I am delighted to have been selected as the Libertarian Party’s parliamentary candidate for North East Hampshire at the next general election, an election that cannot come soon enough.

Full statement

Since childhood I have held a firm appreciation of individual and the rights of citizens against The State. Having family members who lived under communist regimes and having lived in the authoritarian regimes of communist China and Putin’s Russia myself I believe we have still maintained some veneer of liberty in the UK. Sadly, in recent years that liberty has become increasingly under threat, not just from our politicians but from advances in surveillance technology and censorship of speech online. For me, the State’s hideous response to the Covid-19 pandemic finally removed any doubt about the dangers we face as a nation and the immediate need for action. This is why I have decided to stand as a candidate for the Libertarian Party.

2020 will be remembered as the year the United Kingdom finally and decisively threw off any pretence of functioning as a healthy liberal democracy. Lockdown was the most egregious State assault on individual liberty since the suspension of Habeas Corpus.

Within the first weeks of the pandemic it was clear that the substantially lighter Swedish approach was the right one. A June 2020 trip to Stockholm unmasked a lost world in which people went about their daily business, breathing freely, uninhibited and alive. The Swedes did not give up their liberty to The State. Proportionately, far fewer of their nation lost their lives. Meanwhile, in the UK private individuals were forced to shutter their businesses while the taxpayer funded the economic inactivity of millions; loved ones were prevented from meeting -- even on their deathbeds; our children were denied an education, some locked in with their abusers. Lockdown did irreparable damage to our young people, and continues to manifest in mental health and behavioural issues, further compounding the recruitment and retainment crisis in education. To add insult to injury in this dystopian nightmare, fearmongering and informing on our neighbours was encouraged by State propaganda through its taxpayer funded mouthpiece the BBC. All the while our Prime Minister showed a flagrant disregard for his own rules. This was the United Kingdom in the 21st Century. It is worth remembering that MPs were eventually given a free vote on these heinous coronavirus measures in March 2021 and the vast majority voted to keep us imprisoned. This amounted to no less than treason against the sovereign individual. This would not have been possible with a written constitution upholding the rights of the individual against The State as proposed by the Libertarian Party.

Government has been playing fast and loose not only with our rights but also with our hard-earned money. We currently face the highest tax burden since the conclusion of the Second World War while Rwanda have received £240 million for quite literally nothing as billions have been thrown at the galactic black hole that is HS2. All this against the backdrop of a state-manufactured inflation and cost of living crisis -– who could have possibly known that furlough and shutting down the economy for months would have repercussions later on?

Soon the British public will have to choose between a “Conservative” party, which has long since jettisoned any semblance of conservatism and the frightening prospect of fiscal responsibility lying with the Labour Party. The Liberal Democrats are still in love with Brussels, the Greens would make environmental totalitarianism the State religion and one only needs to read the views of Reform UK’s prospective candidates to see their thinly-veiled admiration for hard-right authoritarianism and demagogues abroad. The Libertarian Party offers the only alternative based on the rights of the individual against an increasingly bloated state. I am honoured to stand as a libertarian candidate during these uncertain times.