CCHQ approves strong immigration message for campaigning in marginal seats

A couple of weeks ago I began a process to find an ideal leaflet and drew up a list of policy pledges that could be included on that ideal leaflet. It's very good to see an almost exact reproduction of that list appear in a newspaper advert placed by our excellent candidate in South Ribble, Lorraine Fullbrook (full PDF of the ad).

Two pledges have been altered:

• One corrected from my "Free long-term care for every pensioner who buys an £8,000 insurance policy" to "Free long-term residential care for every pensioner who buys an £8,000 insurance policy - so pensioners don't have to sell their homes."
• And my "A cut in net immigration of 75%" has been changed to "We would cut net immigration from the current hundreds of thousands to tens of thousands".  I think that might be an improvement.

Every candidate should know that if they want to campaign on immigration they can. CCHQ are sometimes frustrating this but candidates need to be assertive.

Lorraine's newspaper ad is great but I would cut the number of policy pledges to just five or six when used on a leaflet. The five or six depending on the individual constituency.

Tim Montgomerie