Malcolm Cupis
Parliamentary Candidate
melkshamanddevizes@reformuk.com
Malcolm grew up in Melksham and went to Aloeric Primary School and George Ward Comprehensive before his family emigrated to South Africa in 1983.
Malcolm returned in 1989 and became Editor of Melksham News before establishing himself as a Public Relations consultant and moving to London.
In his career Malcolm became a Senior Consultant with both of the world's two largest PR companies and spent several years working in the Middle East.
He moved back to the area in 2019 and he lives in Keevil with his wife, Caroline. In his spare time Malcolm restores classic motorcycles and cars, is a passionate supporter of Bath Rugby and Somerset County Cricket and enjoys long country walks with his dogs.
www.facebook.com/groups/reformuk.melkshamanddevizes
https://twitter.com/reformukmandd
Melksham and Devizes is geographically a very large constituency, created ahead of the next general election by the Boundaries Commission review. The constituency includes the villages of Box and Colerne in the North West, the market towns of Bradford-on-Avon in the West, Melksham in the Centre and Devizes in the East, parts of Calne in the North East and Market Lavington in the South East. In total, at the last census, there were 71,823 voters in the constituency, covering 19 electoral wards.
Here are the facts about immigration.
Net migration last year was 750,000 – more than the population of any British city apart from London and Birmingham.
One in every 30 people you meet on the streets of this country has come here in the last two years.
More people have come here in the last two years than in the previous 1000 years.
A new house has to be built every two minutes to keep pace.
The NHS is completely overwhelmed, which is why waiting lists are so long and you can’t see a GP or a dentist.
Legal migration is fuelled by the demands of business for cheap labour. Migrants undercut the job market making it unviable for British workers to compete and leaving many better off claiming from the state.
Reform UK will tax employers to hire migrant labour, making it more attractive to hire British workers.
We will raise the income tax threshold to £20,000, which means workers pay no income tax on the first £20,000 of their earnings, keeping more of their hard-earned cash.
We will reduce benefits for any able-bodied claimant who turns down two job offers.
We understand the need to maintain essential immigration but we want to make work pay and to incentivise British people back to work, so that it isn’t necessary to hire so many immigrant workers and it is less attractive for businesses to do so.
Illegal migration is continually increasing.
No illegal migrant is a refugee. I lived in the Middle East for several years and I have seen genuine refugee camps.
Genuine refugees live in absolute poverty, with no proper shelter, medical provision and access to water and food.
They have no method of getting off the refugee camps, let alone paying people smugglers thousands of dollars to transport them across Europe to the UK.
The illegal who arrive on inflatable boats on a daily basis pay no resemblance to this. They are all fit young men, with very few women or children. They are all well dressed and well financed. They are all criminals because travelling illegally to this country is a criminal act.
The current government does not have the will to stop them. If it did it would leave the European Court of Human Rights, establish a UK bill of rights to replace it, take control of the borders and prevent them from reaching UK waters.
The French government is in contravention of international law in allowing unseaworthy vessels to leave French waters. The migrants are safe in France. There is no need for them to risk their lives by travelling across the English Channel in unseaworthy vessels.
It costs, currently, £8.5 million a day just to house these illegal immigrants. That is £8.5 million a day that could be prioritised for paying off our national debt, housing our homeless, improving our infrastructure or investing in the NHS.
We would leave the ECHR, strictly patrol our waters to prevent illegal unseaworthy vessels from entering and any that do slip through and land on our shores will be intercepted, the migrants put into secure detention and then returned to France.
The Conservative policy of net zero is calculated to cost the British taxpayer around £30 billion a year for the next 25 years. In private conversations the Labour Party has revealed that its policy would be considerably more expensive than this.
Net Zero will have absolutely no calculable benefit to the global climate.
It will destroy British industry – as it already has been for several years. Manufacturing will be exported to other countries where it will be done to less rigorous environmental standards with lower quality goods produced. We will lose the jobs and the investment. The manufactured goods then have to be shipped back to the UK. So it will result in higher emissions, more pollution and will be disastrous for the British economy.
The argument that we can replace our energy production with renewables is false.
Renewable energy costs the British taxpayer – renewable energy companies are currently subsidised by the taxpayer for about £10 billion a year. They are not doing this to save the planet, they are doing it to make enormous sums of money which is taken from your pocket. And then you have to pay for your energy on top of this.
