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Prime Minister Gordon Brown has announced that the UK general election will be held on 6 May.
He had a meeting with the Queen at Buckingham Palace on the morning of April 6th to ask her to dissolve Parliament.
Mr Brown has
called the election "the big choice".
Conservative leader David Cameron welcomed the announcement and said Labour had the "big ideas" for the country.
Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg said that his party was the only one to offer "real change".
UKIP has announced that it will create a million new manufacturing jobs, and reduce wasteful public spending if elected to Government.
The key campaign issues will be the future of the British economy, taxation, and public services.
The parties will be fighting for 650 seats, four more than currently exist because of constituency boundary changes, and no less than 144 MPs so far having announced that they will stand down.
Amidst the fallout from the credit crunch, bank bailouts, recession, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the collapse of the housing market, here in Wigan we are also looking at a completely new slate of candidates bidding to become the town’s next MP.
The biggest threat to our way of life, however, in Wigan and in the UK, is the way the people of Britain have fallen out with politics and politicians.
Over the years, men and women have campaigned, fought and died to extend the franchise to the point where all adults have the right, written in law and blood, to vote for the candidate of their choice in a general or local election.
Our democracy, for all its faults, has yet to be bested as a means of deciding on how we govern ourselves. Our free market economy, with the reins in the hands of the Chancellor of the Exchequer and the Bank of England, and its destiny increasingly in the hands of its european neighbours, has a whole host of challenges, but still represents the system of choice.
Here at the Courier we see our responsibility being to encourage you to vote in the upcoming elections: to govern effectively any party needs the confidence of a significant majority. Low turnouts at election time are an insult to our forebears who fought so hard to give us the right to cast our vote.
We began our election coverage in the issue dated February 22nd with profiles of the candidates as at the time of publication. In our next edition on April 19th some of Wigan's young voters will be quizzing the candidates on the policies and issues that they consider to be important. We will also be covering the issues that are unearthed during the course of the campaign up to election day in each edition and here on the Election 2010 website..check out the latest news link on the top left.
We welcome your feedback and opinions about the campaign - e-mail us on info@courier-online.net
But above all, let our coverage remind you of the importance of casting your vote.
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