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I won’t make an apology for this because it has been on my mind for a very long period of time. I am sick to my bulging stomach as to why there is such a pressure on gay men to be so slim.

There are many articles – scientific- and non – which I’d like to introduce to this post. I will start with the non-scientific ones below, which I will not quote since they are based on personal experiences. I have offered three here, and I will not be your search engine for any more, but I will talk about the science.

• Why Body Image Issues Pervade the Gay Community
• How being a gay Man Can Make Your Body Issues Worse
• As a Gay man, I know How Damaging it is To Idealise the Idea of the ‘Twink’

There is a massive problem within the gay community with respect to this, and the straw that broke the camel’s back for me tonight was seeing this:

Survey: How do you feeling about travelling to the Caribbean as an LGBTQ person?https://t.co/IV6p6qBC42 pic.twitter.com/ZOo5eVWLBN

— Attitude (@AttitudeMag) November 18, 2020

I have had enough of the “perfect body”. I see it on Twitter all the time. I see people “thirsting” after those with abs.

Earlier today – and I won’t embed this tweet considering that I don’t want to attract any attention to him and his body image issues (or attention-seeking) – I saw pre-lockdown and during-lockdown “comparison” photos. One of them featured a toned, abs-on-display body, and the other displayed some abdominal fat. Neither of them were unhealthy in terms of how the human body works: His BMI would be in range; and if it were not, it would largely be attributed to muscle and not fat.

It isn’t just that. There are many reasons why people gain weight, and within the LGBT community – and especially gay men – it is frowned upon. People gain weight due to depression and the side-effects of antidepressants including mirtazapine, fluoxetine, and a litany of other anti-depressants have weight gain as a side-effect.

What is more important?

Quite clearly, someone’s mental health, at the point at which they need to take an antidepressant, is more important than their physical health. This is, of course, providing that there are no underlying conditions.

I will “come out” and say that I am on ‘California rocket fuel’ at this point. Mirtazapine and its effects on hunger suck. My GP has advised me to “ignore the hunger,” and added that it is easier said than done. I’ve added things like oranges, sliced apples, etc., so that I try not to gain weight. The most important thing, however, is my mental health.

Scientific studies into gay men and weight

Here, we come to the nub of the problem. And I say this as someone who is gay. The science is below.

The most common type of antifat bias reported was rejection by potential romantic partners on the basis of weight. Both experiencing and witnessing antifat bias was associated with several types of body image disturbance. As a follow-up to Study 1, Study 2 compared gay and heterosexual college men’s expectations of antifat bias from a potential romantic partner. Participants rated how likely certain outcomes would be if they saw an overweight man hit on an attractive target (a man for gay participants or a woman for heterosexual participants). Gay men reported greater likelihood that the overweight man would be blatantly ignored, treated rudely, or mocked behind his back if he approached an attractive potential romantic partner.

Foster-Gimbel, O., & Engeln, R. (2016). Fat chance! Experiences and expectations of antifat bias in the gay male community. Psychology of Sexual Orientation and Gender Diversity,

The problem goes deeper than that, too. As a consequence of the continuing pressure on gay men to have a “perfect body” as opposed to a “dad bod”, we see:

Participants (134 gay men, 119 heterosexual men) completed measures of body figure preference ratings varying on adiposity and muscularity, and measures of self-esteem and involvement with the gay community (gay participants only). It was found that both gay and heterosexual men desired to be thinner and more muscular. However, body dissatisfaction (discrepancy between current and ideal figures) was greater for the gay men. For both sexual orientation groups, dissatisfaction with thinness increased with age and was negatively correlated with self-esteem. For gay men, muscularity dissatisfaction was also negatively correlated with self-esteem, but involvement with the gay community was not related to body dissatisfaction. It was concluded that many men (gay and heterosexual alike) experience body dissatisfaction, but that this was somewhat greater for gay men.

Tiggemann, M., Martins, Y., & Kirkbride, A. (2007). Oh to be lean and muscular: Body image ideals in gay and heterosexual men. Psychology of Men & Masculinity, 8(1), 15–24.

This is a cultural thing within the gay “community”, and it is not something that is conducive to good mental health and nor is it conducive to physical health.

I have experience with my best friend who developed anorexia nervosa to achieve a perfect body image. That is why I was a trustee of First Steps ED for 18 months: I was trying to help prevent problems within other people through my marketing experience.

Getting back to the point, the male gay community does need to stop being so shallow as a whole. There are huge pressures on weight, and during lockdown, since everyone seems to have gained weight, we absolutely need to change this.

