You don’t need to be a trained economist to know that the model of economics the world uses and the way economics is revered like work of the gods today is wrong.
In fact, it is probably better if you aren’t, and that you aren’t involved in economics, banking or corporate wealth creation either. As you are much more likely to be objective and untainted by ‘being in the tent’ in some way.
The misplaced ingenuity of the economic system and how it works has made it as complex as it is mind boggling. But that doesn’t give any surety or guarantee that how it works and what it achieves is in any way good.
For those actually thinking about why money is the common factor in everything across the world that is now going wrong, the complexity of the economic system is being exposed to light as the smokescreen that it is giving the hallucination of credibility to all the darkness and malevolence that has been so cleverly hidden within.
How can something so clever and complex not be real, is a question that many would employ as a riposte to counter the suggestion that there is absolutely no legitimacy to the FIAT monetary system, MMT, Free Markets, Globalisation and Neoliberal Orthodoxy that we have been subjected to for 5 decades or more.
But isn’t it the case that any good game that feels good to play is only good for those playing, because of the complexities and therefore levels for ‘the players’ that are involved?
How many carrots does it cost to buy a wheel?
To really understand why the world now has got the relationship with money so wrong – even though it was deliberately made this way by corrupt interests who have changed the laws so that their crimes have been legitimised and wiped clean – we really do need to stop for a moment, count to ten and think about what money is, or rather was really intended for.
In so far as the accepted narrative of human history goes, the whole pathway of our development has been progress that moved towards today in a linear fashion, stepping off from very primitive times when man couldn’t even speak, let alone farm for food.
The point here is not to argue whether or not any accepted version of the evolution of man is true. But to set the first picture back at a point when everything was considerably more simple. Long before more and more of those complex ideas or complexities became involved in how people trade.
Then, as now; different people did different things and produced different foods, goods and services to others as the direct result of whatever it was that they did.
For the purposes of this explanation, let’s assume that there are already fishers, farmers, growers, millers, bakers, saddlers, farriers, blacksmiths, cheese and butter makers, butchers, water carriers and pretty much someone or some small business providing all the different forms of foods, goods and services that we need to provide for life, from around a village green.
Some days a baker doesn’t want fish and a fisher certainly doesn’t want a saddle or leather goods daily. Even though they probably need something made to protect them against the elements from time to time.
However, everyone needs something regularly. Whether it’s for their own consumption, or it’s there to help them complete and provide output or goods from their own work.
Bartering and exchange, or swapping goods or even hours of work are of course a very straightforward and sensible way for two parties to make a transaction when one has something available that the other needs.
But the real benefit of bartering and exchange comes from being localised. And its weakness soon showed when the transactions were required to take place over distance, or for items – like that saddle or something equally special – which in day-to-day terms, are rather obscure.
Money, or coins of some kind used at first, created a transactional value, or to be more accurate, a medium of exchange.
The creation of a medium of exchange meant that one person’s goods or efforts could be exchanged for coins that could then be exchanged for whatever that person wanted themselves. All without there being any excessive delays or the need for a very complex or convoluted chain of different transactions to be involved.
The beauty of the system, at that point, was that the money in use could only relate to the agreed value of the transaction.
It would have been good for everyone, once the related practicalities involved were ironed out, if that system had continued without further ‘progress’. The relationship we all have with money could then have remained the same in relative terms – as that unit of exchange and nothing more.
Unfortunately for mankind, progress very quickly created wealth disparity or what we call wealth inequality today.
This imbalance was itself made progressively worse by the inter-generational transfer of property and wealth (and the power it buys) which has snowballed over time. Quite literally meaning that people can be advantaged or disadvantaged by birth, even before any one of the many other factors that skew life opportunities can come into view.
One of the most unfortunate elements of the human condition is the innate desire to always possess and accumulate more. For no better reason than the basic fear we all have of experiencing lack. With the rather perverse dimension that those who have more guard it more jealously than others, probably because they believe they have much more to lose.
The power and influence that money has given people who really weren’t fit to have the responsibility they had over the lives of others, has only got worse over time.
As industry and technology has improved and made it easier and easier to avoid genuine consideration for the consequences of their actions upon others, the human cost has become increasingly irrelevant, whenever the opportunity to make more profit was involved.
When promissory notes or what we know as cash came into being, a giant leap forward was taken towards the system that we have now, where the accepted wisdom is that the value of the money – or what we are agreeing to exchange as being representative of money – is being exchanged under a mutual understanding of trust, that is shared across society, and not just between the people where the specific transactions are involved.
Trust is of course belief. And as those with power and influence at the centre of the banking system realised that having currencies pinned or anchored to anything meant that they could only ever use or suggest they were able to use the money or sensible multiples of the money that they knew they either held, were owed or could earn within a certain time frame, they knew that they would have to create a new system that would release these chains. So that in terms of the money that they could create and use in the future, the only restraints would be dictated by them.
We should be under no illusion that this process of creating an economic system that could lead to limitless wealth and the control of everything for those who controlled it, wasn’t a plan that developed overnight.
The economic system that we have today was created and implemented over decades and carefully constructed so that it would make life much easier for the interests and in particular the politicians who needed to be bought. So that the useful idiots who gained power under the illusion of democracy would obligingly pave the way with system changes that have legitimised this otherwise criminal system at every step of the way therein.
When everything is about money, the answers to every question can only be found in monetary terms.
The money we have today and the way that it comes to and is taken from us – the economy – is the direct result and design of this massive, corrupt and inhuman game that the worlds wealthy, powerful and influential – the elites, decided to play.
The money we have in our pockets, bank accounts and have the ability to earn changes value quickly at the will or as a result of the actions of others.
Meanwhile, the direction of travel for the general population has always been that we are and always would become increasingly poor, as the value of the money which is typically what the poorest in society have only been able to hold, decreases faster than the rate at which our skills and experience develop or there is any chance to earn more so that we can keep up with or counteract the fall.
It was always intended to be this way. As those with wealth always knew that the real wealth was the control of assets and anything and everything that could then rented out to everyone. All as the world became increasingly poorer and their ability to grow control and rent out everything the money they created had bought them gave them even more.
It is ironic that billionaires now have so many zeros on their balance sheets. As everyone who has been a victim of what is probably mankind’s greatest con is now beginning to realise that they have been left with zero. Or if they are lucky, a diminishing amount of liquid capital that isn’t worth a lot more.
I would like to add at this stage that this essay is not an attack on any individual for whatever it is that they may believe they possess, control or have influence over today. Many of those with excessive wealth, power and influence today have just played along with the rules of a very clever game. One that has removed the balance, Justice and morality from every part of life and has done it so successfully that the poison it has replaced values with is embedded across cultures and normal life to the point that even the academics and leaders in finance and economics believe in the legitimacy and correctness of an entire system which is bewilderingly anti-human at its very core.
In simple terms
The simplicity of the mechanics of an economic system and more specifically a monetary system that revolves around private banks creating money from nothing – a process which is carefully hidden from view – so that government always looks like it is borrowing or rather selling bonds to private interests to finance everything, whilst those banks also lend money that doesn’t exist to us through loans, finance, credit cards and even pay day loans, really do make it horrendously difficult to accept that this is one massive confidence scam. Especially as everything is hidden in plain sight by little more than the disinterest that we typically have in anything that goes beyond having our perceived needs met.
However, let’s think about it as if we were reading a story about two friends at the start of their working lives; one with the motivation to work hard and deliver through their own industry, whilst the other has had life easy and just wants to find another easy way to get more, and we can then perhaps see how this gargantuan scam rolls out when exposed to light.
The diligent and easy living friends talk one day, looking at property that they would both like to own.
The diligent friend commits to working hard and earning the money to buy what they would like to own and leaves, promising to catch up when this outcome has been achieved.
Meanwhile, the easy living friend knows that he has the contacts and ideas necessary to go away and print enough of the money he needs to buy that same property today. And that he can do this from nothing, which will work out well for him but not his friend, so long as he doesn’t speak openly about what he’s doing. Uses his contacts to change a few rules so that what he’s doing is legal. And he doesn’t keep printing more money to buy everything else so that it becomes obvious what he’s been doing all along. Afterall, nobody will know if he uses the money he then earns from renting out that property to pay all that money back…
The money that the easy living friend has created, has just increased the amount of money that exists.
This means that because there isn’t actually any more property, production or anything else with ‘real’ value that corresponds to the increasing pool of money, all of the money that’s available is now worth much less than it was.
The real world impact of this fantasy being made reality is that the diligent friend will have to worker harder, longer or both, to pay for the property that the easy living friend has just taken without effort.
What is more, the easy living friend is now offering to rent the property he’s bought to the diligent friend who now realises that he may never be able to afford to buy it.
If you can see and understand the basic mechanics of how this situation works, you only need scale up the same principles to understand how the massive, growing amount of money – and the ridiculous inflation and the growing cost of living problem we are all facing, has been created and is now growing at a ridiculous rate.
It is an unavoidable, inescapable fact that if one person or set of people are able to buy real, tangible things that have value to us – whatever those things might be – with money that doesn’t actually exist, they can take lawful possession of those things and do with them whatever they so choose – as any legitimate owner would be able to do so.
However, the illegitimate creation of the money and the legitimised theft of assets, businesses, infrastructure and everything else imaginable that it has financed means what they have been doing is just one part of a multifaceted crime against everyone else.
The crimes that follow the created money pathways include the impoverishment of the masses.
Yet they become even worse when we consider that public services and infrastructure such as utility companies have been bought up with fake money.
Entire business sectors like the pub trade and small, local shops have also all become unviable because fake money has financed industry expansion of big retail and all their centralised supply chains, that would not otherwise have been possible.
To cap that all off, markets and the practices of big business and finance have been deregulated through the drive for ‘Free Markets’. So that those making money can make more and more, because the rules that once protected us all and small independent businesses have been removed, whilst regulations that cost us, exclude us and disqualify us from our own independence and from taking part have instead been imposed under the pretence that they help and protect us.
The whole pathway of illegitimate money creation using the FIAT system leads or rather has led to the doorstep of nothing less than worldwide system control.
The only thing that now gives us the opportunity to save ourselves from a very challenging fate is the reality that those with their hands in the till have already broken too many of the rules of their own game.
The whole system is starting to collapse before the great reset or imposition of the next new world order has conclusively been imposed.
The Future of Money
I could stop there. But in lifting the stone or exposing what lies beneath it to light I am certainly not alone.
Before continuing further, I would encourage anyone who has read this far to do their own research and use as many different sources and mediums as they can to uncover and draw their own conclusions about all of this and what is really going on.
My real interest and passion is what happens next for us and for our future. Once we have got through this horrid time and whatever turbulence and challenges that we now face, once we have got to the other side and left them all behind.
What we should perhaps all be able to conclude – once we have dealt with our own addictions and attachment to the way that endless money supposedly works for us all now – is that money should never hold its own value. Should never be speculated upon, and the power of its creation and policing should never be under private control.
What is more, the value of legal currency should never be pinned to anything that can itself vary in value, especially when whatever that currency is pinned to is in short supply or can be controlled manipulatively or otherwise at will.
People are the only legitimate economic constant
If everyone did what they do, only took what they need and were happy to share or exchange what they didn’t with whoever needed it in return for something they did in return, there would never be need of money of any kind, ever again.
Whilst I can see that to many the idea that everyone just does what they do today for nothing and that in return, they get just enough of what they need of everything else in return might seem fanciful, this suggestion does nonetheless make a very important point about everyone only taking or expecting to have access to what they actually need.
Need is NOT the same thing as want.
Too much want is what has led to a situation where there are people right across the world today who don’t have access just to the things that they need.
An economy – a legitimate economy – will function only to provide for the needs of people within it.
There isn’t an argument that can counter this legitimately. Any argument made against this, no matter how compelling or well elucidated, is inevitably built upon one person being able to obtain or accumulate more things than others. Because the alternative system favours their interests more.
These are the fundamental basics of greed.
Locality based economies and economics
Everyone who can, should play their part or contribute to the function of a legitimate economy, in whatever role they are able. So that everyone who is active, then comes together to become the sum of all the parts – with the sum of those parts being the community, which because of what members can do together collaboratively, will be greater than what everyone would be able to do by working alone.
The value of a legitimate economy should therefore be based upon the number of people who are active within it and include what they input or contribute to that economy individually and therefore collectively.
If every member of the community does what they should be doing, and the needs of everyone being met are always prioritised and planned for or budgeted for as they should be, the whole system will move closely towards self-containment, with the amount of money in circulation always being closely related to the number of heads within the population.
A localised and online local market exchange system that focuses on bartering and exchange for foods, goods, services and work being made universally available alongside cash and digitally transferable money, should also exist so that everything works in a circular fashion and everyone’s particular needs are always met in ways that favour everyone.
The needs for public service, infrastructure, community activities and everything beyond should be met by everyone who is able to work volunteering the equivalent of 1/10 of their working week and their skills or experience to the community. Thereby meeting whatever needs and community income generation requirement there may then be.
Excess goods produced, surplus service capacity and over production which is specialist to the community would also be traded with other communities and traded where any additional requirements beyond the scope of community production exist.
The blight of greed-driven thinking
The only reason that an economic system that will work like this, which promotes freedom and financial independence of the masses, would not work, is because those who would no longer be able to define themselves as being different to others through the accumulation of additional and unnecessary wealth will argue that it isn’t practical and cannot work.
Even within a genuinely egalitarian approach to economics based along these lines, it is a fact that some could always do better, because they choose to do so through their own industry. Whilst many others – and the majority at that, would be happy to just make the contribution that was absolutely necessary, knowing that they would be happy, healthy, safe and secure because all of their basic and essential needs were being met.
It is part of the capitalist myth that entrepreneurialism and creativity in commerce cannot exist when the ability to earn or rather profit is capped.
The real truth of the matter is that everyone will be productive and make a valuable contribution when anything that goes beyond what it takes to look after themselves and those who depend on them is a choice and the ability to just live a normal life without dependency on anything beyond themselves hasn’t been denied by the actions of others.
Nobody has the right to take or have more than they need and certainly not when it can only come to them through the exploitation and infliction of pain and suffering of any kind upon others.
Whilst so-called socialists and capitalists alike will continue to argue that their destination would have been different, until whoever is in power takes the rap for destroying everything at the time – and then the other tries desperately to convince everyone that there’s still time for them, just to be sure, the very perverse and somewhat disturbing truth that is now coming into our view of reality is that the direction of both left and right political thinking takes humanity to exactly the same place.
What all these ‘philosophies’ – the ideas of academics, thinkers, economists, industrialists, tech moguls, agitators, the aggrieved, life’s bitter victims, entitled shirkers, greedy and selfish bastards – have in common, is the centralisation of power into the hands of one or just a select few – who for whatever purpose intended – control everything, so that they can enjoy their own lives and positions more than anyone they see as different to themselves and therefore as being a threat.
Verging on enlightened thinking, as many will surely argue their heroes and inspirations to have written these works will have been, enlightenment doesn’t revolve around creating environments that centre purely on a beneficial vacancy at the top. Which the design of these solutions surely was the intention, resulting from whatever experiences the authors had themselves experienced up until the time of writing.
None of these accepted visionaries were wrong. Or at least they were not wrong in the sense that we all are the sum of our experiences and our position looking upon or perception of life in any given moment will be correct, for us personally, in terms of what those experiences have taught us and what we have therefore concluded that they should be, right up to that same moment in time.
Let’s face it. The world is a very shitty place to be. Whether you have nothing and cannot escape poverty because of the boot that rides rough-shod over you; or at the other extreme you are as financially wealthy as it is possible to be and all you quietly worry about is protecting yourself, your wealth and how you are going to accumulate even more.
The pain that hides behind our eyes hasn’t changed over decades and centuries in human time.
Yes, the surroundings, clothes, transport, technology and everything else may seem different. But the nature of the experiences we are all having on our different pathways are in relative terms very much the same.
Wherever we may sit across this spectrum, 200 or more years ago at the dawning of the Industrial Revolution or right now as we are being prepared for the AI takeover, we all have an idea of what the perfect world for us would be.
It is regrettable that only some of us find ourselves able to share those ideas and thoughts and have them taken seriously by enough others for them to be seen to matter – which itself doesn’t mean they are genuinely enlightened or of benefit to greater humankind.
It’s simply the case that even when complete idiots or utterly selfish bastards are heard, their thoughts and views are swallowed up like nectar by people who themselves have a back catalogue of difficult experiences that identify with what they read or hear.
They pick those ideas – those philosophies – up and run with them, no matter how twisted or damaging in the longer term they might be. Leaving ideas behind in the dirt that the chaos they unleash leaves behind to fester for years and possibly centuries, that would otherwise deliver for the good of everyone when implemented.
We must be clear that all the ideas and philosophies for the world, whether they fall under the socialist or capitalist umbrellas or not, are without fail just ideas and suggestions.
Whether well intended or not, these philosophies were all packaged with the pretense that they were the ingredients, nuts and bolts or technicalities of a model of the perfect working world, for all people.
As history has demonstrated only too well, the actions of those underneath these umbrellas lead to both the imprisonment and oppression of the masses under the yoke of world elites.
We are fooled into believing there is a difference in outcomes because one system gets straight to work by enforcing its ideologies on people and the systems of the world as it tightens its grip and pushes those who are left into the cage. Meanwhile, the other drugs everyone with every conceivable high that they believe they like, creating mass addiction to ways of living that mean there is little hope of sobriety for anyone who has bought in and become addicted, until the very heavy jail cell door will have already slammed shut behind us all.
Centralisation is the flaw in all of these philosophies. Because it is impossible to centralise every part of life, for every single person across every country and across the entire world, without life, values, happiness, health, wellbeing and all the mechanics of essential function and civic society collapsing in their wake.
The clever tools and devices used by capitalists, globalists and neoliberals are ultimately no different to the level-playing-fields, street revolutions and guns employed by communists and socialists to enforce and police their point.
The painful outcomes that these forms of idealistic thinking inflict upon the masses always have agendas behind them, and none of those paying the real cost of these ideological-turned-material crimes ever agreed to the world being run this way.
The elites and those behind all of this have of course been aided by technological advances and the many different ways that the world has opened up and the distances between us all have been bridged.
Yet the point has always and pretty much systematically been missed that humanity and our morality based values system do not need and never needed to change to keep up with the material changes in the world, which have always been about the things that appear to be important beyond and outside of people.
Indeed, the changes that have been made to our frameworks for behaviour have always been made to suit those in power, with influence and who are directly benefitting from those changes. Those who perceive that the only way they can benefit more is for the old ways or ways that benefit others with fairness and balance must be left behind. Because they will otherwise get in the way.
So, was there ever a point in history where humanity genuinely got the whole thing right?
There is good reason to believe not. Or that if that moment of genuine balance has ever existed so far, it was momentary and could only really have been so, because the opportunity didn’t actually then exist to end the self-interest, anger, frustration, greed and every other dark part of the human condition that drives generation after generation to ingeniously, creatively and ignorantly to exactly the same things over and over again.
We may not see it, nor appreciate nor even find value in the suggestion. But a centuries-long pathway of humanity being led and controlled by interests that are not in any way genuinely shared, has led us all to a place where those who have benefited from that control and the generations following behind them, can no longer maintain that control. Because the whole pathway is about to have gone too far, before that door can be slammed shut and the final adjustments to the oppressed fate of humankind can be made.
The intention underlying of all these ideologies was that everything and everyone would be controlled throughout the journey, until that control was necessary no more.
Yet the systems we have been conditioned into accepting, like the out of control value of money, the rules that are supposedly there to protect and help whilst they disadvantage us, and the process of making very intelligent people doubt themselves or force them to believe and support ideas which run contrary to common sense or that are completely untrue, have all contributed to a situation where many already know the world is out of balance. People know that whatever is behind all of this has gone too far.
Natural, universal, unspoken rules have always existed that require each and every one of us to have the freedom to learn, to grow and to develop if we so choose to do so.
Because of the persistent actions of these patriarchal few and those who have followed them, that freedom for everyone to learn grow and develop, no matter their background or position in life, no longer exists. Because the way the system of the world has been developed now means that many no longer have the opportunity to experience the personal sovereignty to which every man is entitled. No matter how, where or to whom they were born.
A collapse is coming. That collapse is already underway. We are all within it and experiencing it at subjective levels that keep us from the objectivity that would make it much easier to define.
The critical point that is now approaching will be the moment that something happens, that could be civil unrest, financial collapse, the extension of foreign wars, civil war or something else, when each and every one of us realises and accepts that we have a Choice. And that we no longer have to be passengers or passively accept whatever someone else has engineered to be our fate.
The curse of overcentralisation is the never-ending desire of those who are at the centre of that centralisation process to centralise even more. Simply because of the greater rewards and control that they believe it will bring.
The outcome of the overcentralisation is that nobody ever has enough of any of the things they really need. When in a world and time when we have so much available to everyone, this has become a first-hand tragedy for us all to experience indeed.
The only centre that we need and that we should ever seek is the community, locality and to share responsibility for everything amongst the people we see face to face and interact with each day.
This is real life that doesn’t come to us through media channels, digital technology or through rules that have been made by some name without a face.
This system is the only resource and ecosystem that we need to sustain us, that we need contribute to and that can be relied upon to create frameworks and governance for life that will always be in our best interests.
It is the only system that will provide and leave us with the genuine freedom necessary to enjoy every aspect of a good life, as the majority of us would want and like to experience.
The decision to make this change and embrace the power to do so is ours already, if we actually want it.
There is no need for hierarchies, for top-down systems and procedures, for political parties, financial markets and devices, globalised business and supply chains, or anything else that makes life cheaper. When life being cheapened any further is the very last thing that any of us need.
Local communities that are genuinely local and locality driven, and the ecosystems and self contained economies that they will create, offer us everything that we will need to have to experience valuable lives, where the basics and essentials are always in place.
Locality driven communities offer a system of governance meaning that no matter the life choices any one of us makes, we can all live independently of help – and therefore will not experience the forms of lack that are responsible for so many of societies social problems as their root cause.
The value of every one of us is exactly the same and nothing can change this.
No matter what we do, wear, what we have or how we are seen to be, not one of us should be positioned to advantage ourselves by disadvantaging others.
This is where the fundamental basis and genesis of a new world philosophy must be able to begin. One that is designed by us all for everyone rather than by a few who want everything controlled and for that control to be in the hands of one.
***
Over the past 3 years, I have been writing about the different aspects of what is happening; what is likely to happen and how we can all get from here to a much better place.
Whilst the rules and frameworks that govern a new world that will genuinely be of benefit to everyone, must be designed and agreed freely by us all, we still need an idea or vision of the outcomes that we can expect.
Our Local Future is a model for future life that I believe to capture this, which I would invite you to consider. Before someone else has considered and though out an alternative, that when the time has come to make the choice that is genuinely good for us, will instead steal that opportunity and take its place.
Whatever you do next, please remember to beware the many false prophets who are shouting the attractiveness of populism and anarchy now.
Don’t listen to those who tell you they are putting people first.
Keep watching for those who are doing so.
The only centre we need is within our communities themselves. Everything will make sense when everything important throughout our lives revolves around everything we can experience daily at first hand in this way.
10 Steps to Vote NONE OF THE ABOVE and make every Vote count too
There’s nobody better qualified to decide what’s best for a community than the members of that Community, itself
The chances are that before you’ve even read this book, you will hear other People criticising or attempting to devalue everything that this book, Officially NONE OF THE ABOVE is about.
They are likely to suggest that only experienced Politicians, Political Parties or People who have been qualified in some other way, are suited to running in Elections and to being in Politics.
The inference or suggestion is that none of us or anyone our communities could select to represent us would have any idea what to do.
The words they use might sound very different to even these.
But any message intended to disqualify you and your community from selecting the People who make decisions on your behalf, will turn out to have exactly the same meaning:
THEY ARE TELLING YOU THAT THE PEOPLE IN YOUR COMMUNITY AREN’T CAPABLE OF BEING RESPONSIBLE FOR THEMSLEVES OR FOR MAKING THEIR OWN CHOICES – AND THAT INCLUDES YOU!
No matter what anyone says to you or to anyone else about Officially NONE OF THE ABOVE, there is nothing they can say that’s negative about the Community making and being responsible for its own choices that can mean anything different or be interpreted in any different way.
Whichever way you look at it, you are being told you aren’t qualified. You are being told you aren’t good enough. You are being told you haven’t got the right skills.
There is no question. These People who know better, are absolutely wrong.
Anyone who says or suggests that someone else knows better when it comes to selecting the People who make decisions which affect us all, is on an agenda of their own. An agenda that has neither the best interests of the whole Community, nor what’s good for you, at its heart.
The decisions that affect us all and the public policies they deliver will always be flawed for as long as anyone involved in making those decisions obtained the responsibility to do so because of some motive that wasn’t focused upon the Community and service to others.
It was about whatever they are part of. Ultimately, it’s all about them.
