00:00St Margaret's at Clif is a quiet village outside of Dover, but could it be shaken up by a by
00:06-election
00:06putting forward the first restored candidate the county has seen, which has even been backed by actor John Cleese?
00:13The district including Kingsdown, St Margaret's at Clif and Guston has historically been very conservative,
00:20but could this year be different?
00:22There's not one, not two, but three different right-wing parties all fighting for that same voter base.
00:30I've been down here in that patch, speaking to locals, asking them what matters to them and who's got their
00:36vote.
00:36I'm going to vote Labour for a lot of reasons.
00:40If any of the others had given me food for thought, I might have voted another way.
00:47I used to vote the same party every year. I have recently changed.
00:52I've liked a lot about what I've been hearing from Restore, quite a lot of their stuff.
00:57Reform I was very much looking at, but there's just been a few things recently that have made me think,
01:03is Nigel Farage's party the one that I would trust in my vote?
01:06I hope we start to move away from right-wing ideology in this area.
01:10The major issues here are the new estate being built around the village
01:18and the concern over lack of water supply.
01:22I will go on about the bus service until I'm blue in the face.
01:27One of the biggest issues I think the village has is the lack of buses.
01:30They cut them a while ago, and especially for older people,
01:34just kind of hardly having a bus to go anywhere.
01:38And I think the two traditional parties, Labour and Conservatives,
01:41they may say they've got answers, but I'm not convinced.
01:44It's a seat on Dover District Council,
01:47set to be abolished under local government reorganisation anyway,
01:50but the political excitement has made its way from the streets
01:54all the way down to the beach.
01:56Now, one thing that locals were very happy to chat to me about,
01:59but only off camera, is the so-called small boats crisis,
02:03and that is the arrival of migrants in small vessels to the country's shores.
02:08Now, it was only last week that Sir Ed Davey came to St Margaret's
02:12to this very beach where he announced the Liberal Democrats' strategy
02:15on how they believe they will combat this.
02:18Now, it's important to note that he didn't come down for the by-election,
02:21as migration is a national issue
02:24and something that district councillors really have very little power
02:28to do anything about.
02:29But with St Margaret's on the map,
02:31and Dover never too far from headlines on asylum seekers,
02:35could this by-election, as a result,
02:38see better turnout than usual?
02:40Megan Shaw in St Margaret's at Cliff.
