POLITIC
I was born in 1967, into a Britain that still remembered who it was. My childhood was protected in ways that most didn’t have. My dad worked at Ford Dunton in Research & Development, so even while the country was wrestling with strikes, inflation and industrial decay, we had stability. We weren’t rich, but life had rules. My mum was the backbone of the house, the one who understood that trouble has to be confronted, not reasoned with. I didn’t grow up being negotiated with. I grew up being put in line. Leadership, in my first experience of it, was not a conversation, it was a hand on your shoulder, a door shut, and consequences. Those lessons stayed with me.
I came of age in the 1980s, in the shadow of Margaret Thatcher. You can spend your life listening to people complain about her, but none of them can deny the reality: there had been no leadership like hers for decades. Britain had been drifting, apologising for itself, held hostage by unions that treated the country like a bargaining chip. Thatcher did what real leaders do: she confronted institutions that believed they were untouchable. She didn’t manage weakness, she broke it. I didn’t admire her because she was conservative or because she ‘won’. I admired her because she acted like my mother did, when something was wrong, you fixed it, even if people hated you for it.
The Falklands proved that more clearly than anything. Britain was a tired country when Argentina invaded those islands. The easy thing would have been to shrug and accept the loss, to bury it under diplomatic language and talk about ‘limited options’. Instead, the government sent ships eight thousand miles to defend a rock most people couldn’t find on a map. For a teenager like me, it was a moment of awakening: you learn that a nation is defined not by the speeches it gives, but by what it’s prepared to fight for. It gave me strength. It told me that Britain, even in decline, still had teeth. I was a year too young to join the army when the conflict came, and when I did enter later, it didn’t go the way I imagined. Those stories belong in my book. But the political meaning remains: the Falklands proved that a weak country dies and a strong country survives. Ever since then, Britain has been drifting back toward weakness.
I found my own path the way young men do: through failure, friction, and hunger. I bought a Yamaha RD50LC in black, I still remember the freedom of that machine. I went north to Sheffield chasing a girl and a life. I slept through winters in boots and a Crombie coat until I had to go home. I got into trouble more than once; I know the system from the inside. I’ve slept in holding homes and watched how authority treats people who don’t have the right kind of accent or the right kind of parents. I don’t need documentaries to tell me how the law works, I’ve seen it from every angle: punished by it, protected by it, and eventually studying it. I earned an A-Level in Law because I learned that fists solve nothing when the opponent is a government file.
My politics comes from work, not theory. Thatcher’s Britain offered opportunity if you had the guts to take it. I went into property in Yorkshire, developing and renting. I won some, I lost some, I kept going. That was Britain then: a place where the State didn’t stand in your way unless you broke the law. You didn’t need slogans or subsidies. You needed backbone. That’s how a country functions. That’s how people grow.
Then came Tony Blair. A salesman in a suit. The man didn’t reform Britain, he put it into debt and left the bill to children who weren’t even born. The NHS is bleeding today not because of doctors, but because of Blair’s Private Finance Initiatives, thirty-year mortgages disguised as progress. Hospitals became financial instruments. You don’t run a nation by leasing its vital organs to banks. Blair did, and we’ve been living with the consequences ever since.
Now we’re governed by Keir Starmer, a man who stands for nothing except the avoidance of conflict. His politics is managerial: committees, consultations, reports, endless language and no action. He governs like someone who has never been punched, never risked anything, never built anything, never lost anything. Britain is treated like a conference room argument, not a sovereign nation. Nothing bold, nothing brave, nothing that demands sacrifice. Only safety, slogans and the desperate hope that no one notices the decay underneath.
I don’t care about Left or Right. I care about strength. I care about consequence. I care about truth. I believe in enterprise because I’ve built things myself. I believe workers should be able to live with dignity because I’ve worked through winters. I believe women deserve respect not because of ideology, but because they pay the biological cost of humanity, periods, pregnancy, birth, while men walk free of it. A real man covers the bill.
Britain is dying, not because we lack resources or talent, but because we are led by people who do not believe the country is worth defending. They apologise for our history, our borders, our identity, our pride. They think politics is about tolerance and performance. It isn’t. Politics is about survival. It’s the cold calculation of what you will protect, and what you will destroy.
I am not a theorist. I am not a partisan. I am a man who has seen Britain from the factory floor to the courtroom, from youth detention to business ownership, from Yorkshire winters to the Falklands on the news. I know exactly what this country is losing, and I know exactly why. Weak leaders don’t save nations. Strong ones do. Britain doesn’t need healing circles, it needs a spine. And if it cannot grow one, someone must drag it back from the edge.
