Your vote in May will be crucial

Ihave knocked on doors in Peterborough for 25 years. For many of those years, I was guaranteed to hear a particular phrase: “You’re all the same!” No matter how hard I tried to persuade them otherwise, I would find voters who insisted on it. I tried listing all the differences between my party and Labour, but to no effect. Not any more. One of the upsides of Brexit and the rise of Jeremy Corbyn was the end of this myth. There are profound differences in politics.

Our country is leading the world in vaccinations, helping us to defeat the virus and regain our freedom. Locally, we are set to benefit. A Conservative Peterborough is bringing new investment, jobs and opportunity.

Things under Corbyn would have been very different. Thankfully, we avoided that fate. But although Jeremy has moved on, under his own toxic cloud, his supporters run the local Labour Party. Now they want to run Peterborough. The Labour candidates for the local elections are from the same extreme mould.

I can’t stress enough how important the elections on May 6 will be for our local future. No party has an outright majority at the Town Hall, so your vote will decide whether the city council stays Conservative.

All of Peterborough’s progress could be lost. The other local parties want a Labour takeover, which would throw away our hard-won achievements. That is the stark alternative. People in politics are not all the same. Let’s take crime and anti-social behaviour as an example.

Peterborough City Council is now cracking down on anti-social behaviour. It will use the new powers in the Police and Crime Bill to stop unauthorised travellers’ camps - the caravans that have blighted our roadsides and local parks. I know how important this is and how many people have been affected. I’ve raised it again and again in Parliament. Action was long overdue and has wide support.

Yet Labour don’t just oppose making these camps a criminal offence. They sympathise with unauthorised camps as a cultural ‘way of life’. Labour don’t just oppose restrictions on violent and extreme protests or tougher sentences for sex offenders. They describe these sensible measures as ‘heading to a dictatorship’. When I used this column to describe those daubing graffiti on Churchill’s statue as thugs, it was a Peterborough Labour councillor who objected on social media. The same councillor who described my Peterborough’s Favourite Takeaways competition as promoting ‘a risk factor for death’ among ‘Muslim communities’. This, an official spokesperson for the Peterborough Labour Group. But they will be the people running our city, unless you prevent it at the ballot box. Can you imagine? They are keener to rename Gladstone Street than to clean it. Keener to ‘defund the police’ than fight for our fair share of the new Cambridgeshire police officers.

The only action I’ve seen from Labour on fly-tipping was a dead-of-night operation to remove their own dumped rubbish in Bretton. They would be a catastrophe.

There’s so much going in the right direction for the city and our area. You may have to take your own pencil to vote this May, but our positive future depends on your choice. We aren’t all the same.