Renewable energy cannot service the needs of the British population. Ideologically moving away from fossil fuels and failing to invest in reliable energy production means we have to import energy from other countries and therefore we become dependent on them and are not in control of energy prices.
There is another very sinister implication for this. As we become less dependent on fossil fuels and move away from the Gulf states of the Middle East we vacate the oil and gas fields to Russia and China. They care nothing for the environment. China alone increases its harmful emissions every year by a factor greater than the entire UK output. They are building upwards of 80 new coal fired power stations this year. Russia and China would increase oil and gas production of they take strategic control of the Gulf states. That will increase emissions and increase environmental harm to the planet.
We will solve this problem by scrapping net zero. It is unaffordable and not only does it have no benefit to the global climate, it is likely to actively cause greater harm.
We will ensure that we produce our own energy so that we are not reliant on other countries by importing it. We will bridge the gap in energy production by granting more licences to North Sea oil and gas and by fully surveying shale gas facilities in this country and the implications of fracking.
In the meantime we will invest in the very latest nuclear energy production, in which British engineers lead the world. This is very clean energy with zero harmful emissions and will future proof our energy production needs for generations to come.
The NHS is unable to maintain the level of service to British people that they expect as things are.
Fundamentally this is not about funding. More money is spent on the NHS than at any point in its history.
It is about demand and it is about waste.
On the point of demand, the funding of the NHS is simply not adequate to keep pace with the population explosion that has taken place in the last 10 years.
There are seven million more people living in the UK than there were in 2005. Net migration last year was 750,000 – more than the population of any British city apart from London and Birmingham. There has been no increase in essential infrastructure investment to take account of this.
On the matter of waste the NHS has become bloated with bureaucracy and layers of middle management and spends a fortune on politically motivated dogma. This is money that is badly needed on frontline services, on equipment, technology and doctors and nurses.
Recruitment has become a problem. We don’t attract enough people to careers as Doctors, nurses and carers. Of those we do attract we often lose newly qualified staff to other countries which prize them for the standard of their training and tempt them with higher salaries and better working conditions. We then have to recruit essential migrant workers to cover the gaps.
We have come up with a range of policies to address this situation. To attract more people to train for careers as doctors, nurses and carers we will:
Allow them to work for three years without paying income tax. This will give Junior Doctors in particular a major boost in earnings. After three years they progress their careers to a point where their earnings greatly increase. They will be less tempted to head overseas in search of better pay and conditions.
We will also reward them by cancelling their student loans if they stay in the NHS and work for 10 years.
We are raising the income tax threshold to £20,000 per annum, so you pay no income tax on the first £20,000 you earn. This will greatly increase the take home pay of low paid nurses and carers.
We will reduce pressure on the NHS by introducing 20 per cent tax relief on all private healthcare and insurance. If you can pay for your healthcare, you should, so that NHS services can be focused on those people who are unable to.
We will introduce a voucher scheme so that NHS patients can access private treatment if they can’t see a GP in three days, a consultant in three weeks or get an operation in nine weeks. We will ensure that NHS services are always free at the point of use.
Finally we will greatly improve efficiency by ensuring operating theatres are working at weekends. We will review all the outrageously expensive private finance contracts that are a legacy from the Blair and Brown governments, which will generate massive savings. We will charge patients who fail to turn up at appointments without good reason and most of all we will cut waste by getting rid of layers of bureaucratic and unproductive middle managers.
Warning - Offensive Language
Here is the full text of what I sent to the BBC and the Independent Newspaper (I-News) in response to the zero context stuff they wrote about me this weekend.
You can make your own judgement. Feel free to share if you want to.
Dear Stephanie,
Thank you. I know this is going to be far too long for you to use in its entirety but I need to satisfy myself that I am giving you full context. What you do with it is up to you.
I’ll start with an important point. Like most Reform candidates I am not a politician.
I have never been a politician, I haven’t been educated or trained as a politician. It is my great privilege to be representing the place I come from, went to primary and comprehensive school and was once the Editor of the local newspaper. I don’t apologise for not sounding like a politician or behaving like a politician because everywhere I go all I hear is that people are sick to death of politicians, especially over-polished careerist politicians who typically use lots of words to say nothing at all.