Social media is rife with people’s “perfect bodies” (I note that some people are attracted to those with a few extra pounds anyway). This needs to end because it puts so much pressure on gay teenagers way before they can even have a real relationship.

Like I said earlier, I am currently taking an appetite-stimulating anti-depressant (as well as one which quells it, but not very well — so I eat fruit, veg, soups, etc., when I get uncontrollably hungry). Even that said, I have no doubt that I will gain weight during this period.

But that’s it: It’s not just about me: It’s about all of us. The absurdity of seeing a “before and after” picture of someone from pre-lockdown to lockdown as it is and having just some abdominal fat made me genuinely sad. We should be better than this.

What happened to people fighting for rights solely to sleep in the same bed with another man?

If we do not do something about this, then we are all complicit in a collective self-hatred.

I am very sorry that I have left out lesbians and transgender individuals here, but I can only speak to my own lived experience.

Liam

The disastrous pandemic

This year has, undoubtedly, been the worst year for the world since the years of the Second World War. We have seen – at the time of writing – 1,328,496 deaths from COVID-19. That is a horrifying figure for a virus. In Britain, we have seen the death count rise – again, at the time of writing – to over 68,000. We have also seen tremendous pressure on the National Health Service to the point that the pandemic has caused a mass pause in cancer treatment and essential health services.

Going back to January, we saw the Government briefing ministers and Tory MPs, while other European countries were taking action to quell the pandemic as much as possible, to say that herd immunity would be a way to come out of the virus. They were aware, back then, of the World Health Organisation’s (albeit late) warning about the virus and its impact and chose to do nothing.

That was a choice, and it is indisputable: Procurement of Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) was not in line with any guidance at all by four successive governments. Most of it was way past expiry.

The mental health impact has also been dreadful. This is the first time in the vast majority of the population’s lifetimes in which friends and family have not been able to see each other for a significant proportion of the year. Countless people in Britain have lost their spouses, partners, grandparent/s, mother, father, brother, sister, aunt, uncle and cousins with the deaths.

With people losing their jobs, being furloughed or working from home, there is a lack of an ordinary routine. Routine is key to mental health, and this is of course being broken for everyone. Many people who are working from home do not have their own separate working space – i.e. those who have no choice but to live in shared housing – and this can be extremely harmful to mental health.

Reasons to be optimistic

However, there is news to be cautiously optimistic about vaccines and, the pandemic and its effects on us – i.e. how humanity can learn and develop from this. Pfizer’s vaccine appears to help prevent 90% of COVID-19 cases, or at least reduce its severity. We have seen further good news from Moderna, whose vaccine is 95% effective, has greater shelf life and does not have to be kept at quite such a low temperature. We can also expect good news on Oxford/AstraZeneca in the coming weeks, it would seem.

Good changes to ways of working

There is a balance to be struck here, but many people prefer working from home because it gives them greater flexibility and family time. The average commute time in the UK is 59 minutes. Consider all that saved time. Those who can’t afford to live in London and so have had to commute have found themselves getting a very sweet deal indeed: They are still living outside of a heavily-polluted city, with an employer there and having to commute where necessary, but are largely working from home. And those of us who are further up the north of England still save in this respect, freeing up much-needed money to spend to stimulate the economy and, for many of us millennials, save for mortgages.

We saw the announcement – very early in the pandemic – that Twitter will make it an option for those who can work from home a permanent feature of their perks, if they can, and if they want to.

Many people do not want to work from home on a long-term basis because, for example, they live alone. I count myself as someone who might feel lonely on some workdays if that is the case but having the flexibility of choice would be nice. After all, after the pandemic, I will not be as isolated. Even during it, I have a support bubble.

Clearly, tech businesses are best placed to make the move to remote office settings, but it has not been difficult in my workplace because of the readiness that we had put in place.

The future of work

KPMG predicts: “HR must swiftly transition from putting out the fires of the immediate impact of COVID-19 and its aftermath and switch to playing the long game of shaping the workforce of the future for their enterprises. But this switch requires new mindsets, skills and priorities,” said Robert Bolton, Head of Global People and Change Center of Excellence, KPMG International. “Lasting impacts, including the fact that nearly 40 percent of employees will continue to work remotely and perhaps others in a hybrid model of attendance, means that a new reality has to be contended with. The pandemic has presented HR with a significant opportunity to transform not just the function, but the enterprise itself.”