Today’s Politicians don’t represent the People. They represent themselves, their parties and whoever they aspire to be
Until now, NONE OF THE ABOVE has been a way to protest against and to refuse to Vote for those Politicians who are always someone else’s choice.
More often than not, NONE OF THE ABOVE has been a way to raise a laugh or to make a joke too.
The problem for us all, is there is nothing good, nor funny about a political system that benefits nobody other than the People who directly benefit from the way that it works.
The disease within the Political System has reached the point where no Politician or Political Party makes decisions or pursues any Public Policy that is good for anyone else.
NONE OF THE ABOVE doesn’t need to be just a process or a figure of speech, anymore.
We need to be positive. We need to be proactive. We need to grab the opportunity that is waiting for us to turn this all around, whilst hiding in plain sight.
It’s time for us all to come together as one. To go way beyond being just a protest Vote or a refusal to accept the options we are given in Elections – as if that and only that, is all that We deserve.
We can only achieve this by selecting and providing candidate options in ALL Elections that are OURS.
This is what Officially NONE OF THE ABOVE is here to help you and your community to do.
Before we get started, there’s one rule you need to understand, accept and live by when it comes to everything that is Officially NONE OF THE ABOVE and getting the very best out of this Book:
There’s nobody better qualified to decide what’s best for a community than the members of that Communityitself.
Welcome to Officially NONE OF THE ABOVE.
Officially NONE OF THE ABOVE
NONE OF THE ABOVE will already have meaning to you.
You may also know or recognise it as being ‘Not in my name’, or ‘you don’t speak for us’.
To keep things simple, for now, we will just think of it as NONE OF THE ABOVE.
NONE OF THE ABOVE is the choice made when any Person has the opportunity to Vote in an Election but decides that they won’t.
Because none of the candidates or the Political Parties stand for represent what that Voter feels they and their community need from the Public Representatives they have the choice to elect.
People who are living NONE OF THE ABOVE, might not even bother to involve themselves in Elections.
Then there are those who may have gone to the Polling Station on Election Day, signed in and shown their ID and even have been handed their ballot paper.
They then decide that they cannot or will not Vote for any of the candidates or the Political Parties represented on a list that runs from the top to the bottom of the paper.
Some of those will even draw a line through the ballot paper or the boxes and even write NONE OF THE ABOVE at the bottom of the ballot paper itself.
Then, when the Counting of Votes takes place afterwards, this ballot paper and any others like it will be classified as ‘spoiled’ and no Vote will count.
Whatever the reason you may not have Voted, spoiled a ballot paper, or now found yourself looking for an alternative to Candidates and Political Parties that never seem to deliver on anything they have promised you they will do, this Book is here to help.
Officially NONE OF THE ABOVE is a How to and Information Guide that has been written and published to help and advise People just like you.
NONE OF THE ABOVE is the place where many of us already are
Take heart. You are not alone.
A growing number of People already recognise what the words NONE OF THE ABOVE mean to them.
Whilst the interpretation will differ between us, the reasons for being unhappy and searching for an unidentified alternative to all the so-called ‘choice’ of Political Candidates that we already have, will almost certainly be something that we share.
You may already know that the answers to all of our questions and the solutions we all need are not going to come from any of the Political Parties that we know. They will also not come from any of the new Political Parties or activist groups that already exist and are hungry to be in power, just like the Political Parties that everyone recognises.
Alternatively, you may be at the point of giving a party you have previously supported a ‘last chance’.
Whether committed to change or praying over a forlorn hope, we all know that change has to come from a different place to have meaning and for it to actually be different.
Otherwise, we will continue to ride the merry-go-round of the same Political Parties, knowing that with them, the more things change, the more they stay the same.
You now know you are not alone. But are you really ready to embrace change?
If what you have read is already making some sense or has perhaps just struck an unknown chord, I would urge you to keep going and read through THE ENTIRE BOOK.
Without doing so, you will not be equipped to consider the full picture or achieve the understanding of what Officially NONE OF THE ABOVE has the power to do for us all, as a tool that will work for your community.
Most importantly, you will miss what turning NONE OF THE ABOVE into a Vote-winning option has the power to do for YOU and for your future too.
The formula for a winning outcome from Officially NONE OF THE ABOVE
There are no shortcuts, IF you want your life and the lives of others to improve.
Please read this book through and then decide which parts of it make sense, or more importantly, which parts apply specifically to you and what you feel able to do.
BE HONEST WITH YOURSELF when you read and think about the content you are reading.
If you know what you are reading is true for you, DON’T go backwards. DON’T STOP. DON’T put this book back on your Bookshelf.
If you do nothing, you are standing still.
In a world of constant change, standing still is going backwards.
Doing nothing and going backwards are just the same.
Even if you never do any more than Vote in every future Election, please use this book as the guideline to search out and identify those who will work hard and work honestly for your community and for YOU.
WARNING: Officially NONE OF THE ABOVE is not for you, IF
You are committed to following whatever anyone else tells you to think.
You believe that the only problem is there isn’t a Political Party in power that represents you.
You believe that somebody else will solve all the problems that we have.
You believe that power, position, influence, qualifications and wealth define leadership.
You look down on any other social group, no matter what the difference between you might actually be.
You are not prepared to take part in something that helps others as well as yourself.
You cannot accept that change for everyone begins with you making the most important change first.
NONE OF THE ABOVE is for you, IF:
You are looking for answers and solutions to the problems we ALL have.
You know that those answers and solutions to our problems will not come from the so-called leaders that we have or are today being offered.
You can focus on what we share in common with each other, rather than what divides us and is very quickly tearing us all apart.
You accept that if we keep doing the same things as they have always been done, things will inevitably stay the same.
You accept that IF change that is good for us all is going to happen, we all have a role to play in being that change.
You accept that REAL CHANGE BEGINS WITH YOU!
To be able to Vote NONE OF THE ABOVE, your participation is ESSENTIAL
What you may have realised as you read the bullet points above, is the essential ingredient of us all being able to Vote NONE OF THE ABOVE is YOU!
One of the biggest problems that we face together is the apathy that years of political inaction, broken promises, the spread of manufactured fear and the use of outright lies from Politicians and the Establishment have created.
People genuinely believe that there is no alternative to the mess that we have now.
People feel that there can be no change, because it’s the same People who will always be in control.
People believe that the best we can hope for will come by voting for the alternative that the Establishment gives us. That the alternative candidates and parties we are given, will somehow get something right or allow at least some change to happen that could at the very least prove to be some help.
Sadly, it’s all smoke and mirrors.
This story of ‘who and what will win the next Election’ that we are all experiencing in the news and media, is no better than a confidence trick – even when People from outside of the Establishment appear to be involved.
NOT because there is some kind of conspiracy.
But because everyone who is in power or believes they deserve to be in power today, thinks in exactly the same way.
What could Officially NONE OF THE ABOVE really be? What can Officially NONE OF THE ABOVE become?
Officially NONE OF THE ABOVE has the ability to be and to deliver the answers and the solutions that we are all looking for. Because the PROCESS, METHOD and AIM it offers will return your power and begin helping us ALL to take control back from the Establishment, from the moment that you accept it will work.
Officially NONE OF THE ABOVE is the process of embracing the UKs broken political system and bypassing all the parts of it that are sick.
Officially NONE OF THE ABOVE is a clear pathway to ensure all that’s wrong with British Politics can no longer affect, influence or even brainwash those People who volunteer with good intentions, to become Public Representatives, ensuring that all the diseased thinking can be sidestepped until it has all been replaced.
Once the majority of us have accepted Officially NONE OF THE ABOVE and what it represents as the only honest and fully democratic way for communities to be represented properly in any Election, the battles and the war for Freedom from useless and self-serving governance that many don’t even know we are fighting, will then have been won.
Warning: for change to happen you must think and act differently. Leaving change to everyone else is thinking the same way as you have been all along.
You must be the change is itself one of the most important messages within Officially NONE OF THE ABOVE and every book that relates to it.
Regrettably, we have become accustomed to the idea that somebody somewhere else will always sort out the problems that affect everybody else.
Strangely enough, we then don’t understand why help doesn’t come for us when the problem is now ours and we are the ones experiencing the pain.
It’s time to join the dots up.
Officially NONE OF THE ABOVE will only work if you and People like you dare to change the way that you think.
Then, we must ALL act to create the change, removing the power from other People’s hands, taking back control of OUR OWN POWER.
Don’t fall into the trap of thinking that the way things work now is the only way. Ask yourself the question, ‘Who is the only beneficiary from you or anyone else believing and thinking like that?’
THE CURRENT SYSTEM IS BROKEN. IT DOESN’T WORK FOR YOUR COMMUNITY. IT DOESN’T WORK FOR YOU.
IF WE WAIT FOR THE PEOPLE WHO BROKE THE SYSTEM TO FIX IT, THE FIX THAT COMES WONT BE MADE WITH YOUR COMMUNITY OR YOU IN MIND.
ONLY YOU CAN FIX THE WAY POLITICS WORKS FOR YOU.
TOGETHER, WE CAN ONLY TRUST POLITICS IF IT IS RUN BY PEOPLE WE TRUST.
THE ONLY PEOPLE WE CAN TRUST IN POLITICS FOR OUR FUTURE WILL BE PEOPLE FROM OUTSIDE OF THE SYSTEM LIKE ME AND LIKE YOU
The negative stuff (That we cannot avoid)
Regrettably, presenting an alternative to what we have already got in Politics wouldn’t be complete with at least touching on the reasons why the Politicians that we have and The System that brings them to the ballot paper isn’t working for any of us.
Strange as it may seem, because of how bad things have become in Politics, telling the truth or being realistic about what is happening will always be treated as or considered to be negative by some.
Objectively and in reality, being negative and being realistic are two very different things.
Whilst it makes it sound like we are engaged in a war (which some People genuinely now believe that we are), we really do need to know and understand our enemy, before we can create or implement the methods and practices that mean we will ultimately win.
However, the reality is that in the majority of cases, the Politicians and People who have created the problems we have and who will continue to create them, IF we do not replace them with People who have the integrity and purpose to represent us, are not bad or evil People.
They are simply lacking awareness. They are selfish. They are without moral principles. They have a very restricted or self-serving view of what humanity is and the difference between wrong and right.
If many of them were able to see life in a different way, they could, in time, become just like any friends we have.
There is nothing wrong with them, except for how they behave and what they fundamentally believe.
Who are ALL OF THE ABOVE?
You may not realise or even understand it. But because Politics or rather our Politics is about what we believe at an individual or personal level, it also means that we identify ‘our Politics’ as being part of or who we really are.
Regrettably, this means that most of us find ourselves getting emotionally tied into the way we think politically. Especially if we have historically identified with a Political Party, group or ‘tribe’.
Even now, if you have been tribal in your approach to Politics in the past – and it won’t matter if you’ve Voted Conservative, Labour, Lib Dem, Green, UKIP or any of the names we associate with the broken Politics of today and the past – the chances are that deep down, you still feel some affiliation with that Political Party and hope that they will soon ‘come right’.
It’s time to accept that they won’t.
And it’s not like any of them haven’t had chance after chance to be the change, time and time before either.
Officially NONE OF THE ABOVE can only work if we consciously disassociate ourselves and keep disassociating ourselves with the Politics of the past (today) and our past political thinking – whether it’s in respect of our own outlook, or those we have previously thought of as being ‘the enemy’, who you are probably by now beginning to understand have much more in common with us than anything meaningful that any of us should be allowing to drive us all apart.
When the People who lead us are out for themselves, how can we expect anyone else to behave differently?
We cannot continue to make allowances for and place our trust in People who have asked for our support and taken it. But then misused the power that we have entrusted them with, and behaved as if what they want and what’s good for all of us are one and the same thing.
Equally, we cannot afford to waste years on new, up and coming Politicians, Influencers, Activists and Political Parties who tell us they are different. But by the very act of telling us what we should think, are demonstrating that if we treated them as a real alternative, that when elected and in power, they would then behave in exactly the same ways as the Politicians we already have.
There are good People within all Political Parties and plenty of them are genuinely well meaning. But few of them really understand the responsibilities and the power that they have been given, and what being a good Public Representatives means.
Without the knowledge and leadership skills that public office should always require of those holding such responsibility, it means that the People we have running the Public Sector and the whole country right now and for the foreseeable future – without change, are the last People that any of us should knowingly elect to Public Office and put in charge of whatever happens next.
At best, we live in a mediocracy where everyone we elect is out for themselves.
With the challenges that we now face. mediocre leadership is simply not good enough for our communities or for ourselves.
The ‘Establishment’ Political Parties and Tribes
We are all being failed by the Public Representatives we have elected as representatives of Political Parties.
It is inevitable that ‘Party Politicians’ will always be expected to put the interests of their Political Party and the Establishment they are part of first, before doing anything that would be good for anyone else.
Any Public Policy that works out well for any of us today, is just a happy coincidence.
There is very little good that comes from Public Policy for People that was directly intended or put into being through a fully considered process and genuine choice.
The Establishment Political Parties and Tribes include:
The Conservative Party (Also known as The Tories or Tory Party)
The Liberal Democrats (Also known as The Lib Dems)
The Labour Party
The Scottish National Party (Also known as the SNP)
The Green Party
Plaid Cymru (Also Known as The Welsh National Party)
The Outsiders or The Political Parties and Tribes from ‘Outside’
Many are already placing their hopes in new and less established Political Parties, activist groups and movements as being the way of change.
These political vehicles may appear to be different, speak with different words and with different voices.
But the thinking that drives them and the way that the Establishment or mainstream Political Parties think about Public Representation is regrettably one and the same.
The Outsider Political Parties and Tribes include:
The SDP
Reclaim
Reform UK
UKIP
ADF
Not Lib/Lab/Con
Vote Freedom
AND many others.
All of them are regrettably missing the point that the Outsiders’ strength lies in focusing on what we all have in common. Not by championing their own ideas, or anything else that just creates more of a divide.
Remember: Nobody serves everyone’s purpose when they are only serving ideas that are their own, and if they wanted to put you and your community first, they would be doing so already.
Why ALL OF THE ABOVE will NEVER work for your community and certainly won’t work for you
Have you ever had a politician who represents an existing Political Party come up to you, and without telling you what they already stand for, take the time to ask and make the effort necessary to actually listen only to what you think?
The greatest flaw that all Political Parties and Political Groups that already exist today share, is that any good they could be doing is quickly erased by the fact they are all pulling in their own specific directions.
None of them stop to think about what it would mean to be unified. To be working together. To have the ability to speak and to represent us universally with one and just one voice.
Established Political Parties and Speakers ALWAYS have an Agenda
Established Political Parties follow ideologies or philosophies that are idealistic, or formed around the thinking of the People who lead them.
By their very nature, Political Parties do not take account of the needs of everyone.
Political Parties will always be aligned with or have biases towards a specific group. Usually, one or more that serves its own purposes, or is aligned or identified with its own key demographic groups.
The way that Politicians would usually account for the way that Political Parties and groups work is to say that they are focusing on the important issues of the day.
There is always an inherent undertone that silently speaks ‘we represent the true majority’. The statement is presented without any evidence. But it is treated by many as credible, just because of the platform that the media or social media platforms have given them.
The problem is, existing Politicians and Political Parties aren’t credible. None of them can be relied upon. Because once anyone is motivated only by ‘what is important to them’, they can soon be led and influenced by anything else that is presented in such a way that is equally important to them.
Whilst this thinking is already the cause of great public harm, the reality is that it is human nature.
It’s what very stupid People do when they find themselves with power and responsibility that they are not equipped to handle appropriately.
It’s time for you to be the change, so that your community can do so too
The future of Politics is about everything working well for everyone. Everyone must therefore be involved in choosing that future.
Officially NONE OF THE ABOVE recognises and responds to the flaws that exist within the accepted idea that the only way the existing political system in the UK can function is by having it controlled and populated by Political Parties and Politicians who tell us they are there to work for us all, but only have their own interests in mind.
Officially NONE OF THE ABOVE proposes a genuine alternative pathway to electing the Politicians we are given, as being the way to ensure that the Public Representatives we elect are genuine, and always put the interests of the Public and the Communities they represent first.
Your Role in Our Future – You want to be an active part of the change
You’ve read this far. You are interested in taking part. You just want to feel convinced.
At this point, you will probably fall into one of two groups:
You will either be thinking ‘I’d like to take part and do something’.
Or you will be thinking ‘I’ll wait and make a choice when it’s the next time to Vote’.
If you are already thinking that you will take part and make a contribution because the content of what this book suggests makes sense to you, please remember that the real change we are about to begin working towards doesn’t look like anything you are used to. Nor does it resemble anything that you have already seen or already know.
If you are ready, please keep reading the TEN STEPS to Officially NONE OF THE ABOVE that follow in Part 1, next.
Your Role in Our Future – You just want to be able to Vote
If you are still thinking that the only time that any of this will matter is when it comes to the next Election and the time that you are next required to go out and Vote, I’m afraid it’s time to face a certain truth:
Waiting for change will always mean that change will not be something you take part in. Change will certainly come, but it will be something that happens to you.
Even if you are one of the many who will only see your real contribution being that moment when you pick up the pencil and ballot paper and draw a cross in a box to make your Vote, change requires that you do not remain passive between now and when the next Election comes.
Please do read through all of Part 1 and the TEN STEPS, so that you understand and can identify what the process of change will look like when it reaches your community.
Please then continue and read Part 2 which has been written for those of us who still see their contribution to the future as being no more than a Vote.
Follow the Plan. Learn from the Plan. Improve on the Plan. Share the Plan.
Before we get into the real opportunity that is awaiting you and your community, and the details and STEPS of what you can do to play your part, it is worth mentioning that the alternative pathway offered by Officially NONE OF THE ABOVE is one that you are being invited to follow and to learn from.
But not only that. I am also making a very explicit invitation with an expectation that you can find ways to improve upon Officially NONE OF THE ABOVE and that you will then share what you can then offer with all the other Communities like yours, too.
I am grateful for the opportunity to have been able to bring together the experiences and insights that I have had, to help others – IF they want that help.
You are about to open the door to being able to share your own experiences too.
Thank you and good luck.
Part 1: For the Change Makers – Whoever you are
This section outlines a PROCESS of STEPS that many of us within all of our local communities MUST take, if we want the existing ‘democratic’ and ‘electoral’ systems to work for all of us.
Doing nothing other than making a choice from the Candidates we are given by somebody, somewhere else will only ever continue to be an endorsement for ALL OF THE ABOVE.
Nothing will change.
The motives of the existing Political Parties and the behaviour of ALL the Politicians already within The System – as well as that of those who aspire to be there – are the reason that British Politics is completely dysfunctional and broken.
In the longer term, the electoral system and system of democracy that we have must be completely reformed so that public representation is in touch with everyone and is always provided by the most appropriate and best-suited People that we could ever have.
However, for Officially NONE OF THE ABOVE to succeed as quickly as possible, we have no choice but to focus on what we have the power to do NOW, so that we can begin the process of changing everything as quickly as we can.
How we will be able to Vote NONE OF THE ABOVE in the existing system
The good news for everyone is that change of the kind we need, is possible to begin working on now.
NOT through creating civil unrest or by forcing some kind of revolution, as some People genuinely believe – where the outcome is never guaranteed because it’s out of our control.
But by stepping outside of the system that the Establishment expects us never to question. By looking at the whole ‘electoral wood’ differently. Then using the map of the trees that the Establishment has given us, whilst navigating our own path through with new way of thinking that will enable us to take back our power and then put all the self-serving plans and strategies that have enslaved our democracy, into the bin.
Yes. WE CAN make the current system work for us.
The difference between what we have and what we could have, is that WE MUST select, appoint and then Vote for OUR OWN CANDIDATES to run in each and every Election.
We MUST reject anyone or any candidate that is offered to us by anyone other than our own communities and accept that is OUR DEMOCRATIC RIGHT AND CHOICE.
Forget the Date of the next Election. Work to Vote NONE OF THE ABOVE begins right now
When I say, ‘We need to change the way We think’, it is important to understand that this ‘change in thinking’ is about the entire way we look at things, or even the lens we use to look at it. It is not as simple as moderating or adjusting our view of just one thing.
A good and very relevant example of this is the way that the majority of us think about Elections and how Elections actually work.
Most of us have not been actively involved in Politics or Political Campaigning. So, we immediately fall into the trap of thinking and believing that the only time that Political Campaigning matters, is the same time that everyone else who is out there trying to get themselves elected, is around about our local areas and knocking on our doors.
What many of us then fail to realise is that ALL OF THE ABOVE will have their eyes and thoughts on the next Election, right from the very moment that the results of the last one have been confirmed.
In fact, so obsessed with getting elected or reelected have ALL OF THE ABOVE become, that their obsession with influencing the People they believe most likely to Vote for them in the future, is one of their priority considerations in just about everything that they do.
Put yourself in other People’s shoes
I have had the experience of campaigning for both myself and for other candidates in a number of different Elections.
One of the most important things that I learned was that not enough People will take outsiders or challengers and what they have to say seriously, IF it’s only after the Election has been called that the door knocking begins and the new messages and concern show up.
Matters that concern the Community are ongoing. They are real and they are relevant each and every day. Just like the issues that have an effect or an impact upon you.
It is the same for everyone. So, if you turn up at other times too – as anyone who genuinely cares about their community is supposed to, People at their doorsteps will see a lot more value in the new experience for them that you offer, when you ask them to share their concerns.
Patience is necessary, as well as being a virtue
Some People – and a growing number of them too, will engage with what you are doing from the very moment that you first knock on their door. But for others, the process will take time.
The self-interest and cynical behavior that has ruled and broken Politics right across this country, for so long, has done a hell of a lot of harm.
From this point alone, it should be obvious that building up a relationship and developing trust with someone and something new, is bound to take time.
So, it doesn’t matter whether the next Election is a Local Election or a General Election. Nor does it matter if it is going to be held in 4 months or 4 years’ time. The right time to begin the process of engaging with Local People is RIGHT NOW!
Forget whatever the Councillors, Mayors, MPs and Political Parties are doing
Another idea that we must get over is the one that tells us it’s only the Politicians who are already elected that have any power, when it comes to influencing anything that’s going on.
They don’t. And it’s self-sabotaging to think this way. Because in the same breath, it’s easy to fall into the trap of assuming that nobody will pay attention to anyone else.
That’s bad enough. But the real risk to changing everything for the better is the next idea to arrive.
The one that suggests we have to listen to and respect what anyone who has been elected or has a position of authority has to say.
WE DON’T.
Respect & Trust MUST be earned AND be credible too
Sadly, the way the Electoral System works today doesn’t mean that we can rest assured that candidates are skilled, experienced, in touch with our reality, or in any way capable of speaking for us or making any decisions on behalf of us all.
Not only this. The reality is that even the ‘majority Votes’ that ‘winning’ candidates attract for Council and even Parliamentary Seats are themselves representative of just a small fraction of just the People in our communities who are eligible to Vote.
This means that the genuine majority of the People who you are about to communicate with, already feel that they are not represented by the politician(s) your community has already got.
Speak and make promises in the same way that the Establishment and the Outsider Parties already do, at these doorsteps, and the People you are reaching out to will see right through you, almost as quickly as you can blink.
Speak honestly and openly, and share your care and compassion for change, for People and for the Community – from your heart, and the People you speak to will take you seriously, right from the start.
It’s what we all have in common that is key
We have much more in common with others than anything that divides us.
Yet we allow those differences and the beliefs that we have about each other to take over and rule our lives as if the commonality that we share doesn’t even exist.
Politics is so divisive because it is reflective of who each and every one of us believes that we are and what we stand for, deep down inside of ourselves.
With the problems across the UK and the World that generation after generation of poor Politicians have created, it’s no longer possible or responsible of us to leave the Politics for the Politicians.
And it won’t be, until such time as we once again have a political system in place that we can rely upon and trust.
The culture of Politics that is dividing us all is representative or a reflection of the broken system and the disease of self-interest and the thirst for self-advancement, influence and power that has stepped into democracy’s place.
It simply doesn’t matter if you have seen yourself as being left-wing, socialist, right-wing, capitalist, conservative, eco-friendly or as wearing any similar kind of label up until right now.
The tribal badges that a self-interested political system has conditioned us to wear, have also been the banners that we have allowed to trip us up by defining how we feel about and how we perceive many others too.
For what it’s worth, those others have gone through exactly the same process on their part, too.
Politics today is not based upon, driven or motivated by anything good for us and for our communities, as it always should be.
Left, right or from somewhere in between. This broken Political System focuses on keeping power away from the People and absent from within the communities where it should be.
It continually funnels and focuses OUR POWER on People, both seen and unseen, who make the real decisions that we have no influence over, right at the top.
Our power will be immediately returned to us by recognising the parts of life that are common to everyone, and by focusing our collaborative efforts to bring equitable access and provision of the things and experiences in life that we genuinely share.
If you haven’t realised already real community is not just an idea. It is a way of being.
For instance, we don’t need a socialist or a capitalist to introduce their political ideologies into the processes which deliver our food – BUT THEY DO!
And it’s the same with everything else that these People touch!