The only reason I am doing this is because I care and I have had enough of seeing miserable people, nationally but most especially locally. I see my number one priority as serving my people, not ruling them, which is what politicians at local government and Westminster now typically do.
People want politicians who speak plainly, who are not constrained by political correctness, who speak their minds and represent their views.
Happily that is the way I am made. I am incapable of being anything but me and unwilling to compromise and try to end up like all the careerist politicians people are sick of. I don’t just believe in freedom of expression, I insist on it. If someone asks me a question I will answer it directly and deal with the consequences. If I make a mistake, I’ll own up to it and deal with the consequences of that too. That’s what people want from politicians. They want human beings, not machines. And human beings err. All human beings, no matter how clever they are or how well trained they are.
The media needs to stop the endless witch hunt against politicians who make human errors. It is a massive daunting challenge to commit yourself to getting involved in the democratic process but sadly people are being more and more put off from it because of how they see politicians treated by the media and then, as a result, by people who have seen reports in the media. If you scare good people off from getting involved in the most vital of functions then you can’t complain if the people who you have left don’t do a good job of being politicians. We need people in politics who are connected to their communities and who passionately care about them. Not over-trained careerist media poodles who carefully say nothing at all in order to ascend the greasy pole.
I am not one of those people, I have no interest in being one of those people and I will never be one of those people.
So I speak my mind plainly. And a lot of people like that. But it offends those people who are looking continually for something to be offended by and who want careerist politicians who just mirror their preferences and ostensibly don’t stand for anything. You can’t have it both ways. I know which way I prefer.
You have mentioned two specific tweets in relation to me. One which you have referred to as “dancing women” who I have referred to as “gutter sluts”.
Have you seen the video that I made this comment on? Here is the link: https://youtu.be/19YildLFUEU?si=qaQ30YPn7cYUzGWx
This came to my attention because someone I know sent it to me. She was upset because she found her 11 year old daughter singing along and copying it on YouTube.
This…disgusting performance should not be available to 11 year old children. It demeans girls and it encourages misogyny in boys.
I was not a Parliamentary candidate when I wrote that response but I’ll tell you what, I stand by every word of it and I am proud to say so. “Gutter sluts” is actually nothing in comparison to what the performers describe themselves as.
Reform UK has actually put a specific policy in our contract (manifesto) to closely examine harmful content that is damaging to children. It is a disgrace that this sort of thing is being normalised for children. This is what they are being brought up to aspire to and see as “cool”. I will argue this point with anybody who thinks this is a good thing to the nth degree. It is disgusting.
I am shocked that the BBC blithely passes this off as “dancing women”.
The second specific thing you have pointed out without any context at all is me in stating that an individual was a “malignant old hag”.
Although I have never been a politician, in 2013 I was appointed lead candidate for the Kingsmead Ward in central Bath for the Conservative Party.
This blog from 2013 explains what happened next: https://malcolmcupis.blogspot.com/.../plumbing-depths-of...
The person I refer to in that tweet is the architect of what took place. She has been behaving in the same way in all the intervening years towards Conservative candidates and now Reform candidates too. She sets up multiple anonymous Twitter/X accounts and sends disgusting personal abuse to them.
One of her current accounts is followed by a number of current sitting Liberal Democrat and Green Party Councillors in Bath who know full well who she is and what she is up to. She is currently broadcasting exactly this sort of vindictive unpleasantness at me, the Conservative and Reform candidates for Bath and other Conservative and Reform candidates in the area.
As a result of all that took place back in 2013 I resigned as lead candidate ahead of the election because the whole thing had a pronounced effect on me and on my wife. It directly affected the democratic process and that is why they do it. I knew I was going to get the same sort of stuff again standing for Reform but I was determined that I had to do it, because I am so passionate about it and the need for meaningful political change in this country.
The tweet you have highlighted was me, in an intemperate way, warning someone else to steer well clear of this person. Do I regret it? No. Will I apologise for it? Absolutely not.
Since you posted your story yesterday I have already been getting it as a result. I hope you may have a sense of regret over that. My home address is freely available. There are people out there who could decide to go beyond nasty words and turn up on my doorstep in the night. I hope you might understand how that feels.