Many businesses are following this trend. At first, we expected to come in and out of lockdown, eventually re-emerging with workplaces changing. Most offices are not doing that, following government advice – and it does not seem that this will necessarily be the case in the long-term. There will be a sea change.

With 40% of employees standing to being given the choice to continue to work from home, carbon emissions are sure to fall: We saw nature itself healing during the height of the pandemic, with less waste being dumped into the oceans, and a reduction in people driving to work, this looks set to continue.

As energy companies are being incentivised to switch to green energy by both the regulatory framework in addition to consumers voting with their wallets, this again brings further good news in that respect. Those who do work from home will have the luxury of being able to choose a green energy supplier.

Overall market impact and its impact

Clearly, COVID-19 has had a woeful effect on the economy and what is rightly crucial to the man on the street: Jobs. The recovery of these jobs will be curious, because business (the below is from the US PwC Pulse Report) are reading signals and investing money within technology.

That is one reason why, as part of fiscal expansionary growth efforts by the UK Government, there is a focus on retraining. The pandemic has sped up the growth of embracing cutting-edge technology by business.

Those answering the PwC Pulse Report, crucially, are looking to contain costs. This makes sense: All businesses attempt to contain costs, but the movement on this has shifted to technology and the uptake of what was already out there.

Investment planning is fortunately increasing because the market is not as frit as it was in the early phases of the pandemic. An increase in both standard investment and also research and development will, if all usual rules apply, result in yet further advancements of technology and its uptake by business.

When asked the question, “What about the current situation will make your company better in the long run?”, businesses in the US answered as follows.

All of this is good news for both consumers, employees and employers: Flexible working arrangements will introduce a greater work-life balance;  resilience and agility includes mental health; new ways to serve customers are already being introduced in the high street; and technology investments that have long been overdue are happening and leaner operations tend to lead to greater efficiency and productivity outcomes. One curious outcome is community and societal engagement, and it makes me ponder whether the private sector is taking its responsibilities with respect to the third sector properly now: We have seen a huge increase on demand for charitable services, and with savings elsewhere, brand image can be bolstered by donations to the third sector.

Mechanics of digitalisation

In my job, I am responsible for digitalisation. I had, prior to the pandemic, set up Microsoft Teams within the office environment. This meant that the switch was significantly easier: We did not have to adapt to new meeting styles as many did. VOIP phones meant that we could switch easily from home. Work mobiles were ordered and issued overnight. This stuff happened everywhere, and we now know that the technology has been there for years; it has just been that digital migrants have not caught up with what is already there.

Not just that, but Remote Desktop Connection for Windows has existed now for decades. If your machine is on at work, you can access it from home.

With modern Customer Relationship Management systems and out-of-the-box print-to-post solutions, it is easy to switch that stuff, too. All it takes is calm thinking in that first part.

It also sped up our digitalisation efforts with respect to remote service provision – i.e. offering our clients the ability to interact with us via Zoom, Teams, Steam, ad nauseum, and a litany of other platforms. Yes, it was hard, but it worked.

The end of face-to-face meetings and the wasted drive

I had always wondered why anyone ever needed to get in their car for the purpose, unless there was a specific requirement for seeing an organisation, of anything but a handshake. Most meetings for development purposes can, and should, involve nobody driving. We should not pollute the planet that we live on for the purpose of face-to-face meetings.

Employment

As we have known for years, as people either in employment or seeking, that digitalisation and artificial intelligence has been the key to development of the things that matter: Jobs.

We have been warned by the doom-mongers that all our jobs will be replaced by artificial intelligence and robotics. While that may be the case in blue-collar jobs, it is not the same in white-collar. Unless you are an accountant or a solicitor, you need not be worried. And if you are any of those things, you should place your bets that there will be no further co-operation between international states.

Artificial intelligence has not been able to demonstrate human creativity in terms of writing, art, marketing and indeed any other creative industry to date. It has not been able to operate on animals like us and our pets. 6G Will make remote operations, in real time, possible: Technology geeks, like me, forecasted this a long time ago.

The future

I am hoping, that through the technology that already existed and has been taken up by all of us with respect to our own practices within the office environment.

The increase in demand, and indeed supply, for working from home as an alternative to the classical model, will undoubtedly happen naturally.

Summary

Nobody yet knows what will happen as we emerge from the pandemic, but we can all guess. Since – at least in white collar jobs – we have all taken advantage of existing technology, we will be able to work from home. We will be able to mix with each other once again once the vaccinations are administered.

