I’m passionate about Liberalism and i’d like to tell you why. My mother brought my sister and I up together as a widowed parent after my father passed away. Despite the difficulty of losing her husband, she studied part-time to get a University degree and to get a better job to support our family. The government gave our family a helping hand with the widows pension, and that enabled her to get a better education and improve all of our opportunities.

It was her example that has taught me that it is possible through hard work and education for people to improve their own lives. It also taught me that sometimes people need a helping hand, and a government that is prepared to give them a leg up so they can then grow to stand on their own two feet. That’s why I am passionate about creating a society with a government that helps individuals to reach their fullest potential.

Following that example I went on to University myself. I studied Holocaust studies as part of my Humanities degree. I can remember one seminar where we that was particularity harrowing. We were sat around in the pub after it, all a bit shocked at what we had just learnt about. I couldn’t believe a civilised society could descend into such inhumanity.

I vowed to myself that I would work to try and prevent such an atrocity happening again. I am a firm believer in the good of the European Union for that reason, it has brought together countries that once fought each other, and it strives to protect the rights and humanity of all people. I am also passionate about protecting individuals and their civil liberties from bullies and state abuses of power.

I want to stand up for a Halifax that embraces Liberalism, that embraces openness and tolerance. The politics of fear and division are on the rise in the US, in France and here in the UK but it doesn’t have to be like that. We can work together to build a positive future based on openness and understanding.

If you feel the same way and want to help me to stand up for these values then please support my campaign.

We were recently contacted by a resident Mr David Hinchliffe who lives in Warley Town. Broadband speeds in the village can be dreadful, as low as 1.5-3 mb/s. This really isn’t good enough in this day and age, and both the government, Council and infrastructure providers BTOpenworld should be doing more to deliver a better service. People rely on having a decent internet connection for work, gaming and for streaming services such as Netflix, Amazon or BBCiplayer.

That is why we are launching a petition and campaign to try and lobby for faster internet speeds in the village. It’s possible to do, it just requires some of the local infrastructure to be upgraded. The more people who sign this petition, the more we can demonstrate that there is a decent demand for this service.

You can sign the petition online here

Download a PDF of the petition here. Please feel free to copy this PDF, and get your friends and family to sign it. There is a return address on the petition.

So there we have it, tonight Parliament voted to trigger Article 50. Now whereas the referendum result was advisory, our parliament is sovereign. As such I accept there is now a democratic mandate for Brexit. Despite that I still think it’s a big mistake, and will be really, really bad for our country and good for Trump and Putin.

The Liberal Democrats will in an amendment be hoping to give the people a say on whether or not they want to accept the final deal the Tories negotiate, which would include an option of staying in the EU. Now i’m not keen on referendum, they reduce complex issues to simplistic yes/no binary answers. However seeing as this process has started with one it ought then to have one on the actual facts of the deal, rather than the wild speculation and claims of the referendum in June 2016.

The Liberal idea of having a vote on the deal at the end of the negotiation is not such a strange one. It happens all the time in Trade Union negotiations. People vote not to accept a pay deal, they ask their Union representatives to go and negotiate a better deal, they then get to vote on whether or not to accept the deal they come back with. The same could easily apply to Brexit. It would have the benefit of the government seeking to try and get a deal that was acceptable to as many people as possible.

Now as you might expect there have been a few shrill voices on twitter today suggesting that the Liberal Democrats, and folk like myself should no longer oppose leaving the EU. As if politics is simply one football match and at the end of it we all accept the result and go home for a nice cup of tea having settled everything for ever. Perhaps these people ought to be reminded of history, because there is certainly no record of Euro-sceptics ever having hung up their boots. It is indeed the case that after the referendum on joining the EEC in 1975 Labour carried on campaigning against the EEC. It was in their 1979 manifesto. People surprised at Corbyn’s anti-EU stance should recall the last time the Labour party had such as stance it was equally left wing. Prominent Euro-sceptic Enoch Powell also carried on campaigning against EEC, leaving the Conservative party in the process to advocate a vote for Euro-psceptic Labour.

Then in the 80s Labour and the Conservatives started to shift position. Under Kinnock’s leadership Labour dropped their opposition to the EEC, then Thatcher in her 88 Brugges speech inspired a generation of Tory sceptics by railing against any move towards closer political union. The hokey cokey of British politics continued.

The lesson I think here is this – The political question of Europe was never settled by the 1975 referendum, despite it being very decisive and not at all close. It is unlikely therefore to have been settled by the one we had in June last year….’But wait’ I hear the Euros-ceptics cry, “we voted on the EEC and Europe changed after that”. Well indeed, and I suspect both Europe and Geo-politics will also change from where it was in a snap shot on June 23rd 2016. Who knows where global politics will be in a year, two years, five years or even twenty years. What I do know however is that I shall remain committed to working together peacefully with other nations, and trying to build an enlightened international government founded on the principles of rule of law, universal human rights, democracy and peaceful cohabitation of our plant. I might even imagining there’s no countries, after all it isn’t hard to do. They managed it in Star Trek.