I hope you might think that this isn’t a reasonable way for people to behave and that taking the vital step and making the massive commitment to participating in the democratic process shouldn’t expose you to this.
As I said at the beginning, I don’t know how you might use this information, but at least I have satisfied myself now that I have given you the full context.
Please, treat political candidates with care and respect. Without them there is no democracy. Without democracy there is no hope. Please stop to consider that candidates and politicians, no matter what colour tie they wear or whether you sympathise with their opinions or not, exist for the good of the nation and the nation cannot exist without them. But they remain human, as humans they all err, they have families and they are vulnerable. We are never far from the next Jo Cox or David Amess I fear.
They deserve some sympathy from the national broadcaster at the very least and you should not run damaging exposes on them without having a clear understanding of the context behind each story.
Thank you.
It was a great privilege and a tremendous experience to travel to BBC West in Whiteladies Road, Bristol yesterday morning, where I represented Reform UK Wiltshire in a live broadcast television and radio debate.
You can see the debate here https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/c977vn0v6nlt?at_campaign=Social_Flow&at_link_type=web_link&a...
At the hustings meeting at Devizes school on Monday 17th I was asked what wisdom I could bring as an MP.
I answered this by talking about the need for everybody to cherish basic freedoms at all costs and explained that I felt this strongly because I had lived in apartheid era South Africa and also in Islamic theocracies in the Middle East, where there were no basic freedoms, including democracy and freedom of expression.
I was surprised to get resounding boos in the room to this point, which I can only imagine comes from people who want to live without basic freedoms but never have done. Because if they had they would know the implications of this.
On the Gazette and Herald website today they have run a story highlighting this, and I'm not happy with the way they have failed to put the comments into context.
https://www.gazetteandherald.co.uk/news/24395914.heckles-applause-melksham-devizes-husting/
So I have written a response outlining my feelings on the matter in full so that they cannot be misinterpreted.
Dear Jess,
I want to clarify the point about "virtual apartheid", because I was prevented from completing the point in the hustings.
The question was about what wisdom I can bring to the position.
When I was 15 years old in 1983 my family emigrated to apartheid era South Africa from Melksham after my father was made redundant from Avon Rubber.
I found myself in a school which inculcated South African boys with the full propaganda of the nationalist government. As a result they had been taught from an early age that they were culturally and racially superior.
As a 15 year old from a comprehensive school in a market town in rural Wiltshire I knew this was wrong and obviously I did not have these opinions.
As a result I was subjected to horrific bullying and I left school with no qualifications.
Fortunately I got a job in a local newspaper because I was always good at writing.
This newspaper was against apartheid and was subjected to censorship by the South African government.
I saw the full horror of apartheid and was strongly against it. I was thrown out of South Africa at the age of 20 because of this, and because I wouldn't take on South African nationality and do two years national service in the South African defence force.
The point I was trying to make was that I do fear we are creating virtual apartheid in this country.
Firstly by giving up basic freedoms and moving more and more towards statist government. We are losing freedom of expression, freedom of choice in many areas, free press and freedom of travel in particular.
I do also fear that the political policy of multiculturalism is separating people - even though it is done through choice here rather than legislation as it was there.
Communities are increasingly living in silos in this country, not assimilating, living parallel lives. Not sharing the language, increasingly not learning or respecting the host culture, not socialising and in cases even setting up their own courts and legal system.
This is a failure of the policy of multiculturalism. It is not an attack on the ethnicity and culture of other people.
The end result is hostility between communities and complete division and this is a very worrying situation that history has shown time and again leads to tribalism and conflict.
We must guard against the loss of basic freedoms because once they are gone it is difficult to retrieve them.
But we must also ensure that we do not enable virtual apartheid in this country with separate communities living in silos, breeding resentment, division and conflict.
I have seen what this leads to and we must not allow that to happen here.
I am not a climate change denier and Reform UK is not a party of climate change deniers.
The climate is changing. That is unarguable.
It is also a fact that the climate has always been changing, from the dawn of time. We have gone through ice ages, we have gone through continental shifts and we have gone through periods of extreme heat which has created deserts.
NASA has provided us with some facts that are highly relevant to the entire issue and which are not widely enough reported.
The amount of CO2 in our atmosphere is 0.04 per cent.
Far from being an evil and unwelcome component of our atmosphere, CO2 is essential to all life on the planet.