The only motivation that genuine representatives of the People need in order to get everything they do right, is to maintain their focus upon what’s in the best interests of EVERYONE, when it comes to Public Policy that has any impact upon the essential areas of life that we have in common and share.
The things which are essential to provide and maintain happy, healthy, safe and secure lives for everyone, within a system that is truly balanced, fair and just, don’t need any kind of political ideology to deliver them.
We just need to focus on working together and on collaborating in union, so that what we all need, and not what only some of us want, is all that government and our system of governance gives us – and then stops there.
It’s time for our journey to that place to begin. And you have the opportunity to play an important part at the start!
Your role – IF you want it, is to reach out, listen and learn
Yes, it does rather sound like the line from those great Mission Impossible Films “Your Mission, should you accept it…”. The similarity between taking on challenging tasks should also not be lost.
But there is a decision that needs to be made. And the action that follows that decision needs to be taken by many of us, IF we really want to be able to Vote and successfully elect Candidates in every Election who are NONE OF THE ABOVE.
So, your role – IF you want it. Is to reach out, listen and learn from the other Local People from in and around your community. And to then be open to whatever happens or whatever comes next.
The bigger wheels, within wheels, that will soon be at work
Conversation and collaboration with People you don’t normally speak to but see or pass regularly isn’t really all that hard. Because you already have that shared experience in common.
If nothing else, it’s always nice to be able to put a name to a face.
Reaching out and by beginning a conversation which is all weighted towards other People speaking and sharing their thoughts and ideas about what’s happening, and what they believe our structures of government should prioritise and do, will begin the process of opening up a local and Community focused world.
You will not only take the first essential steps of helping to create a new Community-wide and all-inclusive movement that will quickly have the power to influence and change.
You will also immediately begin to learn about life from very different perspectives and see how we all experience the same things very differently.
Yes, there is an agenda that we will all be working to, from the moment you begin.
It’s no secret and we’ve already shared it.
The agenda is to get good and genuine Public Representatives elected and working with many others. So that our Councils, Public Organisations and our Parliament are being run by People who not only understand us and have our best interests at heart. But have the wherewithal necessary to understand all the different parts and functions of the Public Sector, to be able to fit them all together so that everything in the public sphere works for the benefit of us all, as it always should do.
Officially NONE OF THE ABOVE has an AIM, that will be achieved through a METHOD, which will be the result of you and others like you following a PROCESS from the moment you start.
THE AIM: Community agreement on Candidates who are Officially NONE OF THE ABOVE
The only thing that gives Political Parties an edge or an advantage over anyone else is that they are already organised and have systems and procedures in place.
Yet the disadvantage to us all is that they are selecting and offering us candidates under the pretense that they will represent us, when they will always prioritise the party choice.
The AIM of Officially NONE OF THE ABOVE is your Community making a decision upon who represents all of you together. Then going on to support your Public Representatives to be elected and to then fill and fulfil every relevant democratically elected role.
Please do not fall into the trap of believing that’s what you and every Voter like you already does, each time that you go into a polling station and Vote.
The candidates that are listed on the ballot paper in elections now, were not selected by your community.
They were selected by someone else, using criteria that benefits a very specific group of People and whatever they stand for or believe in.
Therefore, ALL OF THE ABOVE don’t represent the views of the Community, they represent the views of someone else.
REMEMBER: The only way that communities will be represented by the People who are best qualified to represent that Community, is for the Community to select and appoint those candidates themselves.
THE METHOD: Community Meetings and interaction where we select Candidates to represent us all
To bring all of the People that make up your community together, means bringing all of them together – ideally at the same time within a Community Meeting.
As pretty much all of the existing Political Parties and Politicians already know, the circumstances when a whole Community will come together in one place at the same time to listen or to even discuss issues that affect them are very rare indeed.
Yet the reason for this apathy, disconnectedness or disenfranchisement, isn’t one that’s hard to address or get over.
It just takes a lot of effort and genuine commitment to the Community – and that’s why the existing Political Parties don’t do this – because respect for what the People really think and what’s important to them isn’t something that any of the existing Political Parties either believe in or currently even try to do.
The METHOD is holding Community Meetings where everyone from within your community has the opportunity to interact and play a part in the process of selecting the Candidates who will become Councillors, Mayors, MPs – and ANY kind of public representative that public Elections within the current system dictate that there will be.
There is significant added value and additional benefits that will come from bringing your community together without the agendas or motives of any organisation that already exists
Yes, we quite clearly have Communities that already exist in geographical terms. They are where we all already live.
We also have groups of People who share certain or specific things in common. Like their religion, their working background, or perhaps a sport that they have played or follow as a spectator or on TV.
But it has become increasingly rare for any of us to really feel any kind of affinity with the People with whom the only thing we clearly share is our locality, in the sense that living together and sharing life together is an essential part of making the things that surround our everyday lives much better than what they already are.
It is the humanity that comes from engaging in direct relationships within our local areas and local communities that have the ability to really help us to find genuine happiness, as well as giving us the ability to discover and appreciate who we genuinely are.
There are no substitutes for the benefits that being part of a vibrant, caring and above all human Community will have for you and for everyone.
Above all, the benefits from coming together to ensure that the decisions that will affect us and that will have an effect upon everyone, are made by the right People, who we have selected, qualified and appointed, alongside everyone else who will be affected by whatever they will then do, will be incalculable for us all.
THE PROCESS: Engaging with your Community in a series of TEN STEPS
So, you’ve read this far. We are now at the most important part of the journey to Officially NONE OF THE ABOVE.
That is, IF you are ready and committed to taking the steps necessary to play your part in creating change, whilst welcoming everyone who is open to it to share the ride.
There are TEN practical STEPS to creating the momentum and energy that will engage your community.
We are going to use the METHOD of bringing everyone in your community together, so that your community can achieve the AIM of selecting your own candidates for EVERY Election in the future.
CAUTION: It is important, as you proceed from here onwards, that you focus on what we have discussed in this book, and upon continuing with the PROCESS of TEN STEPS We are about to go through.
THE TEN STEPS
STEP 1: Give your Community Meeting a recognisable identity.
STEP 2: Get a free email box set up.
STEP 3: Set up your Community Meeting Social media accounts.
STEP 4: Get posting and post as often as you can.
STEP 5: Get at least 12 People you know from your community signed up.
STEP 6: Knock on doors and talk to real People as often as you can.
STEP 7: Collaborate wherever possible, accept help and support from whoever you can, always be prepared to work with others BUT ALWAYS QUALIFY THAT SUPPORT.
STEP 8: Arrange your first Community Meeting.
STEP 9: At your Community Meeting, let the People use their voice.
STEP 10: Hold meetings to identify your community representatives and agree what happens next.
We will now move on to cover each of these TEN STEPS of the PROCESS, providing the METHOD that will allow us to achieve our AIM.
Some things to bear in mind first:
You may be alone right at the start.
But others in your community may also start as you are about to do so.
The opportunity to join with them and others who want to actively contribute to the creation of these new structures for our communities will come along very quickly, IF you remain focused from the start.
So, don’t worry or give unnecessary thought to how you collaborate with the wider Community over a larger area – for instance, if it should be a General Election that is next called.
If everyone who begins as you are about to, is committed to the PROCESS and doing it right, the linkups, system of union between communities and working together at a broader level, will soon fall into place too.
STEP 1: Give your Community Meeting a recognisable identity:
Your immediate thought may well be ‘That doesn’t sound very hard!’
Yet giving your new Community Meeting a name that will have as much meaning with just a handful of local People involved, as it will when everyone has just Voted your first Community Representative into an Elected Office is very important indeed.
Officially NONE OF THE ABOVE is about what you all have or what you share in common.
So, the obvious thing to everyone when you first start, will be using or rather incorporating any local place or area name that local People will recognise and identify with the area of the Community in which you all live.
The chances are that in most places, some existing organisation or savvy web user will have grabbed the precise name of your community area. (e.g., @London is already in use!)
If the actual name of your area is available for any social media username or domain name, it’s worth avoiding anyway – in that form.
Once things get moving and others can see there is interest building in what you are doing, using just the place name could be considered by some to be a declaration that you already speak for the Community.
My suggestion is that you use your community area or place name and then add either ‘CM’ or ‘NOTA’ after or before or use a word that describes what Officially NONE OF THE ABOVE is all about, such as ‘Together’ or ‘United’.
For example, the area I grew up in is called Churchdown in Gloucestershire, UK. So, the name I would then use would ideally be ‘Churchdown NOTA’ or ‘Churchdown Together’.
Continuity and recognisability are important across the different platforms that you are about to use. Everyone uses social media and the internet differently. But they all need to be able to identify with something that reaches across all of them the same.
Before committing to the name you will use, PLEASE work through STEPS 2 & 3, and check that the same Usernames are available for you to use first.
This is a particularly good thing to do early on. Because it could be one of the easiest ways to work out if someone else is already working with Officially NONE OF THE ABOVE, in your community too.
Things to be aware of:
You will probably use your local area name, with ‘Community Meeting’ following it as our e-mail username in STEP 2. But @communitymeeting would already be too long to become a username on one or more of the social media platforms that you are about to use.
Groups that represent different parts of your local community or interests that are shared between a number of local People may already be using words like ‘together’ as a prefix or a suffix within their proper name or a social media username.
A quick visit to any linked social media or web pages should quickly make clear who any group using one of these names is, and whether you are both working to create a Community Meeting of the Officially NONE OF THE ABOVE kind.
What you are about to do, is not about you. It’s all about your community. So, don’t use your name as the name for what will become your Community Meeting.
You may technically ‘own’ or ‘control’ everything you create or do whilst you are working alone. But the end result will only ever belong to the Community.
If you feel uncomfortable with this, please give further consideration to the reasons you feel that way before you decide if you want to proceed.
Even if the name of the area or place you live in sounds like it must be unique, there is a good chance that the name will exist somewhere else in the UK or beyond.
If you should find that the name you would like to use already is being used elsewhere, don’t worry. Just add an abbreviation such as SW if you are in the South West, or perhaps something like the first two or three letters of your postcode area – which in the case of Churchdown would be GL or GL3.
STEP 2: Get a free email box set up
If you are going through the TEN STEPS in order, you will already be aware that STEPS 1, 2, and 3 fit very closely together.
It may seem that setting up a FREE email box and address for your Community Meeting would be better as STEP 3.
But if you are doing everything as suggested, you will soon understand that you will need your e-mail address to get your social media platforms set up with your Username and/or to validate your set up too.
There are a number of FREE email options available to you and it may be the case that you already have a FREE box that has come with your Phone set up, or perhaps you have one with Bing, Google or a company like Yahoo.
Most of them will allow you to set up a second box reasonably easy if you do. All you need to do for instructions, is follow the help options or do a search on any related search engine facility.
My own preference would be to use Google or Google mail. The functionality is excellent, and the security seems to be great. This is not a recommendation. But the reality is that this whole PROCESS is about making your journey to the doorstep as easy as possible, and it will only get longer if we overcomplicate things.
When you are setting your account up, please use the name of your Community Meeting as the username.
Then, when you are setting up the details that will appear when you send any emails, I would suggest using your Community Meeting Username, the same.
Things to be aware of:
If you are nervous about mail being read or hacked, don’t be.
If you are following the TEN STEPS and you are doing so for the right reasons – which are what’s best for your communityand putting Local People first, you are unlikely to ever do anything that anyone could accuse you of being wrong.
Transparency is actually key to everything you are going to do.
There are no secrets being shared here in this book or as any part of Officially NONE OF THE ABOVE, that I am unhappy for any existing Politician or Political Party to see.
If existing Politicians and Political Parties were ready to embrace these ideas and live by them, there would be no reason for anyone else to make the effort and try – BECAUSE IT WOULD ALREADY BE BEING DONE!
If you decide to set up a signature template, DO NOT add your private telephone number unless you are happy to receive unsolicited calls on it.
There is no need to provide a telephone number. With so many other ways that you can (and will) be able to offer People so that you can be contacted directly, there’s really no need to do so, unless you are happy to do so, or you are able to use a dedicated phone.
STEP 3: Set up your Community Meeting social media accounts
There are a range of different social media accounts and platforms that are available, and the list is growing.
To keep things as practical and as simple as possible, my suggestion is that in the first instance you concentrate on setting up FOUR different social media accounts.
These are:
Twitter
Facebook
Instagram
WordPress
You can easily add others social media platforms such as Tik Tok, Blogger, Rumble, YouTube, Telegram etc. if you have good reason to believe there is enough demand.
But right now, this is all about making the best use of the time that you have available and the PROCESS of getting the AIM of OfficiallyNONE OF THE ABOVE known by as many People across your local Community area as possible.
Usernames
If you haven’t already done so, please CHECK that the Username you have for your Community Meeting is available for ALL of the social media platforms that you intend to use BEFORE you start signing up to any of them.
This way, you can secure usernames that will be the same across ALL of your social media platforms.
Remember CONTINUITY and RECOGNISABILITY are KEY!
Twitter
It is very useful to have a presence on Twitter. Chances are that there will be a smaller number of members of your local Community who will use and interact with your posts on Twitter. But it’s also likely that this is where you will generate more interest from outside – which is important for networking and getting help from others too.
The trick is to keep your messages factual and short, or just add a short description and use Twitter just for posting your Facebook, Instagram and WordPress links.
Facebook
You may already have a Facebook account of your own and you can use that as the doorway to create a Facebook Page.
Facebook is where you are most likely to pick up support from members of your local Community very quickly.
My advice would be that you treat your Community Meeting page on Facebook a bit like a central hub, which links to everything else.
Facebook is good for editorial, pictures and for posting links and I would suggest that you take the plunge and use them all, as often as you can.
Please make sure that anything you post anywhere else is linked to your Community Meeting Facebook Page too.
The functionality of Facebook Pages is fantastic. So, if you just follow the guided tour after your Page is initially set up, you will immediately get a taste of what a great Community connection tool it really can be.
Instagram
Instagram is a much more visual tool that a lot of People really like, simply because the content or the stories revolve around pictures and visualisation helps how people think.
If you can record what you are doing with pictures and add a few words to tell the story as you do so, you will be amazed at the support that you will soon find.
Instagram is owned by the same company that owns Facebook and you can set up your Community Meeting Instagram account so that it immediately posts to Facebook too. However, please be aware that it does not work that way, the other way around!
WordPress
If you are unsure how to put posts together that will interest and engage other members of your community when you begin, perhaps writing and publishing a journal of what you are doing and what you have experienced will be a very good way to start.
Blogs of the kind you need to write don’t need to be long. They just need to be factual and relevant in every way that you can make them.
WordPress will also allow you to repost material or blogs from other WordPress sites if you want to.
WordPress is the blogging platform that I currently use to support everything I write, and it’s where any resources I will be making available to share with you will be found.
Setting up
All of these social media platforms take just a few minutes to set up.
Some suggestions:
Use a picture or pictures of a location or landmark that everyone in your community will know and relate to – One that isn’t a private residence, a business or includes People or private property that can be identified within it.
Use a free app such as Meme Maker to add your Community Meeting name and do any basic editing you may need, to the picture or pictures before you use them.
Write a short bio and use it for all four of them. For example, ‘Bringing Churchdown together so that public decisions are made for us all, the same’
Where you can, immediately set up posting links between your different social media platforms, so that when you post to one, you immediately post to all (For instance, if you write a blog in WordPress, the set up will allow you to automatically post to Facebook, and Instagram does the same thing too).
STEP 4: Get posting and post as often as you can:
As soon as your Community Meeting social media platforms are up and running, you should begin posting and sharing everything that you can or have the time to, online.
People from across your community will be interested in what you are doing from the moment that you begin work.
However, the key to success is what you then do to keep those same People engaged and interested, and then thinking about what more they could and then want to do, to help you.
What kind of things you should post:
People you don’t know will respond very well when they feel like you are talking to them, rather than at them.
A really helpful way to approach writing anything to post on social media and online, is to treat it like you are having a normal chat or conversation with someone that you already know – just without anything that would be too familiar or personal. (For instance, leave out bad language, irony, sarcasm or anything that people who aren’t used to the way you speak might not ‘get’ or understand)
You don’t need to write loads to engage People either. Short and punchy lines or just a couple of paragraphs are more than enough, IF there is a message worth sharing included.
Use your Community Meeting social media platforms to post:
News:When you’ve launched, when you have set up something like a fundraiser for People to use, when you’ve made contact with another Officially NONE OF THE ABOVE group, when a member of the community volunteers and is taking on a specific responsibility or role AND when Community Meetings have been arranged.
Questions:You should ask People what they think about things you are doing and speak as if you are already addressing the whole community – no matter how many People are already involved. Remember that the Officially NONE OF THE ABOVE pathway to creating functioning Community Meetings is all about engaging and listening to everyone who wants to speak and participate across the local Community – so give them that chance from day 1!
Updates:Tell everyone what you and those working with you have achieved. For instance, if you have made a commitment to visit a certain number of houses to talk to local People by a certain date, tell everyone how you are getting on. Or share other updates about how other Community Meetings are getting on.
The kind of things you shouldn’t post:
Remember that your Community Meeting and everything you create, set up and achieve belongs to the Community from the moment you begin.
It’s therefore very important not to blur the lines and make anything you post about you, what you are doing when you are not working on Officially NONE OF THE ABOVE, or anything personal to you, such as talking about the things that you like.
DON’T use your Community Meeting social media platforms to post:
Anything Personal: DON’T use the platforms you have set up for your Community Meeting to post ANYTHING that is about you or anyone else personally.
Anything about Public Policy or Politics: The whole point of Officially NONE OF THE ABOVE is the creation of the circumstances where we are able to Vote for People to represent us all as Public Representatives who have been chosen by the Community and whose integrity in fulfilling their responsibilities is something we can trust. Policy itself is the next issue, once we have Politicians running government that we can trust. So, if the focus shifts away from listening and the commitment to the order that these steps have to come, your only success by making policy statement or making an endorsement of a policy of any kind, will only be to divide People at precisely the wrong time.
Rules for using social media as a successful Community building tool:
Here are some general rules that will help you to build a good reputation for your Community Meeting, to stay happy and to build good relationships across your social media platforms, with anyone worth building them with online:
ALWAYS approach social media like it’s a one-to-one conversation with someone you already know.
Don’t do or say anything to anyone online, that you wouldn’t be happy to do or say directly to their face, in real life.
NEVER MAKE IT PERSONAL. Even the People on the internet who are rude are reflecting only how they feel about their own life and the world. ITS NEVER ABOUT YOU – but it soon will be, IF you are the one to initiate any kind of abuse or attack!
If you are unsure of whether you should post whatever you’ve written, DON’T POST IT!
Don’t present opinions and views as fact to anyone. It’s possible to get into legal trouble if you do, and you never know who will see what you have written or published, and People will be very quick to call you out!
Don’t lie or make things up – especially if you have received a comment or read something that makes you uncomfortable.
Don’t post when you are feeling emotional or are under the influence of drink or drugs.
Always answer polite and constructive questions. There will be more People who will be genuinely interested in what you are saying or doing than there will be those who only have bad things to say about anything or anyone.
NEVER make promises that you have no way of knowing that you can keep.
If you are asked a question and don’t know the answer, be honest. Don’t even attempt to blag your way out. Find a way to engage directly if you can and let them know that you will find the answer and get back to them.
Ignore anyone who only has negative things to say.
DO NOT use the number of likes, shares, followers or any other kind of statistic that’s openly available as a way to tell you how successful your efforts have been. Alone, they NEVER accurately correlate with what People are really thinking. The reality is that if you only ever succeed in openly engaging one person, that one person could be connected and then tell your story to the whole world!
Don’t share links to anyone or anything that you don’t trust or are not fully aware of and know to be relevant and helpful to Officially NONE OF THE ABOVE.
REMEMBER: Unless you have done something you shouldn’t have, People only attack and criticise the work and efforts of others online, when they have nothing useful or of benefit to anyone else to say. Keep doing the right thing by everyone, and you will soon be shocked by who this cap actually fits!
Don’t publish any picture of anyone who can be identified from that picture, unless you have their permission to do so. You should get that permission in writing wherever you can.
Don’t publish information that will identify People directly, unless it relates to material that already exists in the public realm – In which case, publish the link, so readers can see what you are referencing or referring to.
Don’t publish anything on your Community Meeting platforms that promote the views of any organisation or any individual in any way, other than your Community Meeting, itself.
Things to be aware of:
Remember that you need to keep the AIM, METHOD and PROCESS of Officially NONE OF THE ABOVE in your mind at all times.
ALWAYS CHECK THAT EVERYTHING YOU HAVE POSTED THEN POSTS AS IT SHOULD, WHERE ITS SUPPOSED TO, AND THAT ITS POSTED ON TIME!
STEP 5: Get at least 12 People you know from your community signed up
Although the PROCESS is all about getting People from within your local Community to Meet up and work together, the PROCESS is also built upon the foundation of getting your message to begin working on its own, without you having to do all the work.
One of the easiest ways to get your Officially NONE OF THE ABOVE messages to start engaging other members of your local Community and to begin working for you remotely too, is to focus your first efforts on getting local People following, liking and sharing all of the social media platforms you have set up.
Clearly, the more follows, likes and shares you have, the bigger the number of People who will see your posts will be – even if they don’t like, share or follow themselves.
Because of the way that social media and search engines work, there always seem to be a number of follows, of likes and shares that need to be hit or achieved before pages reach a magic moment or what some would call a critical mass, when new or additional followers and likes just seem to start arriving and adding up, all by themselves.
From what I know and understand at the time of writing, you will help yourself greatly if you can immediately share your Facebook page with at least 12 People from your local Community who are friends with you on Facebook, who then follow or like your Community Meeting Facebook Page, and then like and share posts with all the People they know, as you publish them.
It’s not critical for you to do this, at this point. But it will certainly help and add to your confidence, if you can secure this support in what you would be able to call a ‘quick win’.
STEP 6: Knock on doors and talk to real People as often as you can
Knocking on doors and talking to real People, face to face, may prove to be the biggest, but also the most rewarding challenge that you will face, as part of the PROCESS to create the METHOD of delivering the AIM of Officially NONE OF THE ABOVE.
Before you let yourself worry about something silly, such as asking yourself ‘what are these People going to think’, please bear in mind that everyone, including you, likes to be asked what they think or how they feel about the things that are important to them.
Not only do People like to be asked for their views and opinion. There’s no better place to give your views and opinion, than at the doorstep of your own home.
When to call or knock on doors
The best times to knock on doors and find People in and most likely to be available and happy to speak to you will be between 6 and 8pm on Mondays, Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays during a normal working week, and on Saturday mornings between the hours of 9am and 12pm.
You should always avoid houses where it’s clear that parties or other meetups of some kind are underway.
Don’t go out knocking on doors when you know that big sporting events or other things are on TV that a lot of People are likely to want to watch.
What you should always say
At some point during any conversation – preferably as a start, you must always explain who you are, what you are doing and why you are doing it.
You aren’t knocking on the door to preach a message. You are there to listen and learn.
So, keep your explanation as brief as possible. But make it long enough so that your reason for being there makes sense in a way that anyone will be happy with and able to understand.
For example, you could say something like:
“Good evening, my name is Adam and I live in the next road to yours. I’m growing concerned about the decisions being made on our behalf by Politicians within our Local Councils and the Government and am in the process of reaching out to other local People to share our experiences and see if we feel the same. I was wondering if you have any concerns about any of these things you would be happy to share yourself and then see if theres anything we can do together and with others from the area to try and address the problems we have in common?”
The Dos
DO:
Introduce yourself in terms that make sense of who you are – For example, “I’m Adam and I live in the road next to yours, I often see you when I’m at the bus stop…” etc.
Ask People to share their views and what concerns them.
Say that you are concerned about what’s happening with government and public services because of the People who are elected to run them and that you want to learn and understand how other People in your Community feel, and what the issues are that are important to them. But again, don’t start talking about what YOU want to happen or see.
Make clear that you are not working for, on behalf of, and are not affiliated with any existing Political Party or movement.
Share with the People you speak to that what we have in common and what we share together is more important than any ideas that divide us or that have been tearing us all apart
Bring focus to the way that the political system works, being the problem that needs to be fixed BEFORE we can then focus on getting the policies right.
End by sharing with them that you are looking to arrange a new type of Community Meeting to bring People from across the Community together, so that we can all share our ideas and experiences and then agree what we can do next.
Suggest there will be opportunities for anyone and everyone within the Community to help and take part and do more if they want to. But the most important thing is participation and sharing the message so that everyone can be involved and take part if they want to.
Ask if they would follow and share your social media addresses.
Take their email address if they are happy to stay in touch with you directly.
The DONTs
DON’T:
Don’t treat someone else’s doorstep as your own personal soapbox or use the opportunity to grandstand or ‘big up’ the part you are playing in any way.
Don’t abuse the gift of time that anyone is prepared to give you.
Don’t share your own views and experiences UNLESS you are asked to and only then, keep it factual and don’t include your views or what you think should be done.
