Bohemia Village Voice

Our collage of the Gensing ward candidates by Stewart Buchan.

A by-election has been called for one of the council seats in Gensing ward. Conservative councillor Daniel Poulter resigned at the end of March to take up a medical post in Surrey, leaving Vivienne Bond temporarily as the sole serving councillor for the ward. The by-election for this seat and one in neighbouring Silverhill ward is given extra spice by the prospect of either a hung council or a change of overall control if the Conservatives lose one or both of the seats up for grabs. The Voice believes this ought to be sufficient incentive for even the most reluctant to get out and vote, on the basis that if you don’t then you can hardly complain if the Council does things you don’t approve of. To help our readers make up their minds we invited each of the six candidates to come to our offices to be interviewed. Five accepted the challenge. The five interviews all employed a roughly similar format, though each one also followed the logic dictated by the candidates’ individual responses. In some cases the views expressed may be offensive to some readers, but that was the point of the exercise: to get behind the official literature to see what the candidates really felt about the issues that affect the residents of this ward, and to find out what they wanted to achieve if elected.

2006

On the basis that some voters might be interested to know how people in Gensing voted the last time this seat was contested, the voting figures from the 2006 election were as follows:
Dr Daniel Poulter (Con) 750 (47.2%)
Andrew Cartwright (Lab) 417 (26.2%)
Nathan Lauder (Lib Dem) 315 (19.8%)
David Carey-Stuart
(Green) 108 (6.8%)
The turnout was 42.2%, one of the highest in the borough and significantly higher than the 30% norm for local by-elections.

Gensing ward, which includes Bohemia - the territory being fought over by six candidates.