NASA says that pre industrial revolution the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere is held to be have been 0.03 per cent.
NASA believes that the activities of mankind is responsible for around 11 per cent of the 0.01 per cent increase.
The UK is responsible for around one per cent of all the world's harmful emissions. So in terms of CO2 that means all of our output accounts for one per cent of 11 per cent of 0.01 per cent.
The truth is that China, alone, increases its output of harmful emissions by a factor greater than the UK's entire output every 12 months.
So if the UK somehow stopped everything that resulted in harmful emissions today, in 12 months all of that saving would be overtaken just by the increase from China alone.
China is building 80 new coal fired power stations this year. We only have one remaining. China is flooding the world car market with cheap electric cars which all require highly environmentally damaging lithium and copper mining, most of which takes place in various parts of Africa and South America, and are then shipped around the world to China for manufacturing. The Chinese don't care about the environment. Neither do Russia and all around the world you will find nations who pay lip service to it, including Mexico, Brazil, Saudi Arabia, Iran, India and, sad to say, the United States.
Here is a real crunch fact for you though. I worked in the Middle East for a number of years and I understand the political, economic and social problems of that region very well indeed. Britain and America have been highly influential in that region for over 100 years. We have close friendships with Gulf nations as a result and have maintained a great deal of strategic influence there.
As we progress with Net Zero and become less and less reliant on fossil fuels we also become less strategically relevant there and have less influence there.
What is not commonly factored in is the increasing influence of Russia, India and China. They are desperate to step up as we are stepping out. And they don't care about the environment. And the strategic value of that region isn't just about oil and gas, it is also about control of the world's most vital shipping lane and it is also the scene of the world's most bitter violent religious conflicts.
I greatly fear that oil and gas production will actually increase if we step away from the region, because Russia, India and China will take control of it. And that they will also sponsor conflict in the region even more directly than they already are.
We will become ever more dependent then on Russia and China for our energy and they will be able to exert more and more control over us. Because make no mistake renewable energy is not going to solve our energy needs any time soon, and potentially any time ever.
Net Zero comes at a cost for our nation. That cost is calculated at £30 billion a year for the next 25 years. We are paying additional subsidies to renewable energy companies because they are unable to financially sustain themselves. So renewables are costing us money, not making money for us and are not able to solve our energy needs. This at a time when financial mismanagement has left the economy £2.7 trillion in debt and the interest on that debt alone cost us £111.5 billion in 2022/3, which is 4.5 per cent of our GDP. That money comes out of the taxes of every man, woman and child in this country and it is no wonder that it is ever increasing.
Achieving net zero also wipes out our manufacturing industry, as we saw recently with the steel industry. But it doesn't actually save anything on a global scale because we simply outsource production to other countries. So they get the financial benefit and the emissions still occur, with less regulation, albeit somewhere else in the world. And then there is an additional environmental cost in shipping the goods here that could have been made here, more efficiently.
Due to the facts outlined earlier, achieving net zero will contribute absolutely nothing to reducing global emissions, simply because we have already reduced our emissions with more determination than anywhere else on earth, but we are such low producers, living on a planet where high producers see no incentive to act similarly, that our actions, sacrifices and costs are futile when it comes to the final equation.
So where does this leave us? It is depressing but it is a fact. The climate is changing. The degree to which the actions of man are responsible for this are the subject of some debate. The degree to which we can influence it, slow it down or reverse it, therefore also a subject of some debate. Don't let anybody ever tell you that "the science is settled". Anybody who ever states this proves themselves to be a politician, not a scientist. Science is never settled because mankind does not hold all of the knowledge. We are apes. We are not able to acquire and assimilate more than a fraction of what there is to be understood. Science is about evidence, not about proof.
There is a clear point to be made. If you face a problem you have to address the cause and not the symptom if you are going to heal it. The UK is not the cause of the problem. We have massively reduced our emissions already, more than any other Q12 nation in fact, but the global effect of this barely registers at all. You have to address the problem with the places which have the biggest outputs. Russia, China, India, the United States and other nations around the world.
And put simply there is no political will in these places to do that.
Mandating higher taxes, reducing freedoms, increasing costs and lowering living standards for people in the UK will not solve the problem. It might make a local difference in some ways, and it might make you feel good about yourself, but it will not, and can not "save the planet".
