Hello, I’m Adam. I’ve been writing here for many years – blogs, essays, and the occasional book – all shaped by the things I’ve seen, the people I’ve worked with, and the systems I’ve lived inside.
My background isn’t straightforward. I grew up with very little, left school at sixteen, worked on farms and in practical jobs, and found my way back into education at twenty. Since then I’ve spent time in local government, charities, business, and community work – often in roles where the decisions were real and the consequences mattered. All of that experience shapes how I think and what I write about.
These days I’m focused on how we make sense of the world as it is, and how we might build something better from where we stand. I’m interested in the gap between how systems are supposed to work and how they actually behave, and in the choices people make when they’re navigating that space.
If you’re here to explore ideas, understand patterns, or make sense of the world around you, you’re in the right place.

Adam lives in Cheltenham, Gloucestershire.
He spends his time writing, researching, volunteering, following Gloucester Rugby, and walking his dogs Betty and Bea through the landscapes he’s lucky to call home – near Cheltenham, Gloucester and the Cotswold Hills.
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The Human Sovereignty Charter for Artificial Intelligence – A Constitutional Framework for Human-Centred Governance of AI | Full Text
The Human Sovereignty Charter for Artificial Intelligence is a non statutory, ethical framework asserting that human dignity, agency, and judgement must never be subordinated to machines. Created in response to the rapid expansion of…
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Foods We Can Farm, Catch, Harvest and Grow Locally in and around the UK
It’s no great wonder that Foods We Can Trust are thought by many to be boring and bland, as well as being expensive and increasingly difficult to buy or access. The alternatives often taste…
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Is Poverty invisible to those who don’t experience it? | Full Text
Introduction In the Autumn of 2023, I embarked on a new adventure into higher education, driven by my building concern around Food Security issues and the certain reality that the UK is running the…
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The UK must have the ability to Regulate the Internet, control and respond to data management issues in ways that we never will with the rules-for-the-sake-of-rules EU involved
How we govern the Net, it’s use, the transfer, storage and sharing of data is a Policy area that like many others our Government should be on top of and ahead of the game.…
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The travesty of Tuition Fees was the commercialisation of education, the myth of qualification-related Social Mobility and the creation of lifetime debt for those who can least afford it
Somewhere, there was a cheer last week. Quieter than the Government was expecting. Bringing noises that didn’t sound quite as expected. Yes, the dropping of Tuition Fees does sound good. But the question…
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Cheltenham & Boots Corner: When things don’t add up, questions need to be asked
With the Boots corner closure remaining firmly in local minds, the Council attempts to write the concern off as nothing more than the views of a ‘vociferous minority’. Regrettably, this is how Local Government glosses…
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Dear Cheltenham, a Petition to stop the Borough’s ridiculous changes at Boots Corner is a great start. But if you really want to make the Council think again, start HERE
For me, one of the most challenging and frustrating experiences of being a Local Councillor, was talking to people I represented who had genuine grievances and reasons for stopping a poor policy from going…
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The Principle of Charity is all but forgotten when we hear others, yet we would all prefer to be given the benefit of the doubt ourselves
Context is always at risk of misinterpretation, unless you are one person who knows exactly what you mean. What we say, what we write or what we do in our interactions with others can…
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Cheltenham BC and Boots Corner: Like local government across the UK, officers and councillors aren’t listening to the real boss, and change is well overdue
I’ve been out of local government for nearly three and a half years. But I have continued to watch the continuing chain of messes being created within our Gloucestershire Boroughs and Districts. Usually because…
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Trashing distasteful parts of history puts us at risk of repeating the same mistakes in the future, which only the same level of hypocrisy would allow us to then deny
The debate over Virgin removing copies of the Daily Mail from sale on its Trains in the past week highlighted the worrying trend for people to attempt to remove anything from their sphere of…
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New houses never lower prices within their local ‘market’ and the Persimmon CEO’s £110 Million Bonus gives our ‘housing crisis’ the lie
Housing has become one of the hot political issues of our time. To read and hear about it in the media, it has become easy to conclude that the Government, our Councils, Housing Associations…