The sun will shine again on a new Earth: One with a greater focus on the climate, since we’ve been forced into it; one with a greater focus on mental wellbeing – with any luck; and one that embraces technology that has existed for years and indeed has saved a great number of jobs and sectors of our economy.

Until now, we have seen Keir Starmer supporting measures that the Government has put in place to stop the spread of COVID-19. We are told that they aren’t having an effect by the dribbling commentariat of social media; more informed sources suggest that they are. The Rule of Six and a 10pm closing time for restaurants (and most certainly pubs) are supported by scientific evidence.

We’ve seen a dozen or so of the Awkward Squad on both the Tory and Labour backbenches vote to repeal the Coronavirus Act. That is, they want the freedom to go around infecting you, and probably your mother, your brother, your uncle, or your grandmother, who might have underlying health conditions.

They don’t care about you. They care about their freedom to do as they please in this national crisis. Comparing the closest threat that we had when we had a visible enemy — i.e. WWII — if we experienced the same today, these are the people who would be saying that “You can’t force me to turn my lights off!”

Lindsay Hoyle – the Speaker of the House – gave some control of the order paper to MPs last week.

Today, we see that Starmer has swapped supporting the Government in a matter of a national crisis to instead make hay while the sun shines. Nobody likes these restrictions, you see. People are angry that they can’t go out in cold weather to infect each other in pubs and restaurants. Businesses are hurting.

There is no case whatsoever for having a Chamber of self-important morons (and this is demonstrably the case with Momentum-supported Labour candidates and the Tory MPs who replaced talent such as two former Chancellors in the last Parliament, just for starters) who make for excellent lobby-fodder.

This is not a Parliament of honourable men and women. It’s one of opportunism and those who would rather play puerile party politics while the country gets sicker.

“It seems totally nonsensical to me that, in my role as a representative of a community that has typically felt left behind and voiceless for many years, I should be advised that there are certain words I shouldn’t use; certain issues that I should avoid; certain sensibilities that I should not offend.

“How am I to raise the true feelings of an electorate that broadly feels like it’s being preached at by a metropolitan elite who neither understand nor care about them, if I have to walk on eggshells and dance around the problem?” – Ben Bradley MP – Mansfield

In an age where all public sector organisations, the vast majority of forward-thinking private ones, and most third sector organisations have trained their staff on unconscious biasness, you would think that a quote would be attributed to some sort of unhinged member of a Parliamentary party not fit to govern the country.

You’d probably be forgiven for doing so. I certainly think that the MPs who voted to activate something which may very well break international law in a “very limited and measured way” are not fit to be Members of Parliament. Throw in the fact that they campaigned on the Withdrawal Agreement being their “oven-ready” Brexit deal, and now seem to think that they can break manifesto commitments – and indeed potentially international law – and you have the recipe for disaster that only a super-majority can deliver.

Let’s analyse what Bradley is saying here for a second.

“in my role as a representative of a community that has typically felt left behind and voiceless for many years…” What does this mean in the context of unconscious bias training? Does it mean that he might agree with his otherwise consciously biased constituents? And for those who might disagree, have you ever been to Mansfield?

“How am I to raise the true feelings of an electorate that broadly feels like it’s being preached at by a metropolitan elite who neither understand nor care about them.” And there we have it. Apparently, we have a metropolitan elite behind this scheme. I remember taking unconscious bias training three years ago when I was working in higher education. It actually shows you things downfalls into which you can fall just by curse of not understanding issues because of certain psychological traps.

Unconscious biasness was not created out of some ideology by the “metropolitan elite”, which is hilariously language only ever invoked by a collection of swivel-eyed Tory MPs.

It was created because various institutions realised, back when Cameron and May were in the business of responding to research that showed that showed the huge barriers-to-entry to employment if you had a “black-sounding surname“, when we understood that sex or gender were barriers-to-entry (both male and female) into employment, and that people assume far too much about an individual being straight.

Those who look to refuse this are either doing it because, in the case of Bradley, he will do anything to keep his seat; or, in the case of people like Davis, they are consciously biased in the first place.

No thinking constituent in any of these people’s seats should let them get away with refusing training which all of us in all sectors either have had to, or did not mind having to, do.

Remind them who they work for.

As a teenager, at the age of fifteen, I became the youngest managing director in the country. That was perhaps commendable, you might think. I’ve no doubt that it did start me on a path to understand marketing, the need for prudence at work, efficiency, entrepreneurship and many other vital skills which have followed me to this day in my career.