Don’t criticise ANY of the Political Parties, organisations, any public figure or anyone who you believe to be setting a bad example or to have done anything ‘wrong’. You are running your own race and when it comes down to the example of what not to do in Politics, they have already won…
Don’t make anything up, lie or stretch the truth about any topic you discuss.
Don’t make promises you cannot keep.
Don’t waste their time or yours. If it is clear that the Person or People you are talking to, are already committed to supporting an existing Political Party or movement of some kind. You will not change the mind of anyone who isn’t already open to the idea of change.
Information you should always provide
If you knock on someone’s door, it’s just polite and courteous to give them your name.
If it is clear that the person or People you have called on are interested in what you are doing, don’t end the conversation or leave until they know about your Community Meeting social media accounts, and they have the addresses so that they can follow, share and like.
Do not be afraid to provide any of the details you have prepared whilst you have been working to hold a Community Meeting. If you are following this Guide and the TEN STEPS, you will have no reason to hide anything that you have published.
The reality is that once momentum starts building behind what you and what others like you are doing, there will be People involved or supporting existing Politicians and Political Parties who will see Officially NONE OF THE ABOVE and the idea of a new form of Community Meetings as a threat.
Let them.
The future of your community is for the members of your community to decide.
Not them.
Things to be aware of:
The most important thing to be mindful here, is that you do not have the right to be heard on someone else’s doorstep.
If it should become apparent that your call and presence at someone’s door is not in any way welcome at any point, turn around and leave immediately.
Always do so politely, and especially so, if you are already talking to someone when you become aware of this.
Never worry about how many houses you call at in one session. If you were out knocking on doors for just 4 hours and spend 15 minutes at each door you call at listening to what People who matter like you on their doorsteps have to say, you will have connected with more People in that one session than any of the existing Political Parties will have done so by taking the same time to deliver one of their glossy leaflets through the letterbox of every house on a giant housing estate.
STEP 7: Collaborate wherever possible. Accept help and support from whoever you can. Always be prepared to work with others. BUT ALWAYS QUALIFY YOUR SUPPORT
You may begin working on the Officially NONE OF THE ABOVE PROCESS alone. But you should do so knowing that for your own and everyone else’s efforts to be successful, it will soon be necessary to pool efforts with others who are thinking the same way as you.
Help will come in many different forms and from many different directions, IF you get to work and just let your faith in the PROCESS take care of the rest.
If an Officially NONE OF THE ABOVE Community Meeting has already been established locally
If you should find that somebody else has already began working in your local area to build a Community Meeting using the Officially NONE OF THE ABOVE PROCESS, this is great news for your area.
Anyone who is genuinely committed to developing a community response to the problems we face will be happy to collaborate with others who are clearly setting off from the same starting point and viewing the process of changing the way that we do Politics in the UK in the same way.
Even if somebody has already begun work to develop a Community Meeting locally, there is no reason why you cannot get started on your own, IF you genuinely believe that it will help the local Community for you to focus on an even smaller area to begin with.
However, there is also a lot of truth in the suggestion that ‘many hands make light work’.
If you get in touch with whoever is also working locally and tell them that you intend to follow the Officially NONE OF THE ABOVE PROCESS too and that you are open to collaborating, the chances are that an honest and open conversation will soon let you know how you can combine efforts and reach more People in less time, by pooling your efforts on the same campaign.
Offers of help when you knock on doors
It may not happen straight away. But once you get used to knocking on People’s doors, introducing yourself and why you are there, and then listening to what the People have to say, your confidence and passion for what you are doing will begin to shine through in a way that just your words alone will not.
You shouldn’t be surprised if People you talk to at their doorsteps are then immediately receptive to the idea of getting involved and helping you in some way – or in some cases, actually asking you there and then what they can do.
Whatever you do next, if someone is interested in helping or has made a firm offer of help, you should:
Exchange contact details and make sure that they have the details and usernames of all the platforms you are using.
Ask them what they would like to do to help.
Ask them if there is anything they are NOT happy to do.
Discuss the possibility of meeting up again quickly, so that you can arrange the next steps.
Provide them with the links to find Officially NONE OF THE ABOVE on Amazon and Online and suggest that they read the whole Book all the way through.
PLEASE ALWAYS REMEMBER that volunteers are NOT employees.
Like you, People who are genuinely prepared to come and work with you and collaborate with us all to build Community Meetings will make effort and give their time for nothing. BECAUSE IT IS IMPORTANT TO THEM.
That means that whatever they do, really does need to be something that they are happy to do. So, it is essential that you don’t push anyone to do anything they are uncomfortable with doing, ESPECIALLY if it’s something that you are not keen on doing yourself.
If someone wants to help but just wants to write blogs for you or deliver leaflets once the first Community Meeting is arranged, let them do whatever they want to and be appreciative of even the smallest thing they have done to help.
Check the priorities and background of any volunteers who ‘come out of the blue’
As Officially NONE OF THE ABOVE begins to build interest from local People within your Community, it will also gain interest from People, Politicians and Political Parties who are invested in The System we already have, and with a commitment to resisting any kind of meaningful change.
It’s quite possible that you will be offered help from People like this which isn’t really help at all. And if you are not aware of who or why someone has approached you out of the blue, there is a chance that they want to get involved with what you are doing using an offer of help, but with every intention of hindering or even stopping you from achieving all that you have set out to do.
As a matter of course, you should always do a thorough social media and internet search of anyone who offers help or wants to collaborate with you in any way.
Whilst the reality of what it takes to deliver Officially NONE OF THE ABOVE will always uncover those who are not committed to Community Meetings and what they will deliver, you cannot leave checking out who is volunteering to your first impressions.
The chances are that your focus could easily be on more important things than what they are doing, once you have put trust in them to do whatever they say. Sadly, the time it could take to see them for who they really are could be longer than it takes for real damage to have been done.
British Politics is broken because it works this very way, today.
Offers of Help you should always avoid:
People who have active or recent links to existing Political Parties.
People who are already Politicians or who work or are linked to Local Authorities.
People who don’t have any kind of record available when you search them out.
People with details and profiles online that appear to be unestablished or very new.
Anyone whose ‘story’ doesn’t match what they or anyone who has introduced them to you has told you.
Refusing the wrong kind of help:
It is quite possible that you will receive offers of help from People with a background like that we have just discussed, or that you have become aware that they are unlikely to be genuine in some other way.
Whether an offer of help is genuine or not, if you find that you need to decline or reject that offer for any reason at all, you should always do so properly, and be polite when you do so.
People who want to involve themselves in anything for the wrong reasons often have very fragile egos. They will become angry and problematic if they are given just the slightest excuse to do so.
Avoid giving them that excuse.
Things to be aware of:
Collaboration is essential between People and groups, when what is good for us all and for the whole Community is at stake.
Until now, different People and groups who have focused on political ideas and activism of one kind or another have happily allowed their own ideas to get in the way of the things in life that are most important to us all.
Officially NONE OF THE ABOVE requires that we think about what’s really important to everyone in a very different way.
You will enjoy the whole PROCESS if you are open to working with and collaborating with others. You will soon be making many new friends of People you already know, along the way!
STEP 8: Arrange your first Community Meeting
Once you have started to build up a list of local People you have had direct contact with who are interested in supporting what you are doing and in taking part, the next step is to arrange your first Community Meeting.
Holding Community Meetings is the METHOD to achieving Officially NONE OF THE ABOVE.
For the first meeting, aiming to have as few as between 30 and 50 local People in attendance is likely to be all you need.
This means you won’t have to wait too long before you can be confident of numbers, and it is likely that there will already be a pub with a function room or a community building of some kind that can be booked either free of charge or for a very modest fee.
The chances are that you will already have somewhere appropriate in mind.
Booking a room
Most Meeting Rooms that can be booked by members of the Public will have information about booking them online.
Look up the details and check the availability. But only proceed if you are happy with the terms of hire and that you already have the funds available to cover any Room Hire Costs.
Please avoid any venue that requires a Room Hire Fee, if you cannot cover the cost, if someone has not already volunteered to pay or donated the fee, or you haven’t already received enough in any Crowdfunder you may have set up.
A pub will be just as good as a dedicated Meeting Venue, and with the difficult times that we are all experiencing right now, you may find that your local Pub Landlord will be very receptive to the idea of having a group of local People come in!
Wherever you decide to hold your first Community Meeting – don’t go ahead unless and until you know that the venue management is happy first!
When to hold your first Community Meeting
It is essential to make it as easy as possible for as many members of your local Community to attend EVERY Community Meeting that you hold.
In time, it could easily become clear that enough People are available to attend meetings at a different time. But in the first instance, you are most likely to have the biggest attendance possible if you arrange your first Community Meetings on a Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday or Thursday evening, with a focus on the main business being conducted between 7 and 9pm.
Please avoid any dates when you know that there is any kind of event, like a local school parents evening or a big sports event on TV that will draw People’s attention elsewhere.
In time, it won’t matter. But to begin with, this will be the most effective way to get the maximum number of local People involved.
Make sure you let EVERYONE know
Whether they attend any of your Community Meetings or not, it is important that you let everyone in your community area know and provide notice of when and where the first one will be held.
You don’t need to drop leaflets or contact everyone directly when every Community Meeting that follows is held – as a notice by email or across all of your social media platforms for these will do.
However, for any subsequent Meeting arranged when any important decisions will be agreed – and in particular, when a Vote upon candidates to represent the Community in Elections is going to be held, you MUST make sure that everyone has been told.
It doesn’t matter if some People choose not to attend, or for some reason are unable to do so.
But it is essential that when something important is happening, EVERYONE in the Community has been informed or what is happening and has been offered the opportunity to be involved.
You only need to have put a leaflet through every door. But you must be sure that this has happened, so that no matter whether you have had direct contact with every household in your community area or not, EVERYONE has at least been made aware.
If you cannot achieve this for any reason, you should not go ahead with any meeting where any important decisions are made.
Otherwise, it is always possible that someone can say that they haven’t been informed about what your Community Meeting is doing, and that could cast doubt upon the legitimacy of the whole process.
The legitimacy of your Community Meeting can only be guaranteed if it is clear that everyone has a choice to get involved.
That said, don’t worry if you experience an existing Politician or someone like them or linked to them making accusations that they weren’t told what was going on.
As long as you know and can confirm that everyone has been contacted, they won’t have a leg for their argument or accusations to stand on.
Something important for you to bear in mind:
When you book a Meeting Room or Venue, it’s really important that you check that the owners or managers are happy for you to hold a Community Meeting.
There is nothing wrong with what you or any of us are doing.
However, many different Community buildings will be under the control of People like existing local Councillors, and People just like them, who are heavily invested in the current System and the way that it all works.
Many of them will not want to be seen to be supportive of what you are going to do.
They will make any excuse to stand in your way or object to your use of what is a community owned asset that was actually intended for just the kind of purpose you intend to use it for.
If you come across People who behave like this and misuse their position and the responsibility they have been entrusted with, you are just experiencing the kind of behaviour that Officially NONE OF THE ABOVE is working to remove from everyone’s way.
In the meantime, don’t sweat it or worry about it if small-minded and selfish people try to get in the way. There are plenty of other options and plenty of other ways to succeed.
Things to be aware of:
You do not need to have everyone signed up or committed to attending when you have your first Community Meeting. But you do need to have at least taken every step possible to ensure that they are aware.
Holding your first Community Meeting and then reporting back to other members of the Community about it will almost certainly prove to be a very useful way to help get even more People involved in the future.
So, it could be a good idea to be working on STEP 8 as soon as you start – as long as you are confident doing all the things you need to, and in keeping the momentum up too.
STEP 9: At your Community Meeting, let the People use their voice
Your role is that of being a facilitator for your Community Meeting. Not the voice of your Community Meeting itself.
When you met local People from across your Community in STEP 6, you explained who you were, what you were doing and why you were there, and then you listened as the Person or People told you what they think.
It is important to understand that your role at your first Community Meeting will be very similar again.
The strength in the PROCESS, METHOD and AIM of Officially NONE OF THE ABOVE is helping everyone in your community to take back their own power.
To do this, we must give everyone back the opportunity to speak, to use their own voice and to be heard.
The agenda for your first Community Meeting
The real agenda of your first Community Meeting is to begin the process of bringing what appears to be a very different group of People together. They can then begin the process of recognising the value of what they all have in common, and what they share, together. All in one room.
There is a good chance that amongst any Community Meeting, and particularly if the meeting is one of the first, there will be a Person or People present who will be happy to sound off very quickly, IF they don’t get the opportunity to take over. Or they believe that there is more value in doing things a different way.
When you begin and you speak for the first time, it is very important that you create and share a few brief ‘house rules’ with everyone.
These could be something like:
That by being here, and by taking part, we ALL agree that:
This Community Meeting is for everyone and as such, everyone will have the opportunity to speak – IF they want to.
We will all commit to listening to what every speaker has to say.
When we want to comment, our comments will be shared in the sense of looking forward and how ideas can be built and improved upon, rather than being negative and critical or focused on the past.
If we don’t understand someone else’s perspective or we believe that in some way it doesn’t make sense, we will respectfully ask them to explain their perspective further and ask them to do so using their experiences – if they are happy to share.
That we all remain polite, respectful of others, and above all else, we won’t speak across others and will wait for our turn.
You will be surprised by just how engaged everyone will quickly become, once they know that not only will they be heard, but everyone will be listening to everyone else with the same open mind too.
So that every member of the Community who is present is treated as fairly as can be, it might also be a good idea to follow a format and talk everyone through what that will happen as each person speaks, before you begin.
This might be something like this:
Everyone will have the opportunity to speak.
We will go around the room in order but will be happy to begin with anyone who is particularly keen to speak first.
When it’s your turn to speak, please share your name and the area of our community where you live.
Please also share with us if you already have a role within our community too.
We would then like to hear your thoughts on any issue which is concerning you, along with any thoughts about how people affected could be helped.
We would also like to hear your thoughts on what your ideal public representative should be experienced in and able to do, before we make a Community Decision upon whether to endorse them, and then support them when an Election is called.
The most important thing to do is to make sure that everyone who wants to speak has had the opportunity to do so – no matter how long it takes.
It’s always worth being patient.
Don’t let anyone talk about forming or agreeing Policy at this stage:
As we discussed in STEP 4 when we talked about posting on social media, this is not the time to do anything other than listen to what everyone has to sayand what experience they want to share. It’s not the right time to get into the details of Public Policy itself.
The overall AIM of Officially NONE OF THE ABOVE and the Community Meetings that you have brought into being, is for your community to select the very best Public Representatives that it can and then endorse and support them until they have successfully been elected. That is the right time for any discussion about Public Policy to begin.
If any kind of effort to reach agreement on a political position takes place at this stage – even if it’s about who and what, or how something is wrong, you will very quickly find that cracks will appear in the support you have been working so hard to grow.
No matter what the topic might be, even words that suggest People have to get behind an idea that might polarise opinion at this point, will be enough to derail your efforts.
People need to experience that Community Meetings not only have the power to bring members of your local Community together. They MUST also see and then KNOW that collaboration of this kind can yield genuine results too.
This will not be achieved until your Community Meeting has selected, endorsed and supported candidates and they have been elected – When People will see that Politics established on commonality rather than separation and difference, is a real alternative and choice.
Things to be aware of:
Communication is a two-way street.
Being a good communicator is as much about being able to listen and hear everyone when they speak or understand them through whatever it is that they do, as it is to speak, write or publish your words, yourself.
A public meeting is a very different environment to somebody’s own doorstep, where most people will feel safe. Many of the People who felt very comfortable talking to you one-to-one, will become hesitant to speak, when the opportunity comes to speak in front of ‘everyone’.
This is a very human and normal response. So don’t push anyone to speak if they don’t want to.
Also bear in mind that the experience of being in a group can make some People feel boxed in. If they think for any reason that what they have said could be viewed in some way as being wrong, they might easily become defensive too – which in some cases might appear they are becoming angry.
What you should have achieved when your first Community Meeting reaches its end
Your first Community Meeting is only the first. And it could be the first of a great many to come.
Let’s hope so. Because agreeing and then arranging your next Community Meeting will be one of the first and most meaningful ways that you can measure your success and see the result of the effort that you have put in.
By the end of the first Community Meeting, those attending should know and understand:
The primary AIM of Community Meetings is to qualify, select and then support candidates who are members of your local Community to stand in every upcoming Election as the candidate or candidates who have been chosen by the Community, to represent the Community and to speak and Vote on its behalf.
The dates and timelines for the next Parish/Town, Borough/District, County/Unitary Elections covering your area (where they are relevant), and any pointers you might then be able to provide about when the next General Election might be.
The role that each and every member of the local Community is being invited to play in selecting Community Candidates for upcoming Elections.
When the process of selecting Community Candidates for the next Election is likely to begin.
The date of the next Community Meeting.
What everyone who is already contributing to the PROCESS will be doing next.
How everyone can keep up to date, keep in touch and do their bit to build the Community Meeting, so that as many People as possible are ready and able to take part, when you all come together and meet next time.
You should arrange the next Community Meeting as soon as possible and hold meetings as frequently as possible thereafter.
Be prepared to have small interim meetings online, using software like Microsoft Teams or Zoom, if this will be helpful to anyone – and particularly everyone who is making an active contribution and taking part as a volunteer.
Depending upon how well attended your last Community Meeting was and when the next Election will be, you should begin taking steps and discussing the process you will use to select your Candidates as part of a special Community Meeting that you might be ready to hold next time.
Please be aware:
Your Community Candidates cannot begin working on their Election Campaign, or the pre-campaign work that they will need to, UNTIL your Community Meeting has Selected and Endorsed them.
STEP 10: Hold meetings to identify your community representatives and agree what happens next
The AIM of Officially NONE OF THE ABOVE is to have Candidates on every ballot paper in every Election who have been selected by the Community – so that there is a legitimate and qualified choice.
Selecting your Candidates for Endorsement will be rather like being an employer who is setting up and managing a recruitment process.
The key difference will be that there isn’t one person or two, but potentially an entire Community of local People that will be making the final decision and choice.
Because of the clear need and requirement to respect and protect personal data, some of the process may need to be undertaken by a committee that is appointed by your Community Meeting, which can then make a recommendation or perhaps offer several People who can then speak to the whole Community and answer questions that will help everyone to settle upon the final choice.
The most important part of the Candidate Selection process will be the very first job your Community Meeting will have to complete.
This will be to identify, agree and implement the framework or terms under which your appointed committee will then makes its recommendations or present its final choice.
Some things that you should all discuss and consider:
No person should automatically be precluded from consideration to be endorsed by your Community as a Candidate for reasons other than those which would disqualify any person from becoming a registered candidate in the relevant Election to be held.
However, a successfully Endorsed Candidate should, at least:
Already reside within the Community that they would represent or live very close by.
Offer experience of life which has enabled them to understand the priorities and behaviour of others, from across different social and demographic groups.
Offer sufficient experience of holding responsibility of some kind, within business or some other organisation, where they have demonstrated an appreciation of how organisations and services work.
Be patient and caring for others, with a clear ability to listen, understand and empathise whilst remaining objective where different perspectives and experiences may be involved.
Have confidence and the ability to speak and explain real life concepts to others objectively and to present alternative options in a way that is accessible to all and basically makes sense.
Possess evident self-awareness and the ability to consider the impact of their actions upon others, as well as the likely actions of others upon themselves, all in ‘real time’.
Be aspirational rather than idealistic. And practical but not negative in their demeanor and approach.
Have skills and knowledge that would clearly be beneficial to the Community, when used in a relevant political role.
Be driven by public service, rather than by personal ambition of any kind.
Your Community Meeting should avoid selecting a Candidate, purely because:
They are popular or already have some kind of ‘standing’ in the Community.
You like them.
They sound credible and appear to know ‘all the right things’.
They already have a ‘following’ of some kind.
They seem to have a lot of ideas.
Under no circumstances should your Community Meeting be asked to consider any person for endorsement as a Candidate, if:
They are a current member of any Political Party or activist organisation.
They are a sitting / elected member of any Council, or Parliament or of any other publicly appointed or elected body.
They have been a member of any existing Political Party within the past 5 years.
To be fair, finding People who have the most appropriate kind of experience and approach who actually want to be involved in Politics, given the way that things are and how they have been, won’t be the easiest task. At least right at the very beginning.
However, finding the right People from within your local Community is certainly nowhere near impossible.
The PROCESS will be made much easier by following each of the TEN STEPS to Officially NONE OF THE ABOVE, as rigorously and as diligently as you can.
The reality is that once People start to become aware that there is a growing, non-political option that’s all about doing what’s right for everyone, many more good People will be interested in coming forward to serve on behalf of our communities than those who are prepared to take the risk that Politics offers them right now.
Choosing your Candidate Selection Committee
Choosing the members of your Community Meeting who will sift through, research and initially interview potential Candidates for Endorsement is just as important a job as selecting the Candidates to stand in Elections themselves.
As with Candidate Selection, the ability to be objective is key.
Selection Committee Members must be able to look at every part of the information they have and go in search of and be able to consider it without letting their own experiences and biases get in the way.
You will need at least three People and preferably five or even seven to take on this role.
Of these, it may become apparent that one member will have more of these attributes and as such may be well placed to take on a chair or facilitator role, where they can point out where certain things may have excessive influence on how Candidates are perceived in some way.
Transparency
Whatever process you decide upon and whether you have a Candidate Selection Committee or not, there is absolutely no reason to hide anything, other than any personal information that it is only right and that it might be necessary to protect.
Please research handling personal data and The Office of The Information Commissioner if unsure.
When your Community Meeting has agreed and set the Terms for Candidate Selection, these should be published in full online, with links highlighted and made available across all of the social media platforms that you are using and making available publicly.
It is essential that the process your Community Meeting uses to select, and Endorse Candidates for Elections is clear, agreeable and fair to everyone – with the balance of fairness always weighted towards the Community as a whole, rather than what will be helpful to any particular Candidate.
PLEASE REMEMBER: Public Representation IS NOT A JOB. IT IS A RESPONSIBILITY.
For this reason alone, it is essential that no part of this whole process is compromised by entertaining even the smallest bias towards what any individual involved within it may want.
Presentation, Questions and Answers
No matter the process your Community Meeting decides upon to get there, the final decision and therefore the Endorsement of a Candidate by the Community, MUST come from an overall Vote of the Community Meeting itself.
Whilst the Candidate Selection Committee may have made a selection, or ideally presented several preferred choices for the Community Meeting to make its choice or choices from, it is essential that all those members of the local Community taking part in the final Vote have had the opportunity to see the ability of the candidate(s) to represent them, demonstrated BEFORE that Vote takes place.
One of the best ways to achieve this, beyond an open Question & Answer session, will be to ask the final candidates to talk through their understanding of a complex area of public policy that the Community Meeting has already identified as being important.
Then ask them to go through, in detail, and explain their understanding of each and every aspect of that issue. How they would go about finding a solution, and what their considerations for reaching a choice of solution would then be.
How many Candidates does your Community Meeting need to Endorse?
This may sound like a silly question to ask at first glance, as many of us are used to the idea that we Vote for one person to represent an area in any Election.
That’s certainly true for Parliamentary Elections when we are voting for an MP to represent us.
However, it’s not always the case for Local Elections when Councillors are being elected.
So, it’s not unusual to be electing 2 different Councillors or perhaps even 3 at the same time – meaning that Voters will need to choose that number of candidates to support when they actually come to Vote.
By rule of thumb, the more local the Council or the smaller the geographical area it covers, the more candidates – and Votes on one ballot, local People could have. The very first time I was elected as a Councillor to a Town Council, my Seat was one of 6!
Therefore, your Community Meeting will need to endorse the same number of Candidates for the number of Seats or Vacancies to be filled, that there are.
This information will be available from your local Democratic Services or Elections department and more information about the different Councils and the Tiers of Government can be found on my FREE to read, web version of How to get Elected.
REMEMBER: The AIM of Community Meetings with Officially NONE OF THE ABOVE is to provide all Voters with the exact number of Candidates to fill any elected positions that are vacant within our current System of Government.
The Community Meeting will select those Candidates through the Officially NONE OF THE ABOVE process, just like the Political Parties use their own processes to.
The VERY BIG difference is that Candidates endorsed by Community Meetings will be selected to be genuine Public Representatives who work for and on behalf of the Community. Rather than being Candidates who will always be working for someone, somewhere else and out of sight, with an agenda that isn’t in yours or your community’s best interests.
The Vote
When it comes to the final Vote of the Community Meeting and the Candidate Endorsement itself, the Vote to achieve this MUST be conducted in the fairest way that it can be.
On the face of it, it would appear that the easiest way to be assured of legitimacy would be to work with a simple show of hands.
However, when everyone can see what everyone else is doing, it can too easily mean that ‘group think’ or fear of offending or upsetting certain People from within the local Community can get to work. This is something you will always need to be mindful of.
Remember, if the PROCESS and METHOD are compromised at any stage, then the real AIM of all of the work and effort made will not have been achieved. The Community WILL NOT have the chance to be represented properly and legitimately in the way that it should.
