sort or another every year, but it would be good to make some connections there.

While out and about it was disturbing to see some visible signs of some of the issues facing Broadfield.

This is a good example.

When I was out knocking on doors on election day in May I am sure I saw this same cable company in this state. I don’t know if it has been repaired and re-vandalised since then but its not right. Apart from it looking bad and encouraging further vandalism it can’t be good for the cable company’s services either.

I have written to the local cable firm to get it fixed, but I can’t believe that I have had to. If none of the local residents had done it then surely someone else could have done – Council Wardens on their regular patrols or councillors doing the rounds for example.

Here is another eyesore.

The people here told us that the rubbish was left by the bin men. These houses are not allowed to have the new wheelie bins for reasons of access so they continue to use the open recycling boxes.

This close is only a few metres from the nearest road. How hard can access be? If the bin men can get in with their big trolleys to collect rubbish they could just as easily get wheelie bins out. This needs to be sorted out.

And this is what made me feel that it is worth carrying on. Forget about what happens on the council at a policy level or with rows between and amongst parties, there is still lots of low-level basic work to be done. I know that Jayne would jump on something like this and keep on at amenity services until it was sorted out.

We don’t have trouble persuading people in Broadfield to support us, we just have trouble getting those who support us to vote – at least 80% in Broadfield don’t bother.