See, I had grown up in a family which experienced poverty at a young age. Inspired by my mother’s enterprising spirit to elevate us into a greater life and my Stepfather’s ability to fight for his family (as he had “adopted” us as his own), I wanted to make them both proud. And I did – for a while. When things went a little bit wrong, not so much. But if you find me a business which did not experience some shock during the financial crisis, and I will owe you a pound. (That’s not actually a guarantee.)

This was largely the result of an autistic obsession with ICT. That is not necessarily a bad thing: In fact, it allowed the business that I co-founded, at my insistence, to support the third sector with web hosting and development services. I am proud of that.

What I am not particularly proud of is the amount of greed-driven out-manoeuvring of others within the sector at that point. Competition is always a great thing, but when you have someone at such a young age, maybe not so much. We were successful and we did sell the web hosting arm of our firm during the financial crisis. We would have sold our client book for web development services, but by that point, so many firms had gone bust that it was essentially useless.

I have since been informed by a former friend that I did not “have what it took” to be in business. That person has felt the sting of the COVID-19 recession in his own business, and I wonder now whether he reflects on that conversation. I certainly had what it took, but I was – and am – also autistic. This means that an element of social justice enters business thinking, not the rampant pursuit of profit at all costs.

Herein lies the problem: When you cannot conscionably act against the interests of others to further your own, you really have a problem in business. I balanced it, at the time, with our work to dedicate 10% of profits and operational management to supporting the third sector. That was enough. It was sadly, though, not enough to ensure that we could run the business when we sold it – of all companies, to a firm fronting Libya Telecom & Technology, a Gadaffi firm – that we could ensure its stability. I believe in a moral duty to your customers in addition to a commercial one, and we made that call because we could not sustain it ourselves. I suppose, when you consider LTT and its owners – or rather, owner – it perhaps was not that much of a moral decision after all, but I was at a tender age of twenty.

Between a year out and university, I went into IT sales and marketing – largely cold-calling. This was an incredibly stressful job and one which I would not repeat (due to the cold-calling). I had little victories; I got bonuses. At that moment in time, I was still driven by avarice, kidding myself with some form of donating to the third sector from my wage packet – and I am not particularly ashamed to admit that as a thirty-one year old man who has learned from his mistakes.

Sales is not in and of itself unethical. The business I worked for is an excellent one, but it did not feel right. Something was wrong.

I went into politics, with an intention to make a difference. I spent five years working for a Member of Parliament in a key seat in Derbyshire. It was a (broadly) fun and rewarding job. I enjoyed making a difference to the constituency by organising jobs fairs, by helping constituents, by successfully campaigning to raise the Personal Allowance in Income Tax to £12,500, and by helping to advise my employer on what we needed to do to ensure that we did stand up for our constituents. He did not need much advising in this respect, but we all have our distractions and different backgrounds, and I was there in service to the public before my party.

I since resigned from the Conservative Party, and I do not envisage under this leadership why I would or could possibly join again. The fact that Dominic Cummings got away with his blatant lies – and anyone who believes that story just wants to – sickens me to my stomach. The fact that we are about to experience a crisis at the end of the COVID-19 recession (if predictions are correct), which will be self-inflicted by that same “competent and pragmatic” party also makes me feel ill.

Considering my options, I turned to HEI administration. That was also a mistake, for reasons which I cannot post.

But what has not been a mistake has been moving into the third sector in general. I was a trustee of First Steps ED, and I am proud of the work that I did there in advising their marketing strategy. I am immensely proud of the fact that I now work for an autism charity, which impacts people’s lives directly.

Politics cannot do this. You are trapped within a system over which you have absolutely no control. Even backbench MPs privately admit this, which is why sometimes we see bizarre explosions in the Commons from them. For the most part, however, politics is controlled by those who are at the very top of it, and the rest are lobby-fodder.

It has taken me a while to fully understand and comprehend where my purpose lies. It is in the third sector, trying to develop a charity and make it work. I love my job: It allows me to use my marketing skills, my administrative skills, my development skills, and my entrepreneurial thinking to apply things that really matter. Business does matter, but I would rather leave that to people who are more concerned with profit. I am concerned with people’s lives, what makes a difference to an individual and not what makes a difference to my bottom-line.

As I am involved in development, of course I must ensure that the charity remains stable and obtains grants and contracts. However, I am not concerned about the additional money which must be required to pay shareholders. Call me wet, but that is what I believe to be the ethical way.

