Tomorrow we go to the ballot box. No matter your politics it’s a day in which everybody entitled to vote has power; as the poem below very beautifully describes. It may have been written in a different era but the sentiment remains the same.

The Poor Voter on Election Day

The proudest now is but my peer,
The highest not more high;
To-day, of all the weary year,
A king of men am I.
To-day, alike are great and small,
The nameless and the known;
My palace is the people’s hall,
The ballot-box my throne!
Who serves to-day upon the list
Beside the served shall stand;
Alike the brown and wrinkled fist,
The gloved and dainty hand!
The rich is level with the poor,
The weak is strong to-day;
And sleekest broadcloth counts no more
Than homespun frock of gray.
To-day let pomp and vain pretence
My stubborn right abide;
I set a plain man’s common sense
Against the pedant’s pride.
To-day shall simple manhood try
The strength of gold and land;
The wide world has not wealth to buy
The power in my right hand!
While there’s a grief to seek redress,
Or balance to adjust,
Where weighs our living manhood less
Than Mammon’s vilest dust, —
While there’s a right to need my vote,
A wrong to sweep away,
Up! clouted knee and ragged coat!
A man’s a man to-day!

By John Greenleaf Whittier

There are 6 candidates standing in the Orkney and Shetland Constituency to be held on Thursday 12th of December.

David Stephen Barnard, Independent

Alistair Carmichael, Scottish Liberal Democrats

Coilla Anne Drake, Scottish Labour Party

Jennifer Fairbairn, Scottish Conservative and Unionist

Robert Fraser Leslie. Scottish National Party (SNP)

Robert Watt Smith, The Brexit Party