I’m delighted to be standing as Reform UK’s candidate for Nadder Valley.

Full statement

I moved to the county three years ago and have since had two daughters and securing a bright future for them, and their generation, is my motivation behind standing.

I have worked in the public sector, as a Royal Navy officer, and the private sector, variously in technology, defence, financial and maritime markets, both as an employee and entrepreneur and have looked on with dismay as successive governments have presided over two decades of economic stagnation and declining living standards.

While lip-service has been paid to democracy, government has outsourced decision making to a cadre of unelected, and unaccountable, so-called “experts” in executive agencies, quangos and international bodies. At public expense, and subverting democratic votes, an agenda has been enacted which favours coercion to freedom, corporatism to competition and division to unity. You, the voter, get the policies you rejected at the ballot box which increase costs for producers which are then passed back onto you as consumers. A spiral of decline.

It does not have to be this way.

To govern is to choose. In the EU Referendum – during which I ran Business for Britain under Vote Leave – the British public voted to restore that ability to choose, sovereignty, to the UK’s Parliament. The current political class have since proven that they have neither the wish nor ability to make those choices and to see them through.

Reform UK understands that it is the responsibility of government to choose to lead, not to follow. Only with wholesale reform of the instruments of the British state can the country be set back on the road to prosperity and a brighter future.