Welcome

Hello, I’m Adam and I’ve been publishing Blogs, Essays and online versions of my Books here since 2012.

As you’d imagine, there’s quite an extensive back catalogue which has grown considerably since I left frontline politics in 2015.

I was a local councillor for 12 years and licensing chairman for 4 of them. My cross-sector background, which includes project and program management for charities and local government (yes – I’ve been an officer too!), senior management for a national charity, and years setting up and developing businesses and advising the leaders of others, informs a lot of what I write about.

As I began life in a one parent family and grew up in social housing, on free school meals and experiencing what poverty means first hand, it may be understandable that I left school at 16 with no qualifications. However, I also found my way back to full time education at the local College when I was 20 and started again, which led me to a very diverse professional career, beginning as a management trainee with a well-known international removals brand.

I do believe that no experience is wasted when it comes to understanding real life. The gap between school and college had great value. I spent much of that time working on different farms and developed a practical understanding of UK agriculture.

Indeed, I have found that the forgotten role of food has come increasingly into focus, as I have written about addressing today’s social and economic problems; surviving and thriving through change; and then creating new systems that focus on the genuinely important things that create and facilitate good lives for everyone.

I’m still observing, considering and learning from everyone and everything as I go along.

Although my pathway has been less than conventional to say the least, I recently completed a very big circle with a PGCert in Sustainable Agriculture and Food Security.

Political direction

These days I’m not aligned with any of the Political Parties that we currently have.

In terms of politics as most people recognise it in the UK today, my political background is to the right.

I was elected and sat as a Conservative at district level for over 6 years before continuing unaligned, once the direction of the Party diverged so far from the best interests of the people who elected me, that there was no clear relationship between them.

In reality I’m probably a traditional conservative (which bears no resemblance to the motives, aims and direction of the Conservative Party as we know it today).

Conservatism for me is very much about preserving and maintaining key human values across every part of life and our communities, and the systems and governance that create a good, healthy, fair, balanced and just life for everyone.

I make no secret of being anti-globalist/EU (which are very much the same thing) and am tired of the disparity between what people are being led to expect from all parts of government, the establishment and the public sector, and what they are actually receiving in return for trust and votes. When there is a very clear, centralising agenda to reshape and reset everything across culture and society, so that we will all wake up, not very long from now, and realise we are already in a world where everything fits (and is imposed) as one size fits all.

Knowing what to fix and how to fix it isn’t just as simple as having been within the system either.

Plenty of good people get elected or become government officers or civil servants with the best intent. Only to become a part of everything that’s wrong. Simply because ‘that’s the way things are done’.

I have been there as both a politician and an officer and know from experience that despite all of the rhetoric we are now hearing, the problems are so severely ingrained that there really is no ‘quick fix’, and the wrong approach could quickly make things even worse than what we are experiencing now.

For a long time, practicality suggested for me that to change things for the better, we just needed a new political party that would ‘do the right thing’. However, I’ve come to realise that the party system in the UK is itself a big part of the problem.

The distance between Westminster and real life is simply too wide for any political party or leader to do any real good, without them taking a very different approach to how things operate now, and having a plan for change factored in from the start, that has prioritising people, communities and the environment around us at its very core.

My views, analysis, interpretations, conclusions and suggestions may or may not help those who are interested in real, meaningful change. However, they are real, informed through lived experience and based on an understanding of life that I’m kind of happy to share with you as what I hope is a unique view.

Best wishes to all, whoever and wherever you are.