What it will potentially do is actually increase harmful emissions and cede control of the most vital and volatile region on the planet to Russia and China.
We simply can't afford net zero. We can't afford the direct cost, we can't afford the tax bills, we can't afford the damage it does to our industry and we can't progress with it when, in reality, it delivers no measurable benefit to the global climate.
And that is why our policy is to scrap it.
So here we are at the start of an absolutely crucial week in the campaign.
First of all, welcome to all the new members and supporters, we continue to grow day by day and you are now members of a brilliant constituency team. As such you are a vital component of this campaign.
There is so much going on it's hard to know where to start.
Last week we had excellent engagement in a number of different places, but most especially at the public meetings in Poulshot and Steeple Ashton, and on the doorsteps in Melksham, Devizes, Seend, Market Lavington and Great Hinton.
This week we have some particularly significant events.
Today is the day we launch our finalised contract with the people. We have put this together as a consultative document over the last few months and it has been directly shaped by input from members and supporters. We have not called it a traditional manifesto because people are sick of political parties publishing manifestos and then failing to deliver them. As a contract every single thing in it is a promise with you, can and will be delivered.
Tonight (Monday 17th) is what appears to be the only surviving hustings of the campaign. This is taking place at Devizes School at 7pm.
If you aren't aware this is a public question time. All the candidates will be present and will answer questions from the audience.
If you can, please come along, support me and ask a question if you can.
Tomorrow lunchtime I will be at Melksham Town Hall for an interview with BBC Radio Wiltshire and in the evening at 7pm will be staging my latest public meeting, this time in my home village of Keevil.
Again, please come along if you can, your support is greatly appreciated.
Wednesday is a really big day - I'm travelling to the BBC studio in Bristol to record a live debate that goes out at 10am on iplayer and on BBC Radio. Highlights of this will be shown in Points West that evening.
On Thursday morning we will be back at Devizes Market. In the afternoon I will be heading back to Bishops Cannings to finish leafleting there and then moving on to Potterne.
On Friday I plan to finish leafleting and campaigning in Potterne and will then move on to Seend Cleeve.
Saturday will see us back at Melksham Market and then leafleting in East Melksham.
I am so grateful to have such a dedicated team helping me. We have leaflet deliverers targeting Devizes, Melksham, Bowerhill, Calne, Littleton Panell, West Lavington, Urchfont, Stockley and Heddington this week. I simply could not do this without you.
As a result we are continuing to rise in the polls, locally and nationally, and you are all making a significant contribution to that.
Thank you.
Local Policies for Local People from a truly Local Candidate
Reform UK is currently hitting ever greater new heights in the national polls, neck and neck with the Conservative Party and set to imminently overtake them.
One of the things that is making Reform UK such a magnet for disaffected voters from across the political spectrum is its understanding that elected representatives at all levels of democracy are elected to serve, not elected to rule.
This is a central plank of our democratic system that the established parties have all forgotten or choose to ignore.
As such Reform UK mandates its candidates to come up with local policies specific to their constituencies.
I
have an innate advantage here, as not only do I represent a party that makes
this fundamental commitment, but I am also a genuinely local person who is in
touch with local people and understands their specific concerns. I come from
Melksham. I went to Aloeric Primary School and George Ward Comprehensive and I
used to be the Editor of the local newspaper. The young chap in the black and white picture above is the same person as the grey haired chap on the left. The black and white picture is me aged 11, outside our family home at 76 Kenilworth Gardens in 1979. I live permanently in Keevil. I’m
not doing this because it is my career, or because I am looking for a job, I’m
doing this because this is where I come from, it is my home and I am desperate
to improve the lives of the many people I have known since early childhood.
I
have noted that there is little or no mention of local policies in the
communications made by the other candidates and I think this is a matter of
regret. MPs should exist to use their ears in their constituencies to listen to
what their constituents want and their mouths in Parliament to fight for them.
Instead we have become used to MPs using their ears in Parliament to listen to
what their parties want and their mouths in their constituencies to tell people
what they are allowed to have, as dictated by their political masters.
I have come up with specific local policies for the constituency that I know resonate strongly with local people and which I am absolutely committed to fight for.