Therefore, passing a ballot paper or slip of paper with the name(s) of each candidate listed to each member of the Community who is voting, and asking them to place a tick against the name of one of the proposed candidates listed, will almost certainly be the right way to complete the voting process and to ensure that it has been fairly done.
Supporting The Candidate
Once your Community Meeting has endorsed your Candidate(s), the work doesn’t end there.
The process of supporting your Candidate(s) to connect with everyone across the Community is your next essential step.
You should use all of the social media platforms that you have to make People aware of who your Community Meeting has Endorsed, and therefore who has the Community Meeting’s qualified support.
Preparing for Elections
It is important to remember that Officially NONE OF THE ABOVE is neither a Book nor a Guide for Election Candidates, once they have been Endorsed by a Community Meeting will need to do as part of an Election campaign itself.
Officially NONE OF THE ABOVE is about the creation of circumstances where Candidates for Elected Public Offices have been vetted, selected, approved and endorsed by the Community to be on our ballot papers as a ‘recommended for, by and on behalf of this Community’ choice.
In time, being Endorsed by a Community Meeting to run as a Candidate in any Election will be enough, in itself, to attract Votes from a significant number of People. Much in the same way that the majority of political candidates get backed by People right now. Not because of who they are. But because of which Political Party they are running with.
It may be a relatively short time until your Endorsed Candidate(s) attract that kind of support. But that time could well prove be longer than the time between now and the next Election in your area.
Ideally, your Community Meeting will Endorse Candidates to run in the next Election that is scheduled or expected.
Whenever that Election might be, it is essential your Endorsed Candidates begin work on campaigning across the area and connecting with Members of the Community, in very much the same way as you will be doing yourself.
Until such time as a shared name or political vehicle might be needed and agreed upon to bring all Community Meeting endorsed or approved Candidates together, the best way for any Candidate to consider themselves for the purposes of registering with your local Democratic Services or Elections Office, is to run as an ‘Independent’ candidate.
The very first book that I wrote and published, “How to Get Elected” is intended to help Independent Candidates in a way that is almost identical to the support that your Endorsed Candidates are likely to need right now.
You will find the whole book split up into pages and available to read FREE HERE. (The FREE version is much easier to access from a PC, where the page titles are listed in order, on the right-hand side of the screen).
Alternatively, you can buy and download a copy of How to get Elected for Kindle from Amazon HERE.
How to Get Elected is a self-help or ‘How to’ guide that covers all the things a Candidate needs to be aware of or to consider, with a lot of additional thoughts, experience and tips thrown in.
Like Officially NONE OF THE ABOVE, the way to get the very best value from the book, How to Get Elected, is to read it all the way through, without missing anything out.
How to Get Elected will fill in all the gaps that need to be crossed by Candidates, before other support and help may become available.
Fundraising
Costs that may occur such as Room Hire, and printing leaflets have been mentioned at a number of different points throughout the TEN STEPS.
Before anything else, you will not need to spend any money or even consider whether you will need to spend money BEFORE you have reached STEP 8 and are in the early stages of arranging your first Community Meeting.
If you have already gained sufficient support for your first Community Meeting, it is likely that you will also have enough support to raise the modest funding necessary to cover any costs of Room Hire and Leaflet Production/Printing too.
Protecting yourself and protecting your donors
The first thing you need to consider if you are going to raise money to pay for any Community Meeting related costs, is that any money you raise – even if it’s just pennies – is NOT yours.
If you’ve told People that any money they donate will be for a specific purpose, or just in general terms to help the creation of your Community Meeting in some way, that is the only purpose that it should ever be used for.
In the stages leading up to your first Community Meeting and possibly beyond, the safest way for you to raise money or receive donations is likely to be through setting up an online crowdfunding campaign using a platform like Go Fund Me or Just Giving. (There are others that you will find by doing an online search of ‘Crowdfunding’ or similar, too)
If you set up an account online, it is likely, depending upon which platform you use, that you will be able to manage your fundraising using an app and you will automatically be able to manage and track money coming in.
Not only that. You will also have the added value that will come from being able to post even more information about your Officially NONE OF THE ABOVE campaign within your local Community – and that can only be a big help!
Managing donations and protecting your Community Meeting
It may not be possible or practical to open up a bank account to manage any funds your Community Meeting campaign receives.
But it will be necessary to keep a written record of what money you withdraw or transfer from any Crowdfunder you’ve set up, and then how every bit of it is spent.
Whatever you spend money on (e.g., Room Hire, Printing costs), you should always ask for and keep a receipt.
Each transaction should be recorded in an Excel spreadsheet or similar – which will also make your input much easier, as the software can be set up to automatically do any sums for you.
It may sound like a lot of effort for very little. But when you are managing other People’s money, it’s the real detail that actually counts.
By keeping a very clear and transparent record of the process of financial management you have used, it will be very simple for you to demonstrate that you’ve done everything properly, IF anyone should ask.
It will also then be much easier and less time-consuming for you to hand over responsibility for financial matters to another person, as more volunteers become involved in building your Community Meeting.
Please Remember:
Donations are always made for what the donor believes they will be used for. Not so that you or anyone else can then use them for something else.
Any money given in the form of a donation belongs to the Community and should be given back to donors immediately, if your campaign stops at any time.
You are raising funds so that the only donation you have to make personally is your effort and time, without there being any financial cost to you.
Part 2: For those who just want to be able to Vote and know that their Vote will have real meaning
First of all, A WARNING:
There’s nothing passive about voting.Unless someone else has stolen your Vote.
Yes, you could be one of many who simply don’t bother to Vote when an Election comes to your local area, right now.
But that’s when you only had the option to Vote for something that’s important to somebody else. With Officially NONE OF THE ABOVE and Community Meetings, you will now have the choice and option to Vote for something that will prioritise what is important for you, as well as for us all.
As we discussed earlier, change is always happening.
The choice you have is whether you want to play a part in defining change, or whether you want to sit back and let change happen to you.
You don’t need to be one of the People who will immediately take up an active, facilitator-type role for Officially NONE OF THE ABOVE, and undertake the tasks outlines in detail throughout the TEN STEPS in Part 2.
But you won’t be helping anyone who does, and you certainly won’t be helping yourself and the opportunity that we all have for a Political System that genuinely works for us all, IF you don’t at least involve yourself enough to keep up to date with progress, spread the word to others, and attend Community Meetings whenever a choice or important decision that may impact your future, will be made.
If you don’t want to be actively involved, the STEPS you can STILL take that will help your Community Meeting are:
Supporting your Community Meeting on social media.
Supporting your Community Meeting by sharing the word.
Supporting your Community Meeting by sharing your experiences and any relevant information you might find.
Attending your Community Meetings whenever they are called.
Supporting your Community Meeting by taking part in the process of selecting Candidates for Elections and taking part in any Community Meeting Votes.
Supporting your Community Meeting by voting for all Candidates that the Community Meeting has endorsed when an Election takes place.
Supporting your Community Meeting on social media
Whilst there is no genuine substitute for meeting with other members of your local Community face to face, if you don’t have the time or don’t feel able to be involved in absolutely everything that the others involved with your local Community Meeting do, it will be both easy and helpful for you and your Community Meeting, if you support them by following whatever they are doing online.
Not everyone uses social media. But we are now in a time where the majority of People do. Of those that do, only a fraction will openly support or engage with articles, blogs and posts, even though they will have been of interest or made them think in some way.
The simple act of following or liking the social media pages and platforms of your local Community Meeting will be a massive help to build momentum, IF being able to be able to Vote for Candidates who are real and genuinely offer the option of NONE OF THE ABOVE, is all that you really want to achieve.
Because of the way that online technology such as search engines, algorithms and the AI or Artificial Intelligence that already operates many of these ‘platform’ sites on the Internet work, something as simple as a like or follow will immediately tell them that your interest in what your Community Meeting is doing, is real.
As a direct result, they will very quickly begin to ask other People like you, if your Community Meeting is something that would be of interest to them too.
This could make a massive difference for the cost of what could be no more than a couple of clicks.
Remember:
Community Meetings will bring members of the local Community together to select the People that the Community will support to become their Public Representatives.
This is not in itself a political act.
By liking or following your Community Meeting, you are simply sharing with anyone who knows or is interested in you, that you are taking seriously how the decisions affecting everyone locally are made, and that you are concerned enough that you believe it necessary to support the process and method that will deliver genuine change.
Supporting your Community Meeting by sharing the word
Another very easy way to support your Community Meeting is to talk about what local People are doing with Officially NONE OF THE ABOVE to anyone you see or have regular conversation with.
Word of mouth is a very powerful and influential tool. It also demonstrates just how important and helpful genuine and direct interaction with real People can actually be. It focuses on what Community Meetings are genuinely all about.
You don’t have to sell Community Meetings in the sense of eulogising or championing them to other People, unless you actually want to and feel comfortable doing so.
If you are open with people you know, about why Community Meetings are of interest to you and you share the facts about Officially NONE OF THE ABOVE, as they genuinely are and what we are aiming to achieve together, the benefits of your local Community Meeting will very quickly sell themselves.
Please Remember:
If it helps to keep the conversation short, just tell People about Officially NONE OF THE ABOVE and suggest that they also read the Book.
Otherwise, if you have a little more time and feel able, share the Usernames and links to the social media platforms that you have for your Community Meeting, once its developing and running, you can then leave it to People to take a look and then decide for themselves.
Supporting your Community Meeting by sharing your experiences and any relevant information you might find
Following on social media and spreading the word will be a fantastic help to your Community Meeting.
But you can help even more, IF you use your social media and the remote channels that are available to you, to actually contribute and take part online.
Community Meetings will always be the place for decisions to be made on what the Community wants to do about anything.
But the flow of information between Meetings will help everyone who is actively involved or just following progress from a distance.
If you see subjects or events relating to Community Meetings raised on social media that interest you, please do not be afraid to make comments or add information that might create or promote greater understanding – IF you are happy to share that information in an open forum, online.
People can only learn when they are open to learning. But the most powerful tool for learning is the sharing of others’ experiences. Not because anyone’s experience has more value than anyone else. But because sharing experiences of parts of life that others haven’t had, certainly cuts down on the requirement of time to do so, for yourself.
Interaction and sharing the benefit of your experience to help your Community Meeting and the Candidates that you come together to endorse, is the greatest currency for change that we all have as we focus on real, meaningful change.
By taking part, asking questions, flagging things that you’ve seen or heard, or just making the time to speak to other People about Community Meetings and then turning up at them, you can help the process of change in countless ways.
Remember:
You are never under any obligation to interact with any social media account, just because you follow or have liked it.
You should never post anything online that you would not want to share with People who you see regularly or face-to-face in your real life.
If you disagree with what someone else has said or believe that the information they have shared is incorrect or wrong, the best thing to do is to challenge the information they have shared itself and do so, not by simply saying it’s wrong. But by taking the time to politely and constructively explain why.
Better still, offer the details of the alternative you have based your challenge upon, to what they have suggested too.
But NEVER make your reply angry, or personal about them – and certainly not about you.
Supporting everyone by attending your Community Meetings whenever they are called
Within the TEN STEPS you will have read that it is essential that every member of the local Community is kept informed of anything important that your Community Meeting is planning to do.
On this basis, if a Community Meeting is being arranged to hold a Vote or make a decision, you should at the very least be made aware of the details such as when it will be held and where it will be held – if nothing else.
You don’t have to attend Community Meetings if that is your choice. But if you really want to keep up with what your Community Meeting is doing, and either speak or share your experiences, or just use the opportunity to be an influence in any Vote, it is also essential that you attend.
Remember:
Taking part is everything. By taking part in whatever way you are able to, you are contributing to change. If you don’t take part in any way, you are going to let change happen to you.
Supporting your Community Meeting in the process of selecting Candidates for Elections, and taking part in any Community Meeting Votes
As you will have gathered from reading STEP 10 in Part 1, your Community Meeting will be most effective in the decisions that it makes, by ensuring that the terms for Selecting Candidates and then Endorsing them is done right.
EVERYONE in your Community has something to give in terms of experience or anything else they can share. Everyone’s views are important and attending Community Meetings is the way that you can truly make your Vote count.
Supporting your Community Meeting by voting for all Candidates that the Community Meeting has endorsed when an Election takes place
Your input isn’t worth the paper it’s written on, IF you don’t actually Vote.
The whole reason for Officially NONE OF THE ABOVE is the process of depoliticising the British Political system, so that Politics can deliver for us all, in the way that a democracy should really work.
To some – and you may be one of them, taking part in an Election is all that being part of a democracy will take.
But you must also understand and accept that who you Vote for is very important too.
On the day of the Election or Vote itself, your Vote could be one of just a few or maybe just the one itself, that puts a Public Representative into their role who was selected for the right reasons and endorsed as part of a Community Choice.
We no longer have the luxury of leaving our future to someone else. Many of those someone else’s we thought we could trust have already taken the opportunity that our apathy and disengagement has unwittingly given them. They have then done exactly what they’ve wanted, calling it ‘the will of the People’, all because they were supported by the mere fraction of us who Voted them into power in an Election, when that fraction of the community turned up.
You can be involved and support Officially NONE OF THE ABOVE and your Community Meeting in any way that works for you.
But if you really want change to happen that works in the best interests of everyone, please keep up to date.
When the next Election comes, please Vote for the Candidate(s) that local People with the same things in common as you, have committed the time and effort to select on behalf of your community – but most importantly, on behalf of you.
Support that will be on offer
Officially NONE OF THE ABOVE has been written in the knowledge that once momentum starts building for Community Meetings, support will come from many directions and will come in many ways.
There is no guide to how long the creation and holding of a Community Meeting will take.
Not just because everyone who picks up this book and begins work will approach the TEN STEPS depending upon the way they have read them. But because each and every Community area is very different, is made up of different People and for many different reasons will respond faster or slower to Officially NONE OF THE ABOVE, in very different ways.
With this in mind, there is a very good chance that all you will need to get started and make good progress before support comes knocking on your door will be included within this book.
However, if you should find that you have any questions, or have the need to understand any of the ideas, suggestions and thoughts that I have shared with you here, PLEASE get in touch.
It will be great to hear from you and I will happily respond to all polite and constructive requests and help in any way that I can, in the most appropriate way that I feel possible.
Will NONE OF THE ABOVE become a Political Party?
Let’s put first things first.
The whole focus of Officially NONE OF THE ABOVE is to provide the immediate method and means to address the real challenge we face and must overcome with our broken Political System, as it is today.
With established Political Parties and their own motives and agendas filling up the majority of seats across our whole government system, The System itself is effectively broken.
We must also accept that any new Political Party attempting to do things in what is technically the same way as those that already have seats won’t bring the changes that we need, that work in the best interests of everyone. Because if they were to be elected and gain power, the words and the policies might be different, but their approach, attitude and motivation would end up being bad for all of us in exactly the same ways.
Public Policy is the problem, and that problem is hurting us all.
However, to fix Public Policy problems, we have to focus first on fixing the root cause.
The root cause of all the problems are the People who become our Politicians and a situation that leads to the same self-interested and incompetent type of People being the only choices we have and then repeatedly elect.
The Selection and Endorsement of Candidates and the process that will engage each and every one of us to choose and support them in Elections is what Officially NONE OF THE ABOVE is here to provide.
When we have created a new system of Community Meetings where each Community selects and then supports its own Council, Parliamentary and all other kinds of Political Candidates, then and only then can we genuinely begin to address the genuine Public Policy issues that we now face.
Existing Political Parties serve a purpose that is not about the whole Community. Their purpose is all about the pursuit of ideas and interests that are their own.
The only way that the formation of a Political Party would be of benefit to Officially NONE OF THE ABOVE, would be the structure and support frameworks that it could provide to all Community Meetings and the Candidates that they select, endorse and support.
Because of the inherent danger that anyone in key positions of such a Political Party could fall into the trap of going their own way or going off in a direction that doesn’t benefit the whole Community, the governance of such an organisation would have to be very robust and reliant upon people with a lot of integrity, right from the start.
In time, there may be very practical reasons for joining up a network of Community Meetings in some kind of affiliated or federated way, that might then, through necessity, be required to become formally registered with the Electoral Commission as a Political Party.
That time is not now.
But it would be a very nice problem for People like you and I to have, once Officially NONE OF THE ABOVE is working and is doing its job across our communities.
Be Positive, Be Optimistic, but above all, Be Real
Whatever happens, whatever any of you do, there are no guarantees.
People have free will. It will be the choice of everyone whether they want to change and be part of the opportunity to influence change, or if they want to do nothing and let change of a different kind happen to them.
It is also important to understand that it is impossible to consider all of the factors or the impacts of events that have already happened or are yet to happen, and what influence they might have upon the short- and long-term future for us all.
We can only do our best and make the most of the opportunity.
Have faith, keep focused and you may soon understand what belief can really do.
More Reading
All of the following titles are available to purchase as complete eBooks for Kindle from Amazon using the links provided.
Where indicated, titles may also be available to download FREE as PDF Copies from my Blogsite in different forms, using the links provided.
If you would like to discuss any of the works listed, please get in touch.
Not in my name. You don’t speak for us. NONE OF THE ABOVE.
These expressions of frustration, anger, distrust and disenfranchisement from the Political System we have today are shared by a growing number of us.
We feel that because we cannot Vote for good politicians and public representatives, we have had our democratic rights taken away.
The situation goes from bad to worse, each and every day. Everything that Politicians, Government and Public Services seem to touch is failing. And the rules that Politicians are supposed to manage and set, seem to have done nothing but encourage private interests and big business to operate without any real kind of control.
When the People who lead us are out for themselves, how can we expect anyone else to behave differently?
The truth is, that we cannot.
But there is a way we can create alternative options for Candidates on ballot papers for us ALL to Vote for in every Election. That is, IF we accept and are then prepared to make the effort to create and be part of the change that is necessary.
Officially NONE OF THE ABOVE is a ‘How To’ guide, that will open you up to a new way of thinking about the way that Politics in a democracy should work. It provides suggestions, advice and a doorway to easy-to-access tools, using a system of Community Meetings that will help everyone to reject ALL OF THE ABOVE and then have a genuine and meaningful democratic choice.
Officially NONE OF THE ABOVE will present you with a series of TEN STEPS that can be followed, IF you want the choice of Candidates in future Elections who will work for and on behalf of you and your local Community.
PLEASE Follow it. Learn from it. Improve on it. Share it. Officially NONE OF THE ABOVE is here for you.
PLEASE NOTE: This book is not about Public Policy or Political ideas. It provides a method of putting good People into Politics, so that we then get Public Policy that corresponds.
Building, enabling and maintaining good governance, self-sufficiency and freedom for all people and our communities
The Greek Stoic Philosopher Epictetus said “It is not possible to learn what you think you already know.”
Today, one of the greatest challenges that humanity faces is the reality that almost every one of us believes that we already understand how the world works and subsequently believe that how it works today will always continue to provide the basis of how the world will work tomorrow.
With even the most educated academics and experienced experts suffering from what can be argued as a situational bias, where virtually nobody can picture a way of living where the fundamental factors like money and the economic system that we have today aren’t exactly the same, it seems that we have just as easily slipped into the tragic and passive acceptance that the things that we want to be changed, either cannot or will not be changed. For no better reason that we refuse to give up the things that those changes will necessitate, that we still believe to profit or benefit us personally in some way.
For any speaker or writer who dares venture into the realms of sharing even just one or two layers of the massively multilayered truths that underpin the workings of today’s world using a lens or microscope to focus upon one area of life, government or business, the complexities quickly become too hard for others to believe and the label or badge of being a conspiracy theorist or perhaps worse fits just as easily whilst serving the purposes of those who ride the ‘blissful ignorance’ of the masses ridiculously well.
The truth that even the many who do accept that change has now become more than necessary cannot deal with, is that neither the majority nor the critical mass of people required to initiate meaningful levels of societal change can be reached whilst we remain ‘bought in’ to the current paradigm at any level.
Indeed, the change that our lucid moments allow us to recognise as being the only possible direction for a just, fair and balanced society and culture, will not be accepted and certainly not embraced, until enough of us have felt the real pain that the way mankind lives today will inevitably inflict upon us all. For as long as money and material wealth rule the day.
A HAPPY WORLD isn’t coin operated
The world could not only work as well as it does today. But it would actually work much better. IF everyone did what they did, without being tied into the shared belief that everything has monetary value.
Yet it doesn’t take much for any one of us to build a wall against this truth when we will almost inevitably fall into the trap of believing that whilst we might personally be able to accept a different system of values, we believe that nobody else will. Because they are selfish and coin operated. And that as such, the world will always be destined to work the same way.
What I will say to you now is that the world does not and has never needed to be coin operated or run by money. And it can no longer continue to operate in this same way.
The way that the world works today is a manmade construct. One that has fear – not happiness, peace or love at its heart.
What is more, each of us may well have had the free will to choose fear as our motivation and our guide in times past.
But when the impact and consequences of that motivation on the part of any one of us leads to a situation where the free will to choose between fear and the alternative is no longer available for others to decide, the imbalance that is created is one that will inevitably lead to inescapable pain and impoverished circumstances for those others from which it will be impossible for the world itself to hide.
The contradictory belief that unsustainable living is sustainable, because the narrative says so
Fanciful as it may sound, the reality we all face is that the unsustainable ways in which we have all been living have already gone too far.
The decisions that legislators and leaders make do not reflect what is in the best interests of humanity and everything they now do is progressively making a very bad situation even worse.
We do not and have never needed the world to work as it does now.
The benefits of a whole world and everything within it being twisted and manipulated to serve the interests of just a few, are worth nothing and do nothing but cause pain and harm to the masses.
This is an incalculable level of tragedy when we realise that the fundamental basis of everything we need, is being able to or having the ability to live a good life.
A Good Life cannot be bought
A good life isn’t created or achieved on the basis of what we have, what we accumulate or what other people think.
A good life is a state of mind.
And it is a state of mind that allows each and every one of us the opportunity to open the door and rediscover who we really are.
Those committed to the current paradigm will certainly argue that only wealth, influence, power and control can provide the circumstances where this kind of peace can be achieved.
Yet there is nothing peaceful, beneficial and certainly not spiritual about living a life that may be perceived as being good. But can only be achieved where at least one and potentially many others are having to pay some kind of cost.
Just like our bodies are an ecosystem that work to their very best when they are looked after, our communities and localities are all that groups of us need to survive and thrive, whilst showing and maintaining that same respect for all others and sharing between all of us the things that different communities can do that we cannot and vice versa, with the express belief and understanding that cooperation and collaboration rather than control are all any of us need to have very good lives.
Our Future is Local
Plenty has been said and written about the virtues of looking within ourselves rather than continually looking outside for all of the answers, truths and directions that we expect to make our lives work.
Indeed, the purpose of this work isn’t to focus upon the benefits of self-awareness and levels of self-knowing that reach way beyond any basic understanding of self-help fashions such as mindfulness which can be found in seemingly endless numbers online and on channels such as YouTube and TikTok. As that is a journey for each of us to pursue and conclude upon personally.
However, the circumstances and situations that lend themselves to that journey of personal learning and progress are a different matter altogether.
In very basic terms, the most productive and beneficial way for us to live our lives, to experience a good life and to live a life where we will know that we will genuinely succeed, is to live locally, or in ways where everything to which we attribute real value is experienced as first hand, through people we meet face to face and through life experiences which are fully lived and not accessed at any level through the equivalent of a screen.
To experience the human condition and human relationships, it is necessary to have relationships directly with other humans that will condition us to understand how and why other humans behave the way they do and how they think.
Living any other way immediately adds unnecessary levels of complexity in which the behaviours and choices that harm others can easily hide, that just like any other lie, require many other lies and layers of lies in order to protect the original lie.
Despite many convincing narratives that suggest otherwise, progress doesn’t only travel one way. Just like technology doesn’t automatically mean the redundancy and erasure of methodologies that came before it. And it certainly doesn’t mean that advances of any kind that benefit those who control them, should ever come at the cost, hardship, loss or pain of those who would have been involved in any accepted practice that came before it.
In fact, technology driven by the correct motives and the desire to improve life, rather than replace it, is representative of genuine progress, whereas technology used to replace and impoverish people so that those who own and control it can profit is most certainly not representative of any kind of progress.
Just because jobs can be replaced by technology doesn’t mean that they either need to be, or that they should be. And if money wasn’t the only real consideration that was being involved, neither would anyone believe that there would be any need to be either.
Indeed, if money were not in the equation, the need for big companies or big anything, wouldn’t even exist.
The only businesses or organisations that we would need at any level, would be those that have the structures necessary to provide for all our essential needs and the goods and services that make a genuinely good life work.
These aren’t big businesses. Because they aren’t driven by the suggestion that costs can be lowered so that more profit can be made or one business can undercut another that does the same thing, because it can do the same things more cheaply in some way.
These are businesses that exist to provide the best at what they do and provide the best experience that they can for the people that they serve.
