First day of the election.

At last Gordon Brown has finally called the election and we are in the final stretch of the campaign.

Today I talked to Portsmouth Pensioners who were instructed to ask questions only on national policies. One of the biggest issues is that the state pension has not kept up with earnings and many pensioners are struggling. This is an issue that I hope we will address with the link back to earnings although in this recession earnings are not going up sufficiently so we must find other ways of alleviating the hardship that many pensioners are finding. Like everything else it will depend on the economy which is really frustrating. While we do start to put the economy back on track, we will ensure that our vulnerable citizens always come first and that includes pensioners. David Cameron made a powerful speech at our party conference in October about poverty and we must make sure that the 2 millions pensioners living in poverty are helped.

David Cameron this morning in his speech talked about ‘the great ignored’. People like the couple I met this evening who had both worked hard and saved all their lives. They are now in their 80’s but do not qualify for pension credit and are finding it hard to survive and are really cross that they might have to sell their house to pay for nursing care and they had wanted to leave something for their daughter. They were very pleased to speak to us and told us of their problems.

This evening we were lucky to have Theresa May MP coming down to Portsmouth to canvass with 14 members of the team and she got a fabulous reception from people on the doorstep in Milton. Some people even came out of their doors to welcome her without us knocking, and it is great to see so many people who are enthusiastic about our policies and wanting to see a change in government.

Although I have wanted to run a green campaign with as few leaflets as possible, several thousand leaflets went out today to remind people of why it is so important to vote and to let them know what I am campaigning for.

I am really looking forward to the next four weeks.