Christians come third in speed canvassing TV contest
-26/04/05
The Christian Democrat political party – the Christian People’s Alliance – has come third in a televised speed-canvassing event involving voters, at a bar in South London.
The ‘And Finally…’ feature was part of last night’s edition of BBC Newsnight (Monday 25th) which was comprised of a blind ‘Candi-dating’ contest involving parties running in May 5th’s General Election.
Fifteen tables were laid out with party candidates sat at each. After three minutes with a candidate a bell rang and each voter moved on to spend time talking with the next candidate. Each was forbidden to reveal the identity of their party.
The scoring method involved a simple tick on a voting slip if a candidate had impressed, and a cross if they had left the voter cold. A total of ticks per candidate at the end of the evening decided the winner.
“At the idea’s inception there was a vague notion in the Newsnight office that seeing the same candidates having to sell themselves over and over again would make for amusing television, particularly if the party candidates could be representative of not only the main parties but also the ones our floaters may have never even heard of,” said a statement from the Newsnight Programme.
When the votes were totalled up, and the identities of the candidates revealed, Mabon Gwynfor from Plaid Cymru and Stefan Tymkewycz from the Scottish Nationalist Party were the winners in joint first place.
The Christian People’s Alliance candidate came a joint third along with Green and Socialist Party candidates.
But the party was still able to claim a moral victory over the main political parties.
“This result demonstrates that when our policies are listened to, then the public instinctively responds to the Christian Democratic approach”, commented CPA’s featured candidate, Jill McLachlan, who is standing in the City and Westminster constituency.
Jill Mclachlan added; “I took the voters I spoke to on a journey to see the connectedness of society’s problems – to the fact that marriage and respect for life should be at the centre of our society and without it, everything else is failing. The major parties only talked about economics – taxes, pensions, money here and there, as if people are merely consumer units. But the CPA’s distinctive approach says tinkering at the edges is not the answer – a complete renewal of society is needed from the bottom-up.”
The verdict from Newsnight?
“Newsnight discovered that the main parties, Labour, Conservative and the Liberal Democrats, were not doing as well as the smaller parties, who seemed more successful at simply chatting with their voters” the programme concluded.
“Whether any of our potential voters found true political love is open to interpretation. They may have just wished they had spent their three minutes boiling an egg” the programme said.
You can read the full report on the BBC Newsnight website here. Please note that The Christian People’s Alliance appears as “Christian Party Alliance” on the site as Newsnight seem to have got their name wrong.