These are businesses that are local, that are part of a local supply chain and work within a local circular economy in its truest sense, that have no need to be bigger or biggest, because the one set of values that we all share is built around the belief that every one of us is worth and has value that is exactly the same.
Our Local Future
The default setting that most of us have from the way that our lives and understanding of life has been conditioned will tell even the most learned and intelligent of us that money centric living will always be the way and that everything we are working through here is little more than some kind of utopian dream that is wholly impractical and will never come true.
Yet unsustainable living is by its very nature unsustainable at every level, at that means that to live and believe that it is sustainable is itself untrue.
Those who are looking more closely at the narratives and the truths that they hide will know that life is going to change in one way or another. It is not a question of if, but when, and the only real question that none of us can accurately answer – even though it is easy to speculate, is what event or series of events will be responsible for setting off what we can almost be sure will be a process of change, if we are not already now within it?
Because we tend to be obsessed over the journey and who has decision making control over the next step(s), rather than the outcomes of everything we do, we use outcomes in the sense of what they mean only to us as the basis of any argument over what should come next – in real terms, whose ideas and suggestions should come first.
From this perspective and the conflict that we can see as soon as we begin to be open to how everything works, it can easily feel impossible to visualise an outcome or range of outcomes that could be achievable after having gained buy-in from everyone and the pathways they are demanding, so that the result is meaningful to all as well as being something that actually works.
The paradox is of course that without being able to visualise the destination and what that destination will actually feel like, what it will be to experience it and what being there will actually mean, we don’t have a collective cat in hells chance of ever getting there or doing anything that will actually succeed.
Minded of this, I wrote Our Local Future and took the leap to create a vision or picture of what a world that works for us all would actually look like, feel like and work like. And you can read and work through the structure of Our Local Future and download a copy of the book by visiting HERE.
Putting the first steps towards tomorrow’s world in today’s terms
Whereas Our Local Future may provide the reader with a picture of what a fully functioning just, fair and balanced locality-based world would look like, whether they agree with that vision or not, it does not and will not provide a guide or map that includes all the different steps that we will collectively need to get there. For no better reason than dogmatically sticking to any plan will create more problems than it will ever solve and that in a world of complexity and contradictions like the one we are experiencing today, plans can never replace the choices made by decision makers who make the right decision in the moment, and ultimately will not work.
However, what is not only possible, but is also required with the outlook that we tend to share, is an example of the stepping off point; a signpost in the direction of travel, or rather an outline of the first steps that we could and that we arguably should be taking now. So that what we are doing to ourselves today is no longer destined to be our end, but can be the point from which we make a conscious decision to take each step, and then keep moving and changing step by step, to transform from a world that doesn’t work for everyone, into a world that works for us all, as it always should.
Who does this is not something we should worry about, unless we remain captured by that idea that the next step and who controls it is more important than the outcome or destination itself. And without recognising this, it continues to be unlikely that we will ever agree on how we will recognise that outcome, because the outcome and destination will never have become the topic of our discussion or debate.
From this perspective, I would rather have my work taken apart so that it can be improved upon by all those who can improve upon it, than for the work to have never started at all. And with this in mind, I have created and committed to digital pages An Economy for the Common Good, as a model for how we could all come together as communities and within our localities work together to make a start.
The Glos Community Project
I began this work or project in the summer of 2023, and at that point simply intended to turn an idea in to a practical or turnkey model of how a group of well-intended and appropriately motivated volunteers could begin creating a structure that would lead to a fully functioning and localised economy, that would lead to outcomes that would place localism, circular economy, sustainability and sustainable living, awakened forms of governance and therefore real democracy at its heart.
Because the whole point is about our own communities and where we live and work, I created this model around the areas in which I have lived and live today, so that it would be as realistic as it can be from the very start.
The model is called The Glos Community Project and follows in the next section of this book as a structured and self-explanatory plan that goes as far as to provide the basic adverts and job specs for the social entrepreneurs and community volunteers who are envisaged as being the leaders and pioneers of building An Economy for the Common Good.
The Glos Community Project model is only a guide, providing that first step that I have already alluded to, and one that I hope will invite every reader to think about how our world can and will operate very differently, once we have accepted and are ready to embrace that we must place people, community and the environment we live in at its heart.
The content that follows has been structured in the form of a website that can be found HERE, where comments can be added at the bottom of each page.
If you would like to make suggestions about the subjects raised, please share them there or do get in touch by email at acommunityroute@gmail.com if you would prefer not to share your thoughts publicly.
Please note that I will be happy to publish anything that is well intended and clearly shared with the intention of achieving the best outcome(s) for all, even where such an example directly improves upon the work that has been shared.
Thank you for reading and for your interest in creating An Economy for the Common Good.
Adam Tugwell
February 2025
The Glos Community Project
Introduction
Hello there!
I’m Adam and Gloucestershire is my home. Gloucestershire is the County where I was born and where my family live. It’s where I went to school, where I first worked in farming, where I first trained as a manager for an international company, where I first ran and developed projects for a charity and where I set up my first business. Gloucestershire is also where I was an elected Councillor and Member of three of Gloucestershire’s Local Authorities.
As you can already see, I have a very strong affiliation with Gloucestershire, and with Cheltenham, Cirencester, Tewkesbury and Winchcombe in particular. However, all these places are important to me, not just because of the role and part they have already played in my life. But especially so, because they are all parts of the same community and local communities of which I am or have also been a part.
Community can mean a lot of things and could easily be considered to be different, depending on who you talk to. However, to me a community is the group of people who you share all of the important things in life with, rather than being the people who you share the same things with that are important in your own life.
Community is People and Place
The Community and what the community can do has never been as important as it is becoming and as it will soon become. Given all of the turbulence and difficulties that are beginning to affect everyone in some way, right across the world.
Yes, the world is itself a community. And it would certainly be a much happier, healthier, safe and secure place, if world leaders could cast their own agendas aside, and put the benefits of what they do for the People and the communities they should be serving first.
It’s no excuse, but at the level of world or even national leadership, it’s very easy to lose sight of how important every other person’s life experience is.
That’s why when we think about the basic or essential food, goods and services that each and every one of us needs to live and have self-sufficient lives every day, it is locality, localism and keeping every part of day-to-day life as local as possible, that is going to become the key ingredient to ensuring that everyone has a balanced, fair, just and above all, meaningful life.
Recognising that The System today, isn’t about ‘us’; BUT the Future will be
The Establishment no longer works for any of us, even though the amount that we pay in taxes means that on average, we work until May or June each year and ‘Tax Freedom Day’, when any of the money we earn thereafter is actually ours to spend as if it were our own.
One way or another, the help that we now need doesn’t and will not come from those who we should be able to expect to provide it.
Necessity now requires that whatever help we and our communities now or will need, we will all have to step up and do whatever we can to help ourselves, the people who are in our lives and the way of life and everything within it in the localities that surround us.
Our power lies wherever we focus it
Asking people to help themselves or even making the suggestion that public policy is very much ours to influence and change for the better, is something that many – perhaps even you – will feel some immediate resistance to.
We are, after all, living through a period of our own, if not world history, where we have been conditioned to feel helpless and that solving problems that affect us all is something that somebody, somewhere else is responsible for and always does.
Learned helplessness is a human disaster in the making. Simply because it encourages everyone who believes they are powerless to stand still.
In the circumstances we are experiencing, standing still is like going backwards. Because those who have power are abusing it to take everything that we understand forward, in to a future, in ways that only benefit them and their kind.
However, life isn’t something that happens out there, somewhere.
Life is happening right here, right now, in your mind and in the space or spaces around you that you walk in, talk in, feel in, touch in, eat in, wash in and experience every part of life in – each and every day.
Life isn’t happening remotely in a device somewhere.
But the picture that devices give us of someone else’s life can certainly make it feel like whatever is important in the digital world, is relevant and all-encompassing within our own.
It’s not. And the most painful lesson that we all have to learn, understand and accept in real terms, is that life doesn’t work as it should for more and more of us, because we aren’t living real lives.
Our lives are being dictated by people who are completely out of touch with us and who we are. But have a pedestal, lectern and platform in front of us, just because they are on a digital screen.
The current economic model and system of power doesn’t work for us
There isn’t much that needs to be said to anyone, no matter who you are, where you come from or what you do, for us to reach agreement that there is something fundamentally wrong with the way that everything works.
Whatever your relationship with money, the chances are that you are also concerned by the creeping feeling that less and less of the aspects of your life that you used to feel in charge of, still remain within your control.
In simple terms, it works this way and will continue to get worse in this way, as every decision that’s having an impact on the value of everything we have is being made by people who we are unlikely to ever meet.
The challenge that we all face today, is that the rules that allow all the things that are going wrong for us – no matter what they are – have been created or adapted to serve the purposes of those same people, and these are the people who we have not only trusted, but also put in charge.
Out of sight is out of mind for most.
And people who have power, influence and control by the truckload, are very dangerous when they have no integrity or respect for the responsibilities they have to others.
Localism or Going Local
I’ve written a whole series of books that focus on localism and how the focus of power must be brought back to local communities and for decisions that affect our daily lives to be made as close to us as possible and by people who we know and can trust.
However, the problem that I have faced throughout, is that when talking about anything in a broader or national sense, it quickly becomes as abstract as national politics and national news streams are, even though that’s how we often judge important things to be.
The problem is, real life and what is important to us isn’t abstract.
In fact, the real things that are important and all the things that can have the biggest impact upon everything that is happening to us is not abstract and is very specific indeed.
But we have somehow allowed the abstract, or what is outside of us, to influence all of our specific choices.
With AI and technologies now forcing their way into our digital lives, with consequences that will make real life feel so much easier, whilst teaching us to forget how making decisions for ourselves and even learning new things, the choice between being led by an abstract world where the real influences are never seen or understood, or taking back control and regaining conscious choice in everything we do has never appeared to be such an easy one that is actually so very hard.
Awakening to the reality that hides in plain sight
The damage of centralisation, globalisation and of allowing decisions that affect everyone to be taken by people who are unlikely to ever visit or have reason to understand the things that are happening in our streets and neighbourhoods are very easy for us to see in the news every night.
People who have zero understanding of the consequences and impact on the policies they write for every reason other than those that they should, are condemning increasing numbers of people to harder and more challenging lives, and then blaming them for the problems that they themselves have through their own incompetence caused.
It can only work for us, if we can reach out and touch it
A genuinely self-sufficient and fully localised system of public services and the governance that underpins the systems and processes that affect and impact daily lives would not be in danger of being abused or mismanaged in this way.
Indeed, the only way that we will be able to create a genuinely level playing field of opportunity and a public or community sector that works in the way that it should will be for the full balance of power, influence and decision making to be brought back to the People and local communities and administered openly, transparently and without any bias in the way that it always should.
Real Localism is what Authentic Governance looks like and what it would be.
Localism in its real sense
The most simple way to explain the change of focus from where it is today (Global, Central, European etc.) to where it should be (Local, Community etc.), is to think of it as being a switch from a values set based on money, profit and the accumulation of power and wealth, to the alternative values set which is focused on People, humanity and what we genuinely need for everyone to be happy, healthy, secure and safe.
Real localism isn’t rocket science.
But real localism certainly meets with a lot of resistance when the true depth and scope of what it means are openly discussed, because for many who do so well out of exploiting others (whether they are aware of it or not), localism represents what they believe to be a loss.
Sadly, because the Establishment know and understand that local communities are where the power of the people and everything that supports us should be, they frequently pay lip service to the principle of ‘localism’.
But as in the case of New Labour’s ‘Devolution’ from the 1997 General Election on, and then the Cameron Conservatives ‘Localism’ in the years that have followed since 2010, the type of localism and the return of power to local people that politicians from all sides having been selling us, all add up to no such thing.
Politicians today are desperately promoting what they call localism or any one of a number of similar things, which is Regional Centralisation by another name.
We face a challenging, but achievable course of action, that requires us, our communities, charities and businesses to by-pass the Establishment and begin putting localism into everything we do and are motivated by, if we genuinely want to solve all of the societal problems that not only our communities, but the Country and the whole world faces.
We need a new Economic Model that evolves itself from the community up
If you want to learn about economics, the last person you should ask is an economist.
History – albeit history that is used as a model and translated for the contemporary age, is another thing entirely.
We do not need to return to the dark ages or some kind of feudal system to see that life worked much better for everyone when everything that was needed for day-to-day life was available locally and provided by people that everyone knew.
Simple living is far more intelligent than the ‘connected’ world that we live in where relationships are being dehumanised and we have all become little more than a number or code to every company or organisation that we have any reason to buy something from or to do business with.
We will bypass and reject the heartless and inhumane way of living we experience today by
Prioritising local growing, processing, manufacture and supply.
We will improve life for everyone dramatically by rejecting the money-based value system by
Putting People First.
We will change the world for the better by rejecting the hierarchical structures and system of governance by
Bringing power back to the most local level within our communities – creating a clean, authentic form of democracy that has never been allowed by the power hungry to exist before.
The new enlightenment that we are told we are experiencing is only enlightening for those who believe that they are in control.
People who don’t have any reason to even acknowledge the realities that many of the people whose lives they influence now face, because technology insulates them from all the pain that they cause.
PLEASE Remember: Just because technology can do so many ‘amazing’ things, it doesn’t mean that we are obliged to use it, or that we have no choice when it comes to doing so.
Priority 1: Local, Local, Local
Life isn’t a theory.
Yet we have life dictated to us as if it is.
The only way that things can really work in the best way possible for us all, is for whole supply chains, the route of food from farm to fork and how business works and money or currencies flow to be in circles that are as local as it is possible for them to be.
Forget any ideas, philosophies or narratives that identify with localism purely as ‘circular’ or ‘doughnut’ economics.
Whilst they may be well intended, these are theories that are based upon the current money-centric system continuing to be prevalent across all areas of life.
They are NOT what real localised economies are really about.
Localism and Locality Economics are about everything in life and the business streams that support life, people, communities and the environment, working locally and in a very localised way.
Priority 2: People First
Money isn’t everything. But people, our relationships and the world we live in really are.
People or human based values are in short supply, so the most effective way to change everything is to put People and our communities first.
We don’t need to make massive profits to experience happy, healthy, safe and secure lives. But we do need to have faith that changing minds – beginning with our own, is the most important step to changing the world to one that is just, fair and balanced for all – and that social enterprises that help everyone without charging more than anyone involved genuinely needs within local communities is the best place to begin.
Priority 3: Local Governance from local Communities and the grassroots up
We may have learned helplessness, but we have the ability to change things right now, by-passing the assumed behaviour that the Establishment expects and by making the system work for us and taking power back, rather than engaging in actions we have been brought up to expect which just continues to funnel power at people who abuse it and use it only to benefit themselves.
In the recent book Officially NONE OF THE ABOVE, we discussed the need for us all to act and take part so that the focus of political power is brought back to people we know and the decisions that affect us daily are made by people who have genuine skin in the game when it comes to knowing and understanding what we are experience, how we feel, and how we think.
No, we don’t need a revolution and the destruction of the current electoral system to do this. But we do all need to take part. However, in the long term, we must work towards the removal of any parts of the electoral system or system of democracy that can allow specific interests and the agendas of particular groups of people to manipulate and play the system, as is the case right now.
Social Enterprise and Community Enterprises | Bringing not-for-profit and key local businesses together to work as one
Putting People First isn’t just the long-term aim. Putting People First is the most important stepping off point in the series of practical steps that have the power to influence and deliver large scale change, even without the Establishment giving it its blessing, a green light or any kind of consent.
The way that we can do this is by creating a series of social enterprises that can immediately begin to tackle the issues that are being most acutely felt by what we today recognise as growing wealth inequality and the cost of living crisis, but in reality is a direct result of the broken economic model that the Establishment remains committed to, even though it is continuing to deliver increasing levels of harm to People from all areas and across the whole spectrum of society.
It is certainly true that many will not have even considered the realities that many of the people they pass on the street daily are facing from the growing problems that are a direct result of this broken economic model. Of those that do or are open to the existence of a problem, even more cannot see an alternative way of running a 21st century model of society where money doesn’t have its current role.
Many People genuinely believe that creating a model of society that functions around what everyone needs, rather than what the reducing few just want, cannot deliver happiness, health, security and safety in any way. This is because of the genuine belief that money always has a role to play.
But money or rather inflated prices, excess prices and the greed and profiteering that sits behind it doesn’t have a role to play in any fair, balanced and just society. The only way to demonstrate this is to show the people that need to be convinced, and that’s why those who can see and understand this truth need to be the pioneers when it comes to taking action, as well as having and maintaining a lot of faith.
We can deliver different outcomes and with them, a different life experience for people across our communities very quickly, just by making a start
That start will be social enterprises that follow similar development and growth models in every local area, along with a very small number of new multimodal charity units that provide services for those in very specific cases of need, who have no way to pay.
By passing the Establishment and organisations profiting from essential goods and services that everyone needs
There is no point in attempting to reinvent the wheel. There are already some magnificent social enterprises and not for profit organisations operating in many areas that are doing the very best to help people on a cost-related or free basis already. The Glos Community Project will not seek to replicate or replace any of these within their tangible area of operation, and where or when possible, will also seek to redirect support that might become available to them.
However, The Glos Community Project will operate in any area where we have the volunteers/social business leaders, support and resources, where no such organisation already exists.
The Establishment has had plenty of opportunity to demonstrate that it can reform and get things right. Those involved no longer have the right to demand that we keep waiting for them to get things right, or to expect that we will continue to trust them, just because of the job title or responsibility that they supposedly hold.
This time and the future are ours to decide. They have had their chance and have cast what’s good for everyone rather than just them aside.
In time, many of those from within the current Establishment will accept that there was always a better way and that they made the decision not to exercise the responsibility that they held on our behalf, to do what is right.
We cannot trust anyone from within the Establishment today, to do what is right, until they can see and accept that putting People First is the new paradigm and how everything is going to run.
Who are The Establishment?
We have mentioned the Establishment and the reality that obtaining meaningful change will require bypassing the establishment at the very least.
Knowing who the Establishment are is therefore very important.
As a rule, anyone involved with or directly employed by any of the following will represent the establishment. There are exceptions right across the board, but for the purpose of excluding as much of the risk that comes from those who are invested in obstructing change as possible, in the first instances and until there is definite evidence to support otherwise, we will not trust or knowingly engage with any of the following:
The Establishment includes (but is not limited to):
The Civil Service
Town Councils
Parish Councils
Borough Councils
District Councils
County Councils
Unitary Authorities
Schools
Colleges
Universities
Social Services
Public Services of all kinds
Non-Government Organisations (NGOs) e.g. The Highways Agency / Highways England, The Environment Agency
National Charities that are well-funded and in the public eye
Elected Councillors
Elected Mayors
Members of Parliament
Police & Crime Commissioners
Mainstream Media
Media Companies
Corporate Businesses
Most Celebrities
The Military
Why | The Glos Community Project
Right now, even on the rare occasion that politics does something positive for People, it comes and works its way through the system at a pace that is simply too slow to help and benefit people who genuinely need help in their real lives.
Gloucestershire is no different. And whilst there are at least a few politicians on the seats of local Parish, Town, The Borough and Districts and the County Council who are still genuine in their aim of putting the needs of People first, the reality is that many of them don’t even understand just how little influence they – and therefore the People who elected them – have, over the things that we are expecting them to deal with on our behalf, each and every day.
The elephant trap that we can easily fall into is to think that bitching about any of this or that following, liking and supporting people who are saying all the things that we want to hear will somehow result in change.
It won’t. And that’s why I am here – as just another person from the community we share, who loves Gloucestershire and everything about it, with the aim of connecting like-minded people and taking the very practical steps that we can by working together, to help other members of our community and take the first leaps towards making the Towns, Villages and the Countryside that we love, a much better place and one that reflects the aims, values and aspirations of us all.
We really can change things for the better by doing the things that we can, rather than losing faith because the problems look too big and we believe that we can’t.
HP | The opportunity for change will be what WE make it | The Glos Community Project
You may have already heard of something called social enterprise, businesses that are run on a not-for-profit basis, or businesses that are set up not with the aim of making money, but creating some benefit to the community in some way.
The Glos Community Project is here to explore the opportunities that already exists and that are yet to be identified that will benefit the wider community through the services or products that they provide, whilst providing opportunities for budding social entrepreneurs and practical change activists, along with work opportunities for anyone and everyone – and especially those who might feel that the world has been passing them by.
Right now, I am looking for people who want to be the pioneers of social change within Gloucestershire’s communities. Individuals who are ideally looking for the opportunity to lead and to learn, but are driven by working collaboratively and for the benefit of everyone, rather than long or short term, about what they themselves can earn.
These are voluntary opportunities in the first instance, with the only immediate cost being the time and commitment that it will take, along with the determination that any successful entrepreneur would need to set up a business from scratch – but with the benefit of having the support and guidance of someone who has seen and experienced all of the ups and downs of creating, launching and managing businesses before.
Theres nothing good about global, but local builds love for others every time
Many of us struggle with understanding and identifying the difference between the things we need in life, and the things that we want in our life.
Don’t worry, there will be no judgement coming from me or anyone else who is closely involved in what we are doing if this does or has ever applied to you. The whole system is skewed and the messaging and advertising that is being constantly pumped at all of us has helped blurred the lines so much between need and want, that unless you are awake to anything being wrong with all of this, the two have merged and become one.
In my recent Book Levelling Level, we focused on identifying the difference between basic or essential needs and what many consider to be essential – but are actually just what those people want. We also focused on the reality that with the Establishment having worked tirelessly on behalf of specific interests to make just about every supply chain you could imagine operate to make excessive profits by delivering what everyone who can afford to buy it, wants, the same people who have been responsible have also destroyed the ability of communities and even our whole Country to provide just the basic or essential foods, goods and services that we all need.
Even talking about supply chains and terms like self-sufficiency will sound like gobbledygook or some kind of esoteric language to some. One of the many challenges we face is that this is intentional too. And the myth that we have been conditioned to believe is that everything costs less for us this way, that it is a better, healthier and more enlightened way of living, and that making us all dependent upon people that we have nothing in common with, will get rid of any problems because we all think the same way.
Regrettably, the same way or same thinking is based on nothing more than shared greed, profiteering and a complete lack of care for the human cost, such as loss of local jobs, overuse and unnecessary use of natural resources, exploitation of people and less developed cultures, and the enslavement to debt that is quickly overtaking populations across the world.
Target Business areas | Foods, Goods & Services that are ESSENTIAL to life
The Glos Community Project is all about the basics. The essentials that everyone needs to be able to access each and every day, so that they can lead happy, healthy, safe and secure lives within a fair, balanced and just environment.
Humans don’t get addicted to anything that they need. But the humanity in everyone is quickly destroyed by having too much of what they want.
Whilst the aims of The Glos Community Project will have many points of controversy, depending upon who you are, it’s the definition between what we need and what is essential to life, rather that what we want that will probably get the most backs up, whilst the world is able to continue in the way that it has been.
For the sake of repeating a lot of information that is available in my other books, the basics or the essentials for everyday living look very similar to this:
Food:
Fruits and vegetables that can be grown locally, either on farms, allotments or at home
Bread made using local flour with minimal processing that can be completed by hand or traditional milling methods.
Dairy products including Milk, Cheeses and Yoghurts that are made locally using traditional methods and without chemical additives, extensive processing or refinement
Meats that are farmed, prepared, stored, dressed and retailed locally, without unnecessary miles to heavily and unnecessarily bureaucratised abattoirs and processing facilities.
Fish and seafoods, either farmed inland, or transported from the nearest UK seaport.
Goods:
Clothing (basic)
Cleaning (To keep homes and anything for personal use clean and hygienic)
Kitchen (to cook, prepare and store food and drink)
Laundry (to wash and prepare clothing)
Health & Hygiene (Essential medicines, and goods used to keep clean and healthy such as toothbrushes, toothpaste, sanitary products etc.)
Transport (Bikes, Cars) – Only where regular transport cannot be provided in another or shared way
Services:
Clothing repairs
Vehicle repairs & maintenance where vehicles are owned
Building repairs and construction
Electricity
Water
Gas
Communication (mobile phone, broadband)
Unpaid apps
Entertainment (Free channels)
Transport (where vehicles are not owned or available for essential or irregular journeys)
Banking & Currency (outside of Establishment control)
The More People involved, the more local The Glos Community Project will become
In the first instance, it is difficult to estimate how much interest there will be and which social enterprises will be the most popular, even though I have a good idea what these will be.
If one person per social enterprise model were to come forward for each of them, we would certainly begin by opening up the first of each operation to the widest number of People that it would be possible for us to do so.
However, as interest grows, covering these same areas might be difficult and result in the level of service offered being reduced because there are too many people for one business unit to serve.
When this happens, the area will be divided up, so that every service that The Glos Community Project provides will be offered to the most local area possible.
The growth of The Glos Community Project will be a pathway of decentralization in every sense, focusing on improving accessibility and transparency at each and every step of the way.
