CALL me a Saddo (‘Saddo’ echoes around the Valley), but I am really excited about April 13 and, no, it’s not my birthday (that’s July 22nd and cards with cheques enclosed will be gratefully received).

April 13 is the day that Gordon Brown has to call the election if it is to be held on May 6, as widely predicted. Incidentally, this is also local Election Day.

For a political junkie like me, it’s my World Cup and I will live and breathe every minute of it. You can expect to hear plenty about it from me over the next few weeks.

Will you all be similarly giddy with excitement? Err, no. In 2005, 72,000 of us were entitled to vote in Rossendale but, sadly, only 44,639 bothered to tick a box. That means 27,809 of us couldn’t be bothered. Put another way, that’s more than voted for Janet Anderson (19,030), and a lot more than her Conservative opponent at the time, Nigel Adams (15,435), got.

So, in effect, the Apathy Party won and that is so wrong. If it was down to me, I would make voting compulsory: there could be a box on the ballot sheet that stated ‘none of the above’, so people are not forced to vote for candidates they don’t want, or like. I hope to inform and assist you all over the next few weeks (big head!) and make this election a truly Rossendale affair. I don’t want you to be blinkered. I want you to give a lot of thought to who you are going to vote for.

I have a close and very dear friend who says he would ‘vote for a monkey as long as it was Blue’, and my poor old dad, God bless him, would have voted for Attila the Hun providing he could mouth the words to ‘We'll keep the red flag flying here’. To me that’s wrong.

But what is right? Are you going to vote for someone who is simply a party stooge, whipped to vote for their party leader’s decisions and policies, or someone who will fight and really care for Rossendale and its people? That’s not as easy to answer as you might think.

If I get a chance to cross- examine any of the candidates, I will want to know how strongly they actually feel about Parliamentary reform – and I’m not talking about duck houses and Hobnobs on expenses, but true democratic reform. Based on those answers, I feel the correct person for Rossendale will emerge.