We need better healthcare facilities
Following the massive housebuilding that has taken place throughout the area healthcare is stretched to breaking point. I believe we need to have our own hospital. It isn’t good enough that waiting lists are so long and that residents in the West of the constituency have to travel to Bath and those in the East to Swindon or Salisbury.
I will campaign to have our own hospital built, so that local people can have rapid access to top class healthcare provision without having to wait months or drive miles to find it.
It simply isn’t good enough that we are up to 25 miles away from A&E or that cancer patients or people with long-term health conditions have to continually make that trip for their treatment.
Local people pay as much tax to the NHS as the people of Bath, Salisbury and Swindon and deserve rapid and convenient access to first class health facilities.
No more housebuilding without infrastructure
The scale of new houses that have been built in the area in the last few years, particularly around Melksham and Devizes, has put massive pressure on all surrounding infrastructure, not just on healthcare, especially on roads and schools. This has a terrible detrimental effect on the lives of established residents.
I will campaign for a specific change in the law so that housebuilding is prioritised where there is capacity in existing infrastructure and greater infrastructure investment must be made before housebuilding takes place. Housing developers should be made to contribute more to this as a condition of being granted planning permission.
An important component of this is to make sure that the standard of the roads we have is brought up to scratch before we even start thinking of adding more traffic to them. We need to put an end to potholes, for the benefit of all road users.
It isn’t good enough that local people have seen their taxes hiked up and their living standards reduced. It isn’t good enough that we can’t see GPs or dentists when we need to.
No infrastructure, no planning permission.
Prioritise the needs of local people
I know lots of people in Melksham and Devizes in particular who have seen their home towns change practically out of all recognition in recent years. Major employers have gone, shops have closed, masses of houses built and their living standards have reduced. They have sat and watched as people have moved to the new houses from outside the area. They have felt as if they haven’t been properly consulted in this happening. They didn’t vote for it and weren’t given the opportunity to. They have been powerless to influence it and excluded from any benefit to it. They haven’t had the opportunity, they don’t have the wealth, but still their taxes have gone up and their living standards eroded to accommodate it. I want to make sure that local people have priority for housing and healthcare. And this specifically should include Wiltshire’s proud adopted sons and daughters from the armed services, who are far too often left homeless and unsupported when their military careers come to an end.
Support Wiltshire farmers
We live in a rural county where much of the economy revolves around farming and food production. Farmers have been getting a raw deal for far too long. Many have gone out of business and others face a daily struggle to survive. More and more farmland is being given over to solar farms and housebuilding. This must stop. We should not be importing food from countries where production is subsidised, and which makes no sense from an environmental perspective. We should be supporting our own farmers and food producers. In particular this means facing off the supermarkets who operate an apparent virtual cartel, driving down the prices they pay farmers so that they can maximise their own profits. I promise to campaign to give farmers the support they need.
Combat rural crime
Police numbers have been greatly reduced and what officers we have are hampered by endless bureaucracy. As a result the majority of their focus is on urban centres, where the majority of crime takes place and it increasingly feels as if rural areas are overlooked and forgotten. Criminals are aware of this and can see rural areas as soft targets. Rural people deserve equal law enforcement and I am committed to campaigning for more visibility and better service from the Police throughout the constituency, not just in urban and suburban areas.
There we are. Local policies for local people from a truly local candidate who is doing this for one reason and one reason only. This is my home, this is where I come from and belong and I care.
I said earlier that things are moving fast...
It has just been confirmed that I will be participating in the live BBC debate on Wednesday 19th June, representing all the Reform UK candidates in all Wiltshire constituencies.
The debate will be broadcast live on BBC West television and on the BBC local radio stations. Highlights will then be shown on that evening's BBC Points West programme.
Tune in and let's see what we can achieve!
Please note that after some reflection we have decided to cancel all campaigning today, out of respect for the D-Day commemorations.
As a result both the gathering at Devizes Market scheduled for this morning and the Meet the Candidate event that was due to take place at Worton Village Hall this evening are postponed and will be rearranged for other dates.
Time is moving so fast at the moment and the landscape is constantly changing.
So, in the last few days the big news has been Nigel Farage taking the decision to stand in Clacton and take on the top job, and the impact has been immediate.
Welcome to all the new members who have joined in the last few days. You have all chosen wisely and immediately become vital cogs in the machine, locally and nationally.