Who I do not have sympathy for is the Brexit wrecking-balls who have decided to up sticks and move to Singapore, for example. Dyson was always a hypocrite who took money from the European Union and decided to stick up two-fingers to them while you and I will be left to pay for his reckless actions. I also have no sympathy for those who decided to avoid supporting society by avoiding tax in the good years who have been rightly excluded from the Self-Employment Assistance Scheme.

Yes, I still consult on a part-time basis to businesses in order to make some money if I need it, here and there. That is fine, and it’s something I enjoy: It keeps my commercial focus sharpened. It does not mean, however, that I need to start my own business again. And I can only think of those who are struggling in business right now who genuinely want to employ people and make a success of it to help them pay their mortgages.

I was told earlier today by my grandmother’s care home that she passed away at 6.15 this morning. It’s a strange phone call to get: One that leaves you with a sense of overwhelming blurriness in the immediate aftermath of confusion and denial.

I haven’t quite got to the anger stage, nor proper grief. I am still still firmly in shock.

But I’d like to share some of my grandmother’s best moments with me in mine (and I hope her) lifetime.

I can remember my childhood fondly. My mother was out working for herself and she relied upon my grandmother a lot for childcare when she and my father divorced. I remember being picked up from nursery by my grandmother, who we called ‘Mama’, and sharing a packet of Jelly Tots each day with her dog.

I remember big salad bowls and healthy meals. I remember the lesser healthy, but equally as hearty ones too. I recall her fondness for making sure that you had absolutely everything you needed to succeed in life.

She took me in a few years back after I’d moved out of Will’s, and she helped me to move out of her home. She had the kindness of a Saint.

There were difficult times, especially towards the end of it. She refused to see me for a while, but I am glad that I was finally able to see her and that I managed to see her yesterday, just before she died. I am glad that somebody did. She was in pain and she had poor recollection, with inability to distinguish my voice, and her face had dried out because she had clearly been refusing water.

Cancer – or, rather, three cancers – got the 88-year-old fighter in the end. There’s not much that can be done at that age. She gave it a good go though.

So, my dear Mama, I know that I don’t believe in your Heaven, but I am hopeful that I’m wrong and that you’ve met granddad and your parents in the paradise of free souls. I hope we meet again soon, because I already miss you.

I’ve been taking a party political sabbatical since March 2017, when I resigned my Conservative Party membership out of concerns which had broadened out to be largely true.

As I made clear in the post at the time, I consider that it’s a duty to former colleagues and indeed a locality that I support them in campaigning.

Amanda Solloway, MP for Derby North between 15-17, has been making a fantastic success of her charity: HeadHigh. She stood up for mental health in Parliament and she continues to do so in Derby. I know that returning Amanda would be the return of a decent one nation, caring Conservative.

It’s a bit more than that though. This election really is one that I wish we were not fighting. Parliament and the government both let us down in the last parliamentary term by blocking Brexit when it was first possible to even now, and the government had continued with plans unwaveringly, reluctant and ruling out a second referendum or a confirmatory ballot.

I believe that was a mistake and I still do.

But here’s a chance to get someone I believe in back into Parliament. Someone whose work in Parliament I followed closely and have had the pleasure of working in the third sector with. Someone who I know can stand up for my values and Derby North.

After all, there is a country to govern. At the start of the summer it became clear that Brexit was inevitable. I fought it a bit. I still do. But here we are, arguing about a result from three years ago. Within those three years, we’ve seen little in terms of anything else and no real heat at the heart of government. We need a return to that and Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party is not the answer.

Corbyn asks the wrong questions of the wrong people. Rather than asking the public what they want, he instead speaks to his mates and Seamus Milne, who all agree with him that nationalising everything that moves is a good idea. He doesn’t ask “how can we improve your lives?” He just assumes he knows the answers.

Conservatives don’t presume to know anything about you; in fact, that’s kind of the liberal/Conservative thing: I know that you know what’s best for you, too. And I suspect you agree with me that it’s not higher taxes, it’s not taxing you for others to catch trains, and it’s not voting for someone who’s presided over Labour getting to the point where it has to be investigated by the ICHR for anti-Semitism. And on that final note, after Chris Williamson was suspended by the Labour Party for being filmed aggravated that “the party has been apologising for too long on anti-Semitism”, he himself is standing as an independent candidate in the constituency. I don’t really want to ignore the chance of fighting that awful type of politics either.

I will be campaigning for Amanda during this general election and would encourage anyone else who reads this and would like to get involved to contact me in the first instance.