Theres nothing about The Glos Community Project that can’t be done. The voices that say otherwise are from people who just have selfish reasons not to do it
No matter how you came to discover The Glos Community Project, there is a good chance that unless you have been searching for other like-minded people to do the things that you have already been thinking about, you will read through the list of social businesses that we want to see available to every community – just to begin with, and that you will think that this is something that cannot be done.
If you have an open mind, please ask yourself the question what makes you believe that, and then follow up by asking yourself why.
Everything listed on this site is achievable. Not only that. As more People from our communities sign up, commit to our aims and provide us with whatever support they can, more and more of us will understand that putting people first is a very good, mutually beneficial and happy way to live, where the results will speak for themselves.
Whilst it will be challenging to get the first few of each social business model planned, where necessary funded, launched and then running, we will very quickly have turnkey frameworks or plans available for every new area, that only then have to be tailored to ensure that whatever is being offered, will meet that specific community’s needs.
Areas outside of Gloucestershire
I will be as happy to hear from you if you are outside of Gloucestershire as I will be if you get in touch with me from any of the communities and local areas within.
We might need to take a different approach, depending on what you are able to do, but The Glos Community Project is just a model or incubator where we can all learn, and we must aspire to a much wider roll-out if community or grassroots power is to have the revival that it now can.
If you are from outside Gloucestershire, please consider all the opportunities that have been listed on this site and then get in touch.
I will be happy to arrange a one-to-one meeting via Zoom, WhatsApp, Facetime or Teams. Or if you have a question or questions that would be helpful for others too, I will be happy to post a blog or a video to explain or discuss what we can do.
Area Organisers – Other areas
If you have been reading The Glos Community Project and feel that you might have what it would take to get the ball rolling with a like-for-like Project in your own County or Region, I would really like to hear from you.
Please e-mail me and provide me with whatever information you would want to know about me, if you were already set up in your area and were thinking about inviting me to work alongside you to set up over here in Gloucestershire right now.
Funding Opportunities
We are actively searching for philanthropic support for specific projects or to support them all.
If you would like to provide support through a donation, through sponsorship or through a grant of some kind, we would be very pleased to hear from you at the earliest opportunity.
We are aware that many substantial grants are offered on the basis of meeting very specific aims. Where possible, we will build the services offered in ways that will meet those aims, as long as doing so will not compromise the key principles and aims of The Glos Community Project.
Regrettably, we cannot accept support that would be allocated in support of any political agendas other than bringing back power to communities themselves, through the creation and development of Community Meetings.
If you would like to discuss your idea, please get in touch with Adam for a chat.
Every penny counts and if you are supportive of what we are trying to achieve, but can only afford to make a small donation, we will appreciate and value your support just the same. Please find our Crowdfunder HERE.
About You | Social Entrepreneur
The most important thing about you won’t be anything to do with how creative, innovative or entrepreneurial you are or can be. These are all words that get misused and there are lots of people who genuinely believe myths such as being self-employed means that you are an entrepreneur.
The most important fact or truth about you will be that you are driven by helping others, by genuine social change (no matter how challenging that might appear to be) and that you have accepted that change of the kind that we all need will not come from anyone that most people are expecting it to come from.
I’m not keen on bullet points for something like this, so please treat the following as a framework only, and if there are things that resonate but you are not sure about anything else, please just get in touch and we can have a chat.
You Should
Be motivated by helping others
See everyone as an equal, no matter who or what society suggests that they are
Be open to learning new things
Be able to see everything objectively and be aware of how your feelings might influence this when and if anything leaves you emotionally ‘triggered’.
Think critically – no matter the situation
See a crisis as an opportunity
Able to work in the moment, without a plan or guide to help you
Be sure that you can see commitments and agreements through, even if you are not being watched or monitored
Have a genuine passion for the type of social business(es) that you are interested in and know that you will gain a sense of achievement from being successful within it.
Be open to learning and carrying out any of the jobs or tasks that will be required to make this business run and be successful
Be comfortable with talking to people, to journalists and anyone who has a genuine interest in what you are doing
Have experience working with different social groups, either professionally or voluntarily
Be aiming to earn a wage which relates only to the genuine cost of living at the time
Understand that volunteers are not paid employees and will only do their best for you, if they enjoy and see a benefit to them or what they believe in from doing whatever you ask them to do
Be happy to sign and keep to the terms of a Non-Disclosure Agreement (NDA)
These Opportunities are unlikely to be for you if you:
Believe that someone else will solve all of society’s problems
Knowingly hold prejudices of any kind about other people
Are aiming to own your own commercial company or business
Are motivated only by the potential of what you could earn
Have any hang ups about doing any kind of job
Believe that you must be qualified to do anything
Make excuses or tell lies to cover up mistakes, problems or any issues that are outside of your control
Are already committed to any political or social agenda – no matter how good or beneficial you might consider it to be (This includes any political party, green or climate focused movements, groups with a spiritual ‘agenda’, ‘alt’ movements or anything that promotes ideologies built on ‘us vs them’ thinking at any level or of any kind.
Opportunities for Social Entrepreneurs in Gloucestershire
There are a number of different opportunities for people who would like to lead the development of a social business across Gloucestershire.
These will include:
Local News
Clothing Hire & Resale
Car and Bike Loan Hubs
Local Food Circuits
Allotments & Home Growing
Local Exchange Platforms
Local Currency
Homeless Hubs
Community Pubs
Community Brewing
Community Marketplace
Mend & Make Do Repair Centres
Community Meetings
Skills for Life Courses
Community Helpers
Farm Direct Cooperatives
Community Bakeries
Opportunities will be local community specific, with the aim that there will be at least one of every business type listed within walking distance of homes in suburban or town areas, or available and shared between no more than 4 to 6 villages in remote areas.
We will not seek to establish any new social business where a community-focused social business of the same kind, or offering a service of the same kind exists, unless it is being delivered as part of an Establishment agenda.
Opportunities for Volunteers in Gloucestershire
We are also looking for specialist project and management support
Web & Software Developers
Social Media Creation & Support
App Developers
Fundraisers
Citizen Journalists
Areas of Gloucestershire where you might be | The Glos Community Project
Forest of Dean
Coleford
Cinderford
Newent
Longhope & Mitcheldean
Newnham on Severn
Cotswold (South)
Cirencester
Tetbury
Northleach
Fairford
Lechlade
North Cotswold
Bourton on the Water
Stow on the Wold
Moreton in Marsh
Cheltenham
Town
Prestbury
Leckhampton
Hatherley
Tewkesbury (North)
Town
Winchcombe
Bishops Cleeve & Woodmancote
Tewkesbury (South)
Churchdown
Brockworth
Hucclecote
Highnam
Innsworth
Gloucester
City
Quedgeley
Longlevens
Barnwood
Tuffley
Stroud
Town
Stonehouse
Wotton under Edge
Dursley
Painswick
Berkeley & Sharpness
What you will need to provide | Social Entrepreneur
Your time and commitment are the most important requirement.
There is no requirement for you to pay any type of joining or membership fee as a The Glos Community Project Volunteer. You just need to be confident in what you are doing and be prepared to put your name on your project right from the moment you start.
Together we will build the platform that will be required to attract support and any necessary funding to get your social business started.
It is very easy for anyone considering going into business for the first time to believe that they have to buy everything new and have new everything. You don’t.
My aim is to minimalise the risk to everyone who joins The Glos Community Project in whatever role, and to build every new service and the organisation that supports it with the absolute minimum financial cost to those who get involved (i.e. you may need to pay for fuel to travel, use your phone etc.)
Local News
The news ‘industry’ has undergone a massive transformation within the past two decades.
The national news or mainstream media and regional news or what we once referred to as the ‘local papers’ – or what’s left of them all, are completely under the spell or influence of their owners, who pays them or both, and the only losers have been the general public and the people who read, watch or listen to anything that branded media companies produce.
Sadly, local news was one of the biggest casualties of the internet’s arrival, when the ‘cash cow that once was classified advertising’ dried up overnight, pushing the evening paper that everyone went to for everything online, with the outcome very quickly giving the lie to the idea that the local paper was actually about news.
Stories that are important about local life don’t get the coverage that they should do. And the absence of real-life stories from the next village or the school on the other side of the town have only served to fuel the idea that news in the mainstream is representative of real life, and that what comes from outside of our communities is the only news that there is.
Unfortunately, with most of the national or branded news, and much of the stories that come from well-known names and personalities online all being little better than opinion, people have very quickly lost touch with what real life really is.
We need to change this. And we need to make the news interesting to everyone again, without there being any kind of agenda at work.
The Opportunity to set up and contribute to new local community news platforms
We would like to set up news services in every local area, using all of the media options that are available to us to focus on all the stories that are genuine news, rather than being about what someone else wants us all to think.
Focusing on the opportunity to harness citizen journalism at its very best, I am looking for social media, tech and internet-savvy people with the ability to research and write genuine news stories objectively, and where commentary is required, to do so in ways that cover all relevant points of view.
The ability to edit other people’s work will be important, as one of the aims of these local news platforms will be to give people across our communities the opportunity to tell the stories they have that will help and inspire others.
If you are already visualising what you could do with this opportunity, it could very well be one for you.
If you are interested in this opportunity, please e-mail me and include:
Your name, contact and social media details
A copy of your current CV (If you have one)
How much time you have available to commit to The Glos Community Project
A short note explaining why local news provision is interesting to you, what your priorities would be if you were leading the development of this social business in your local area, and how you would get started.
Links to any examples of articles you have written or any media you have created that is available online.
Clothing Hire, Repair, Recycling & Resale
Everyone needs clothing. But fashion itself is one of the most obvious ‘wants’ that the age of consumerism has encouraged us to have, with very small differences existing between clothes carrying or not carrying a name, but that brand itself means that cost itself is one of the key issues when it comes to what clothes any one of us can have.
The media age creates the perceived need, whilst the banks and financiers now provide the credit that is building a time bomb of debt that only exists because of greed. Worse still, the real cost to our communities through the loss of jobs and to the planet from clothing being needlessly made thousands of miles away on the cheap, where working rules don’t exist and costs are cheap so that profit margins can be exponentially increased, really gives the lie to what globalism has really been about.
The more expensive the clothing, the less likely we are to regularly wear or even wear it. Recent data suggests that a significant percentage of new clothing is either never sold or never even worn.
Recycling clothing through apps such as Vinted is already becoming popular and clothing libraries are being tried in some places too. But we could do a lot more and with the long-term aim of returning sustainable clothing manufacture and production to the UK and our communities, we need to make good affordable clothing available to everyone for all occasions – and without the need for anyone to go into debt, whether they can afford it or not.
The opportunity to set up Clothing Libraries and Resale, Recycling and Repair hubs
We would like to set up Clothing hubs in all areas, leveraging the technology that is available, to make Recycling, Repair and Reuse of good clothing a part of normal life once again.
Focusing on creating local stores that are accessible to all, whilst using apps and the internet to make services and sales available online, I am looking for entrepreneurial leaders with a passion for clothes and the drive to make thrifty wardrobes fashionable, to help create a service that will have the ability to help people from all backgrounds in a multitude of ways.
Ideally, you will already have the ability to mend repairable clothing and be comfortable using the existing resale apps and platforms as a start. However, this is certainly one of the social business models that could easily be developed not just by one community-focused individual, but perhaps a few.
If ideas are already flowing through your mind about how clothing libraries, clothing hire and clothing recycling and repair could work even better than what people already know, this could certainly be the opportunity that is reaching out to you.
If you are interested in this opportunity, please e-mail me and include:
Your name, contact and social media details
A copy of your current CV (If you have one)
How much time you have available to commit to The Glos Community Project
If not already included in your CV, an addendum that covers any skills and experience you already have that would help you to make a clothing hub in your area to thrive
Pictures or links to anything that you have done
A short overview of what appeals to you about the concept of Community Clothing Hubs and what you believe the priorities would be at the beginning and during the stages of the early roll-out.
Community Vehicle Lending Hubs | Car and Bike Loans
Sadly, because of the impractical and tyrannical way that Green Policy, Climate Change and ridiculous Policies such as Net Zero have been rolled out and are being adopted by local authorities through polices such as the switch to EPVs, ULEZ and 15 Minute Cities, the practical reality that we don’t need 4-car households and shouldn’t be wasting money that we cannot afford on journeys that we simply don’t need to make are being overlooked and are in danger of being passed by.
We don’t need cars that sit in car parks all day and on driveways or by the sides of roads during holidays, weekends and overnight. But we do need to have access to the most appropriate forms of transport for the journeys that we need to make, as and when we need to make them, and we need a localised system that makes this happen – and happen well, for us all.
The opportunity to set up Community Vehicle Lending Hubs
I am looking for people with an interest in cars, motorbikes, epvs and emerging transport technology to help create and build local vehicle lending hubs that make shared vehicle use both normal and respectable, and in a way that means consistent quality of experience for users, with the minimization of vehicle abuse.
Whilst experience in things like fleet management, repairs, vehicle hire and areas of work like that would clearly be very helpful, starting with a clean sheet and no experience of these areas is likely to be just as helpful, as we really do need to get this offering right to create the buy-in that we need from members of our communities from the start.
If you are interested in this opportunity, please e-mail me and include:
Your name, contact and social media details
A copy of your current CV (If you have one)
How much time you have available to commit to The Glos Community Project
If not already included in your CV, an addendum that covers any skills and experience you already have that would help you to make a Community Vehicle Lending Hub in your area to thrive
A short overview of what appeals to you about the concept of Community Vehicle Lending Hubs and what you believe the priorities would be that will encourage People to trust and rely on borrowing vehicles in your local area, rather than falling back on ones that they own
Community Public Transport
Yes, we already have a large number of community transport organisations and providers such as Dial-a-rides. However, many of these are now driven by and focused upon contracts and provision that has been identified by County Councils and Government Agencies in ways that make them subservient to the Establishment, creating the perception that they are just there for ‘old people’ or children with special educational needs.
On the other hand, the ‘public transport’ that we have, which includes both buses and trains, stopped being public in the genuine sense, the moment that the operating companies, transport providers, and infrastructure companies were privatised and became tools in profit-making hands.
Yes, they provide services that are accessible to the public. But they are not in any way focused on the need for genuine public transport to be universally accessible, and they never will be for as long as private shareholder interest and earnings or dividends being paid to owners remains involved.
In the absence of any will on the part of the Establishment to take back and maintain public transport services without the involvement of privately owned companies or the influence of unions who by holding any organisation to ransom are in effect doing exactly the same thing, we must work to create a Community Public Transport Service that begins by ensuring that transport provision exists within local communities where any services that can be provided by Community Vehicle Lending Hubs ends.
The opportunity to set up a Community Public Transport Hub in your area
The big focus for developing Community Public Transport Hubs is understanding local need, creativity and innovation when it comes to meeting that need, and a very open and positive approach to working with customers from within the local community, as well as being able to engage with and build good working relationships with the stakeholders who will be unavoidably involved.
Unlike the majority of the social entrepreneur roles and opportunities listed with The Glos Community Project, this one does require that those interested already have a Full, preferably clean Driving License which will ideally include minibus driving (up to 17 seats) – NOT for Hire or Reward.
There may also be a requirement for those running or contributing to the management of our Community Public Transport services to hold or qualify for a Certificate of Professional Competence (CPC) in bus service operations, and/or that they can apply for and hold a Private Hire License, which will require a basic DBS check and no previous driving disqualifications or other forms of conviction that will exclude them from applying to or being registered by the Licensing Department at the local District or Borough Council.
If you have any past convictions or problems with your driving license, you should be able to check the Licensing Policy for Private Hire & Hackney Taxi Licenses online. Please note that we will check every existing local policy before beginning work on any new hub.
If you are interested in this opportunity, please e-mail me and include:
Your name, contact and social media details
A copy of your current CV (If you have one)
How much time you have available to commit to The Glos Community Project
If not already included in your CV, an addendum that covers any skills and experience you already have that would help you to build a very successful Community Public Transport Service within your local community area
A short overview of what appeals to you about the concept of universal transport provision and Community Public Transport, and what you believe will be necessary for People to experience daily, so that the service genuinely works.
Food Supply
By far the most important areas of the social or community businesses that The Glos Community Project is aiming to focus on is the growing, harvesting, preparation, production and supply of basic or essential foods within the shortest and most reliable supply chains possible.
Sadly, we take for granted that food will always be available either online or at the local supermarket. Even though there were some minor shortages during the Covid Pandemic and some supplies of vegetables were temporarily out of stock or in reduced supply earlier in 2023, the reality is that none of us have yet experienced the shortages and changes to the food supply that are now almost certain to come in the months and years ahead.
Globalisation, centralization and the economics of big business have made our communities and the whole of the UK itself dependent upon the supply of basic and essential foods that we could easily grow ourselves. For the sake of somebody somewhere making bigger and bigger profits, whilst power has been taken further and further away from the people so that it can be concentrated in the hands of the few, we have been sold the lie that it’s better for all of us if food comes to us across whole continents, and that it’s also better for us and will make us all happier if it comes to us in increasingly processed or ultra processed forms.
Many don’t even realize that we have become dependent on foods that are not in any way healthy for us, whilst our agricultural and growing sectors have themselves surrendered or given up the ability to grow and provide a range of food stuffs for local supply, whilst the politics of money and globalism have made farmers reliant upon incomes they have little or no influence over, whilst growing fewer and fewer things.
Farm shops are not a luxury or non-essential choice. But it serves the current economic model for us to see them that way
Many of us visit farm shops – where they are available, and do so with the belief that to do so is a luxury or a treat, because we can be fairly sure that whatever they sell to us will cost more than what we would pay for it at a supermarket – even though the levels of quality and the provenance are nowhere near being the same.
Farm shops and any retail business that sells locally made, perhaps organic, high-quality foods with the absolute minimum of processing involved seem expensive, because the way that most foods are mass produced and massively processed has made them that way. It is quite literally the economics of scale that not only appear to make food cheaper, but also guarantee that the marketplace is controlled by very few hands, and that the people involved make ridiculous profits from whatever they do.
Whilst we need affordable basic or essential foods more than ever, we do not need any part of the process that only appears to benefit us by lowering the purchase price, but then goes on to cost us in every other possible sense – including the increasing risks to our health and our lives.
If the whole of the UK Farming, Growing and Fishing Industries were reformed and restructured so that their priority and focus was always on local supply – through complete supply chains that are as local as it is possible for them to be, the price of all essential and basic foods of a much higher quality and standard would quickly come down and be accessible to everyone too.
Our Farmers are struggling because the Establishment is failing them too
One of the most regrettable parts of the Food Supply Question today is the reality that Farmers are already acutely aware that the self-sufficiency or food security of the whole of the UK is now at very high risk.
Sadly, although Farmers are some of the most creative, resourceful and entrepreneurial people you could ever meet or know, the Industry and its leaders like the National Farmers Union, is still very much committed to the misplaced belief that the Establishment will come to the rescue and provide the support they all want for whatever they currently envision as being the necessary change.
For those from the farming community who read this, it is time to realise, understand and accept that there are many different agendas at work within and beyond the Establishment, but none of them place a priority on anything like the traditional model of farming even in the way that we currently know or believe it to be.
Like so many other areas of business and life, we must now take a very practical approach and different view of food production, and continue to do so for as long as the current Establishment is able to maintain its hold.
We must bypass the Establishment food strategies and incentive plans, and point all farming and food producing businesses back to community focused production using up to date methodology and thinking, but in a very traditional, perhaps even shops-around-the-village-green kind of way.
On the current trajectory, more and more farmers will lose or have to give up farms, whilst communities will be pushed further and further away from being able to sustain themselves as we unnecessary lose more and more productive land.
Local Food Circuits
The Glos Community Project aims to work with farmers, and all locally aligned businesses to champion and recreate localised Community Food Chains that keep the growing, production, necessary processing and preparation, transport and supply of all basic and essential foods as local and as self-sufficient as possible, so that local communities can quite literally fend for themselves.
This is an ambitious task. Not least of all, because many will see the return of fully localised markets as a regressive or backwards step, simply because of the way that certain interests and the focus upon profit always being the key priority has conditioned them to think.
However, farmers, aligned business leaders and members of the wider community coming together to discuss a mutually beneficial strategy will quickly open up doors and a dialogue that very few would currently consider to be viable – but that is quickly going to make a massive amount of sense in what are very turbulent and changing times.
The Opportunity to Facilitate and Coordinate Farm Direct Cooperatives
I am actively looking for a number of social entrepreneurs who have the people skills, the ability and the motivation to knock on doors, open up and build new relationships with a range of very different people who are very worried about the future, but are at least initially likely to be very resistant to considering stepping away from the business model where the establishment makes all the rules and only they can offer any help.
You may be from the Farming or Rural Community or from outside of them. But you will have both fluency and understanding not only what farmers and growers have the ability to do, as well as what might be their needs, along with a very innovative and entrepreneurial view and understanding of what it is likely to take to get the right people, businesses and agencies together, to make robust local food supply chains work, so that the self-sufficiency and food security of local communities can be guaranteed.
It is very important to accept that the really exciting part of this social or community business platform will be just how much knowledge already exists within all of businesses that would gain from being involved and that the success of this part of The Glos Community Project will depend on getting everyone who could contribute and benefit from this, not only to open up and share their ideas, but to also commit to becoming actively involved.
If you are interested in this opportunity, please e-mail me and include:
Your name, contact and social media details
A copy of your current CV (If you have one)
How much time you have available to commit to The Glos Community Project
If not already included in your CV, an addendum that covers any skills and experience you already have that would help you to open doors within the farming community and with business leaders within the community who will all need to be inspired by the story that makes real the truth that there is another way.
A short overview of why you believe that Local Food Circuits will provide food security and what you believe the common USP will be that will engage, create buy-in and get everyone important on board
Allotments & Home Growing
Whilst farmers and the Grower community have the ability to change their working practices and to create and employ new infrastructure quickly, the industry wide change that will be needed may not happen as quickly as we might all like – once the need for this massive change really begins to hit home.
To help and support the creation, development and implementation of Local Food Circuits, there is a part that the majority of us can play in helping ourselves and contributing to the local community effort, if we are prepared to ‘Home Grow’ any foods that we can.
There are a range of ways that Home Growing from the smallest scale up to a level where you might be able to supply certain fruits or vegetables to your whole area could be possible, depending on what resources you already have access to. These might include a garden, a deep window sill, an allotment, or an area within your home where you could set up a hydroponics system.
Today, Home Growing is seen as being quirky or excentric by many. Yet it could be a very easy and quick way for everyone who is able, to ensure that they have ongoing or regular access to a source of the vital nutrition that everyone genuinely needs.
The opportunity to Facilitate and Coordinate Home Growing Hubs
To support Local Food Circuits and also feed into our new Community Marketplace, it is an aim of The Glos Community Project to support homeowners to utlise the space and resources that they have available for Home Growing, and to identify land and develop the availability of allotments so that Home Grown fruits or vegetables of one kind or another are available to everyone.
I am looking for social entrepreneurs who can either set up and run, or coordinate others to provide the following:
Purchase, sale and supply of gardening equipment
Purchase, sale and supply of hydroponics equipment
Rental, purchase, preparation and letting of allotments
Developing an online signposting service to quickly identify anything that will help
Work with our Skills for Life facilitators to provide online, classroom and one-to-one training
Like Farm Direct Facilitators and Coordinators, the ability and desire to collaborate with others who have knowledge and skills that will help is vital to the success of this role, as if having a very open mind and the ability to inspire people across the community to think about the meaning of self-sufficiency in a very different way.
If you are interested in this opportunity, please e-mail me and include:
Your name, contact and social media details
A copy of your current CV (If you have one)
How much time you have available to commit to The Glos Community Project
If not already included in your CV, an addendum that covers any skills and experience you already have that would help to demonstrate the kind of approach you would have to getting people to commit to and stay committed to Home Growing.
A short overview of what appeals to you about Home Growing and the role you see that it will play in providing food security at the most local level.
Building Local Economies
‘But we already have a local economy?’ I hear you think.
Yes, we do. But they are very much part of the national and international economy and the real question you might want to ask yourself is how does the economic system that we have really benefit or work for you?
Unless you are a) a billionaire b) a massive corporate shareholder c) playing the markets in some way or d) working for one or someone very similar to all of the above, the economic and monetary system that we have is not working for you or benefiting you in any way – whatever the common, constructed or urban myths tell you.
In my book Levelling Level, we discussed the certain reality that Money isn’t worth anything other than what any of us believe it to be. But that doesn’t stop a great many people who are otherwise probably very sensible from attributing great value to it and letting the accumulation and manipulation of it takeover their lives – all without even a second thought for the cost to everyone else.
Regrettably, the journey that the Establishment is now pushing us along toward the extinction of cash and the use of central digital bank currencies (CDBC) or government derived cryptocurrencies isn’t one that will end well for anyone whose interests aren’t closely aligned with whatever the narrative of the Establishment might be.
The immense power that will be held by people we will never meet, because they can see where every penny of our money has come from and how it is then spent is only surpassed in terms of the danger to our freedom to do whatever we legally want to, by the reality that just because they might disagree with something we have said or whatever we might believe in, they would have the power to switch our money off and prevent us from accessing it whenever they might like.
You only need to think about the political figures who are already having their banking facilities closed down and are being denied access to alternatives to see an illustration of how this will all work. It doesn’t matter whether you agree with their politics or not today, this type of action will become a growing threat to the entire population if the management of money remains in the hands of the Establishment – and that’s before we even get to the discussion about the damage a financial system where the Establishment can just create money as and when it feels like it is doing and has done to our lives already – before thinking about what absolute control and tracking of money will allow them to make it become.
Making money and currencies nothing more than a unit of exchange, once again
The value of money dictates everything today. And the value of money is in the hands of the establishment and very greedy and profit hungry people who have zero understanding and no care about the consequences that come from what they do, as long as the system continues to benefit them.
Whilst a return to the gold standard and pegged or anchored economies would be a sensible step, the reality is that the system is now so rotten and influenced by speculation and private interests that are on the make, that the governance that exists is unlikely to ever deliver a monetary or economic system that genuinely works in the best interest of us all.
We have no choice but to start the money system all over again.
People, their presence and their value and input into the economy is the method that should be the basis for all financial value, not how much anything and everything costs us, or when we possess it, it can then be considered to be worth.
Through The Glos Community Project, the long term aim will be to create a system of new, localised currencies that will be available in a cash equivalent and cryptocurrency or digital form, but will be administered locally and be geographically specific, with the national level currency only being used for transactions between areas or as the baseline that maintains a fixed value between what the basic unit of each currency is worth.
In the short term, the creation of local economies will be focused on allowing people to trade anything they want to, including their labour, their knowledge and their skills, in a way that will quickly become insulated against greed and stupidity driven forms of inflation that are quite literally on the verge of collapsing the existing financial system or ‘bringing down the bank’.
We have no choice but to go back to basics and reject a monetary system that is destroying lives whilst it manipulates all of us and abuses our trust.
Bartering and Fair Exchange
Nobody other than the individual themselves, should be able to define and police a system of values that can exclude or disenfranchise them, based on issues that are outside of their own influence.
With increasing numbers of people missing meals or being forced to make the conscious decision between what essentials they can or can no longer afford, the return to a system where everything can be traded openly and fairly has never been needed by so many as it is right now.
The Glos Community Project is focusing upon bartering and exchange of new and used goods, basic and essential foods and the services that People genuinely need so that anything and everything that any person has or is able to legally able to offer for sale or for exchange can be traded for something that they need, or for a monetary or currency value that is based solely on what the trading parties agree that the specific item or offering is worth.
Community Marketplaces & Local Exchanges
The New Local Economy is built around Local Exchanges, where all goods and services are available and accessible to all, whether they are provided by a business or an individual.
Membership is open to everyone from within the area of the community and trading is available both at a Local Exchange Hub and online with any costs being covered by a membership and/or access fee on a not-for-profit basis.
Local Currency
The ultimate aim is that each local community will have its own currency that will be available in both a cash equivalent and digital or cryptocurrency form.
The local currency will be fixed in value so that outside influences are then unable to profit from trading the currency or damage the stability of the Local Economy by either crashing or over inflating the total value of the money that is in circulation, held by any person or business and in use.
Local currencies will be the normal method of exchange within the community, but will be interchangeable with the national currency.
The only circumstances where the value of the currency will be negotiable would be within the circumstances of essential international trade
Building The Community Marketplace
Increasing numbers of People are unable to afford to buy the basic food, essential goods and services that they need, just to remain healthy, safe and secure.
Communities must take the steps necessary to help everyone who needs to turn the food they grow, the goods they make or no longer want, or the spare time that they have into whatever they need most, without middle men or profit-making businesses inflating the costs of anything and everything they touch.
The Glos Community Project is building a Community Marketplace that will pivot around a Local Exchange that is both physical and online, and will be supported by a fixed value local currency that will be available in both cash and digital forms.
The opportunity to Facilitate and Coordinate the Community Marketplace
I am looking for social entrepreneurs who already have a good practical understanding of the real economy, as well as the basic theories that underpin both classical and neoclassical economics in the sense that they relate to how the world works today.
However, that in itself is not enough. Being visionary in your outlook, you must be able to look beyond a world where money is the common factor in everything, and replace it with a much happier and healthier one where people and humanity are the common factor instead.
Stepping through and navigating between the world as most people see it today, and how it’s going to be, you will become a key collaborator, helping to develop the Community Marketplace person by person and business by business, as we complete the design and planning of the Local Exchanges and Currencies that will provide the necessary infrastructure, and then roll the whole system out.
Able to work as easily with the abstract as well as the practical, whilst making allowances for how others may not easily be able to do the same, any knowledge of cryptocurrencies, software and app design as well as existing trading and auction sites online will all be a great help.
Above all, like all the roles working with others within The Glos Community Project, it’s the relationship with people and understanding how others think and what influences them to do so that will help you most of all.
If you are interested in this opportunity, please e-mail me and include:
Your name, contact and social media details
A copy of your current CV (If you have one)
How much time you have available to commit to The Glos Community Project
If not already included in your CV, an addendum that covers any skills and experience you already have that would help show your fluency in economics and money management,
A short overview of what appeals to you about Community Marketplaces whilst demonstrating that you not only grasp but are fully committed to the principle of building community tools that put People First too.
Mend & Make Do | Repair Centres
Recycle, Reuse, Repair, Restore, Refurbish, Reclaim, Revitalise are all words that our current throw-away culture has taught us to look down on, unless you are either trying to make some kind of statement about your values, or you already have no choice but to recognise the value that remains within all sorts of goods that we use every day, but would otherwise just replace.
Those who still have the luxury of being able to afford and access goods that in many cases have deliberately been created with planned obsolescence or the ongoing need for them to be replaced in mind, rarely consider the reality that the option of recycling, reusing and repairing exists. Yet beyond the waste of money that every new purchase that could have been avoided really is, these are too often the same people that tell us they are the champions of green and ethical issues that run completely contrary to the profit driven exploitation and overuse of natural resources that their buying habits have legitimized, and that the greater percentage of all purchases made today are for goods that they want, but don’t actually need.
Theres nothing wrong with making maximum use of everything that we need. Ultimately, we must embrace a new view of standards for all goods so that quality will ensure longevity, and ongoing reuse, so that industry only delivers the goods that we need them too, and returns to both a size, standard and locality that works for our communities and our country as it should.
The Glos Community Project aims to promote the Make Do and Mend or Mend and Make do mindset, that successfully got British People through the very challenging period that surrounded the Second World War, but also demonstrated that there is nothing wrong with making the best of everything that we have – and that the problems only arise when narratives change or the messages that are shared publicly suggest that this isn’t a healthy way to think.
We want anyone and everyone who has goods, clothes or equipment that they have previously thrown away to start thinking again, and to start thinking recycle, repair, reuse, even if they don’t need them for their own use and then sell or exchange them, so that those items can then make someone else happy elsewhere.
The Opportunity to Coordinate and facilitate Local Repair & Refurbishment Hubs
These are roles that will work closely with the Facilitators & Coordinators of our Local Market Exchanges and Clothing Libraries and depending upon the skills and background of the applicant, they could oversee the development and management of both.
For stand-alone operations, I am looking for socially entrepreneurial people who have a background as a professional, voluntarily or even as a hobby, in repairing furniture, bikes, electrical goods and general household items to a very high standard – and to meet legislative requirements where necessary.
Repair Hubs are likely to run better with a number of people pooling their different skills and experience together, and it is therefore likely that applicants can expect to be collaborating with others very closely, from very early on.
If you are interested in this opportunity, please e-mail me and include:
Your name, contact and social media details
A copy of your current CV (If you have one)
How much time you have available to commit to The Glos Community Project
If not already included in your CV, an addendum that covers any skills and experience you already have that makes clear any technical training, experience and time served that you have.
A short overview of what appeals to you about being a champion of ‘Make Do and Mend’ thinking, and how making a social business out of the processes involved is a very exciting prospect for you.
Skills for Life Courses
Regrettably, education has lost sight of the relationship between being able to live a good, healthy and self-sufficient life, and what political and academic idealism currently dictates that it should be.
The problems that many people face throughout their lifetimes, just because a one-size-fits-all model has been imposed on a significant part of the population that either has a very different learning style, or for reasons outside of conscious control aren’t engaged with schooling in the way they are currently expected, do not fit a modern society that champions equality in all things.
In the longer term, the consequences of not having an education system that genuinely respects the reality that all young people of school age are generally either heads or hands, will be addressed by forms of government that actually do what public representation says it will on the box.
Until then we need to create new ways to help not only young people, but people of all ages to learn skills for life that the education system failed to give them, or doesn’t even offer any of us as standard anyway.
Life skills are predominantly practical or about the way that we perceive the world or think about it. So, unless the objectivity of academically trained or qualified teachers is clearly demonstrated, using ‘teachers’ to ‘teach’ anyone these skills or guide them to achieve this kind of understanding isn’t likely to be the best way.
The Glos Community Project aims to create an experientially led syllabus of skills and ideas that can be accessed and delivered locally within the community, by people from that community who genuinely have things that will be of use to others to share.
Courses are planned and will include:
Politics and how Politics and Government works
Basic Economics and how the current economy works
Critical Thinking and the dangers of Groupthink
Living without being influenced by AI
Surviving Social Media
Growing your own Food
Planning your own work-from-home business
Spiritual & Religious Independence
The Opportunity to Coordinate and Facilitate Community Skills for Life Hubs
I am looking for socially entrepreneurial people who have an understanding of education, but also see the value in providing learning opportunities in a more tailored form.
Openly bypassing the Establishment education offering for young people and adults of all ages and abilities, you will be able to speak credibly and create learning tools that are objective and give an accurate view of the areas you specialise in.
Where necessary, you will have a technical understanding that can be demonstrated by qualifications, by experience or both. But whatever background you have, you will be committed to The Glos Community Project principles of freedom of the person and freedom of thought.
If you are interested in this opportunity, please e-mail me and include:
Your name, contact and social media details
A copy of your current CV (If you have one)
How much time you have available to commit to The Glos Community Project
If not already included in your CV, an addendum that covers any skills and experience you already have that makes clear you have skills and experience that will be of great value to others when shared (If you’ve read this far and sharing your learning with others is what interests you, please don’t be put off if this question makes you feel like you might not be qualified. Just tell me what you thought of when the question came to you ‘what can you share?’
Other Opportunities
If you don’t feel able or wouldn’t have the time to take on a facilitation or coordination role, we are also seeking people from all backgrounds to share their experience with others.
The list of planned Course above is also by no means exhaustive. So, if you have recognised the need for some kind of training that can be shared and will be genuinely beneficial for everyone within your community – without any kind of aim to influence the way that they think in some way, please get in touch.
Other Project Services The Glos Community Project is working on
As you will already realise, having read this far, we are very motivated by the prospect of what people within our communities coming together have the power to deliver and to do.
We have lots of ideas that we would like to consider, discuss and flesh out with the input of anyone and everyone who feels they can bring useful ideas, knowledge and understanding to the table, so that we can go on to achieve all the things that we would like to.
The list below only represents what we are going to begin looking more carefully at next.
If you have ideas about any of these, or are already considering or working on a social enterprise or charity project in Gloucestershire that sounds like it might overlap with any of these in some way, please get in touch and lets have a chat about how we might be able to help or collaborate so that together, we can achieve our mutual aims.
Community Helpers
Homeless Hubs
Community Pubs
Community Brewing
Community Supermarket
Community Bakery
And there will be more…
Community Meetings | Building a Real Democracy
Politics is the subject that we love to hate and we hate politics for all of the reasons that have made the way that politics is being done across the UK so very wrong.
Whilst it has not been publicly recognised, a very different way of doing politics in the UK exists right now, that has the ability to deliver very different outcomes for us all – just by working together from within our communities, to ensure that when elections are called, we have proper community representatives on the ballot paper, rather than someone or some organisations self-interested choice.
For those who want to see real political change and for us to have public representatives who actually represent the public, once they have been elected, there are opportunities across every community to set up and facilitate Community Meetings where communities can select and appoint candidates for all elections, who are qualified and endorsed as the community choice.
The whole process is covered in my recent book Officially NONE OF THE ABOVE, which is available as a book for Kindle on Amazon, or can be read without cost if you would like to visit my Blog, HERE.
I will be very happy to offer the same kind of help and support to anyone who has read through the whole book and feels that the process tabled is one that they can commit to and follow.
Please get in touch, if you would like to discuss the book and the opportunity to collaborate on this very exciting community building project.
How we will create and develop each social enterprise
The really exciting part for anyone joining The Glos Community Project as a social entrepreneur, is we will step off and into this journey in the same way that you would have to alone, if you were about to set up a business of your own from scratch.
The difference is that I will be there as a mentor, advisor, sounding board and strategic guide to help in every possible way.
Yes, there are many different things that we will need to look at very closely and consider. But we will go through the process of researching and writing the business plan that your specific local community will need and this will be there to help us as we get to work and build the relationships that we need to, as well as being a formal document, presentation and application tool for us to use in gaining any specific kinds of support such as grants and licenses that might be needed, to make sure that everything will work as it should, and that everything is done the right way from the start.
You will be required to play a significant part in this process and you must be ready to apply a very open mind to every experience that creating a new business in these circumstances is likely to throw your way.
This is a prospect that should excite you, rather than intimidate you. Getting it right will be fantastic for you and as the ideas and the effort that you contribute begin to make this new social business take shape, the only thing that will feel better than recognising your own success and the outcome from the work you have done, will be seeing the benefits to so many others make a difference to other People’s lives.
Aims
Immediate Aim 1
To address poverty and the growing shortages of basic essentials with practical solutions delivered for the community by members of the community
Immediate Aim 2
To counter the narrative that only the Establishment can help and overcome learned helplessness by demonstrating that the help we need will come from us ourselves
Immediate Aim 3
To begin the process of creating New Local Economies, championing self-sufficiency, food security and the relocalisation of all supply chains that meet the basic and essential needs of life
Immediate Aim 4
To engage everyone in the process of taking back political decision making from centralised government, focusing the centre of power to the most localised and people-centric form
Principles
Local buy, Local supply
No speculation, agents or middle men
People First
Money or Currency is a unit of exchange and doesn’t vary in value
Technology is there to support roles, not to replace them
Just because we can, doesn’t mean we should
The lowest paid should be able to support themselves fully and provide all the basic essentials for life that they need on the equivalent of the basic or minimum weekly wage, without going into debt or requiring third party support of any kind.
Power must be as local to the people and the community in which they live and contribute as much as possible
Collaborate and make it even better
If any part of all of The Glos Community Project proposal is ringing bells or making sense to you and you can see a way we can improve on what you can see, or extend into a service offering that you are currently unable to see, please get in touch and share your thoughts.
We are not precious about the offer we are making. It’s a beginning and certainly not the end. So, by the time we are really off and running and in the business of delivering real change, we appreciate and value the input that will inevitably come from many different people and sources.
You really don’t have to join as a social entrepreneur or volunteer a specific set of skills to be able to help. The only thing we will insist on is that you really can live by and embrace the approach that whoever we are and wherever we are from, we are all 100% in this together, and that any advice, support or direction is given freely and without any form of direction or conditions attached.
Can we help you with a project that has similar aims?
If you are already working on a project serving your community that is aligned with The Glos Community Project offering in any way, we would be very happy to consider supporting you and collaborating with you wherever you are.
Regrettably, we cannot support projects or work where specific agendas or political motives are involved – no matter how good or harmless you may consider them to be.
An Economy for the Common Good and The Glos Community Project were not written in isolation and are part of a series of books that I began writing about three years ago in early 2022.
Each of the following list of Books is a variation on a theme, but works very much under the principle that it is not only possible but actually healthy to be able to understand, value and even hold different views or perspectives of the same situation or set of circumstances at the same time, whether that be in the Past, Present or Future tense.
Equally, it is also important to be able to consider different pathways for the future that sit beyond what many consider to be the obvious, simply because the obvious itself is usually inextricably linked with what has already been done and what sits in the past.
All of the following titles are available to purchase as complete eBooks for Kindle from Amazon using the links provided.
Where indicated, titles may also be available to download FREE as PDF Copies from my Blogsite in different forms, using the links provided.
If you would like to discuss any of the works listed, please get in touch.
When we hear the word ‘economics’ or ‘economy’, what does it make us think?
Money, business, growth, commerce, profit, wealth, trade are all likely to be terms that will spring to mind.
But what if the way we think about economics and what an economy or the economy really are is completely wrong?
What if a genuine economy were not about money or any type of material gain and instead had people, community, the environment, living good happy lives and the common good at its heart?
An Economy for the Common Good opens the door to thinking differently about the role of money, finance and economics in our lives and provides examples of the steps that we could take at any time to begin the creation of a new localised economic system that will lead to us all having much better experiences of everything in our lives.
To download a FREE to read PDF copy of An Economy for the Common Good, please follow the link immediately below. If you would like to download a copy for Kindle for the price of £1.99 (UK – correct at time of publication), please follow the link to Amazon at the bottom.
From the position where I am looking at everything UK Farmers and the supporting businesses and sectors around them now face, I regrettably believe that a collapse of UK Farming and our Food Chain is now inevitable.
The accelerating downward trajectory of UK Farming will not be stopped until events take over, or the majority of UK Farmers step back and see everything they face differently.
Quite a statement I know. Not least of all because it flies in the face of a great many names that the industry respects, whom I have no personal quarrel with.
Somewhat disconcertingly, despite the bubbles of different interests that exist across the industry; when it comes to the answers, solutions and whatever we can expect to happen next, everyone – other than perhaps just a few like me – is looking the very same way.
Expectation vs Reality
Farmers, Farmers membership and advocacy organisations and even No Farmers No Food expect the problems the industry has to be solved by the same people and organisations that not only caused them, but are accelerating the problems being experienced right now.
Few Farmers agree with what I have to say. Because those who are Farming today typically see Farming, the role of Farming and how Farming is being treated by industry and government in a very different way.
To be fair, I wouldn’t expect anything else. Farmers are far from being alone when it comes to the questions over what we know, what we believe and what is normal to expect from the businesses and organisations that we have relationships with and most importantly, the people that we elect.
However, it really shouldn’t be hard for anyone to stop, step back and remember that what we see and what is happening can be very different things.
Power of the political and financial kind has always been open to abuse. Many will have heard the expression ‘Give them bread and circuses’ that dates to Roman times and demonstrates how the public have always been ‘played’. So that those in power can reduce the risk to their position, no matter what might be going on.
Unfortunately, we are navigating a period of human history where manipulation in the forms of marketing, narratives and fear rolled out in many peculiar forms, is used very effectively to create a situation where any one of us can find ourselves questioning our own common sense and what we actually believe.
The internet, smart phones and the arrival of the most recent forms of Artificial Intelligence have made the problem all the more severe.
The reality that we do question what we can trust at least peripherally has the rather perverse outcome for many of making it even more likely that we will trust people and organisations, because of who they are and how their roles are presented to us, when we really shouldn’t be doing anything other than steering a wide berth from anything they say or compel us to do.
In real terms, this means that anyone, including Farmers, no matter how well educated or experienced, is likely to believe and accept as truth whatever those benefitting from whatever is happening to each and every Farm want us or that Farmer to believe.
The attack on UK Farming didn’t begin on 30th October, when The Chancellor unveiled the assault on Inheritance Tax Relief on the generational transfer of working Family Farms.
What it did herald however, was the step of taking the war to destroy UK Food Production as we have known it, into the open. Instead of the whole thing being hidden in plain sight, as it has been for decades before.
They have done this:
Either because the politicians we have and those who advise or influence them are now confident enough that the industry no longer has the clout or leverage to stop them.
Or more likely, because they are now desperate to contain the threat of power being returned to the Farmers themselves.
(Because the whole system that has been working and undermining everything for greed, profit and control since the early 70’s has now reached a point where the economic system that underpins it could collapse, and they could lose their control at any time.)
The outcry from the general public over Farmers IHT has taken the political classes more than a little by surprise.
They believed that the accompanying narrative that ‘Farmers must pay their way like everyone else’ would very quickly resonate with the general public. Given that the left has always happily propagated myths like ‘You never see a poor Farmer’.
What the establishment didn’t expect was a predominantly visceral response from so many different people. Where instincts have told even those not consciously thinking about it that any attack on Farming isn’t about Farming. It’s actually an attack on our Food.
Is Farming really about self-interest or public interest?
Regrettably, this is where maintaining the momentum for supporting Farmers becomes tricky. Because many Farmers see their businesses as being all about income and profit. In a similar way, if not in the very same sense as the politicians do.
With what seems impeccable timing and within a month of the Budget announcement, an initiative landed on social media that informed anyone watching that a new methane-reducing feed supplement initiative is about to be launched and underway using Farms that are contracted into the corporate system.
The relationship between Farms and a processor suggests that this isn’t a matter of choice.
So, it didn’t come as any great surprise that the issues raised by the implications of ‘playing god with natural processes’ would immediately create a new division between those who ‘cannot’ say no to such ‘trials’, because of the financial implications of doing so, and those who see and are at least beginning to question the vein of commonality flowing through every attack on UK Farming.
The last minutes of a VERY long game
Whether its supermarket prices, chemical additive use required by processors, the freeing up of capital that invested in Land and Farms through new punitive taxes, the disintegrating financial support from government and the public sector, or the bureaucracy that has steadily transformed everything since our membership of the deliberately flawed Common Market and latterly The EU began, they all have a war on the ability of the UK and more importantly our communities to run and thrive independently with Food in common at their very core.
In the world we are now being shoehorned into, Money talks and bullshit quite literally walks.
Food Production as we traditionally know it, is the antithesis of everything that those controlling our lives and businesses want and represent.
Who am I and why am I presenting a different understanding of the status quo?
I realise and understand why few can see or even agree with what I am saying here and what I write, speak and publish about Food, Farming and Food Security – amongst many other public policy related things.
Before 12 years in frontline politics, roles in professional charity leadership and years of being an entrepreneur and living the highs and traumatising lows of being in and around businesses, I began my career in farming – where I always had a strong affiliation with the Dairy Sector and made many friendships as a Young Farmer that I maintain to this day.
Farming and specifically Agri-contracting is a big thing within my wider family and beyond the proud heritage of my grandfather being a highly skilled wheelwright and pioneer in hydraulic farm trailer manufacturing, my great grandfather was a steam ploughman too.
My active interest in politics, or rather my driving belief in something better for everyone, in public service and for community working has been at the centre of so much of what I have done and what I still do.
That interest has taken me on a path that led me to appreciate how important the independence of local Food Chains to Our Future will now be. But also, to spend time completing a Postgraduate Certificate in Sustainable Agriculture and Food Security at the Royal Ag, where my fears about the position and outlook of the industry and where it is being led were starkly confirmed and amplified.
The watershed UK Farming is now within
It is difficult for anyone thinking rationally or logically to believe the realities and mechanics of the position that Farming and the wider economy now find themselves in.
Not because of the expertise and knowledge that is there to be tapped into by those who need it suggests otherwise.
But because nothing that is happening to Farming, to people or in politics at any level across the UK as we know it today, is in any way that which it seems.
I’m sure that you will agree it is more than likely that anyone questioned would at least admit that they believe something is going very wrong. Even if they cannot or would not try to identify what that something is.
In the few days after the Budget bombshell was dropped, I began writing ‘Who Controls Our Food Controls Our Future’, in an attempt to open up the reality of what is happening and why within the UK Food Chain.
I did so in what does today feel like the forlorn hope that at least some of the people and businesses that I care so deeply about would at the very least conduct a review of what they currently believe to be true.
Within ‘Who Controls Our Food Controls Our Future’, I discussed the strange but nonetheless compelling ‘situational bias’ that is holding us back from looking at anything and everything differently to what we already know and do.
Because we have trapped ourselves with the belief that we can only trust the sources, systems, procedures, businesses, organisations and news channels that we already know.
It is this situational bias that today presents the greatest risk to the future of UK Farming and with it the UKs Food Security and our Food Supply.
All of which should quite rightly be placed at the heart and function of our Local Communities and everything that we know.
Sadly, most of us still believe that the mind of Politicians can be changed politically. When the game that they are playing and which the politicians and those who control them have framed, isn’t politics at all.
By continuing to engage in any way that shows deference to them and their system and their way of working, rather than just sticking to the basic level of adherence to the rules which the current way of working requires that we all respect, the power of change and control over our future remains firmly in their hands.
The option to save UK Farming and with it our Food Security and a future that will give us all much more besides exists.
But it is also a journey and process where there isn’t politics of the kind that Westminster controls involved.
Play it their way or play it our way.
The Food that UK Farmers can produce is a key part of Our Future. But the choice of whether Farms end up at the centre of that future, or die without anyone other than the politicians themselves knowing why is for Farmers to decide.
Like everything. Its all about the way that we think.
Adam Tugwell 