The polls this morning show that nationally we have climbed to 17 per cent and the Conservatives have further dropped to 19 per cent. It is quite possible, as Nigel predicted yesterday, that we will overtake them by the end of this week.
This is really an extraordinary achievement for a party that is months old and a glowing indictment of all the efforts already put in by every one of you.
While the rest of the nation was concerning itself with the dull spectacle of the debate between Sunak and Starmer last night, we staged our first public meeting since the campaign proper began, in the village of Bromham. We had great interaction and lots of discussion, largely focused on the big issue of the need to prioritise reform of the public sector to enable meaningful change in our legislation.
Earlier in the day I became official. I tabled my nomination papers at County Hall and was formally ratified as your candidate. This was a moment of great personal pride for me, but also a reminder of the responsibility I have taken on. The main reason I am doing this is because I care and I want to make a difference to the constituency I come from, lived in as a child, grew up and went to school in. It genuinely hurts me to see the effect years of political incompetence, negligence and wanton vandalism has had on places and people I love. I want to fight for a better future for it all and to represent you all as best I can.
Throughout all of this campaign please remember my fundamental driving value. I am here to listen to you and to represent you. To fight for what you want. So don't be reticent to communicate with me and let me know. I can't fight for you if you don't tell me what you want me to fight for.
There are a number of ways for you to be in touch with me and with each other. There is Facebook, X/Twitter.
You can find the links here:
https://www.facebook.com/share/3SLYK4FMTuAPMVSJ/
There is also the website at www.reformwiltshire.com and you can email me at melkshamanddevizes@reformuk.com
The next public meeting is at Worton and Marston Village Hall tomorrow evening at 7pm.
This may be doubly entertaining because I've been tipped off that a political opponent is apparently planning to attend and attempt to hijack the meeting. If it is you and you are reading this, if you bring a milkshake please make sure it is vanilla and don't be stingy with the ice cream.
Just to keep you all posted on what has been going on and what
is now arranged.
I have now got a pretty full programme of street events and formal meetings lined up around the constituency and I have a number of people to thank for helping me to arrange these.
I would be grateful if as many of you as possible could support me by attending as many of these as you can. The more attendance we have and the more support we show, the greater the impact on those floating voters who we come across.
The street events are:
Saturday 1 June
Bradford-on-Avon
Meeting at the war memorial at 11am. We will be moving around the town, inviting voters to meet me and engage with me and handing out leaflets.
Thursday 6 June
Devizes Market
Meeting at the fountain at 11am. We will be inviting voters to meet me and engage with me and handing out leaflets.
Saturday 8 June
Market Lavington
Meeting at the market place at 11am. We will be moving around the village, inviting voters to meet me and engage with me and handing out leaflets.
Thursday 13 June
Devizes Market
Meeting at the fountain at 11am. We will be inviting voters to meet me and engage with me and handing out leaflets.
Saturday 15 June
Steeple Ashton
Meeting at the war memorial at 11am. We will be moving around the village, inviting voters to meet me and engage with me and handing out leaflets.
Thursday 20 June
Devizes Market
Meeting at the fountain at 11am. We will be inviting voters to meet me and engage with me and handing out leaflets.
Saturday 22 June
Melksham Market
Meeting at the market place at 11am. We will be moving around the town, inviting voters to meet me and engage with me and handing out leaflets.
Thursday 27 June
Devizes Market
Meeting at the fountain at 11am. We will be inviting voters to meet me and engage with me and handing out leaflets.
Saturday 29 June
Devizes Market Place
Meeting at the fountain at 11am. We will be moving around the town, inviting voters to meet me and engage with me and handing out leaflets.
In addition we have now arranged the following meetings:
Tuesday 4 June
Bromham Social Club 7pm - 9pm
With sincere thanks to Frank and Esther Fenech for arranging this for me.
Thursday 6 June
Worton and Marston Village Hall 7pm - 9pm
With sincere thanks to Bryn Evans for arranging this for me.
Monday 10 June
Poulshot Village Hall 7pm - 9pm
With sincere thanks to Adrian Baber for arranging this for me.
Tuesday 11 June
Steeple Ashton Village Hall 7pm - 9pm
Tuesday 18 June
Keevil Village Hall 7pm - 9pm
Tuesday 25 June
Melksham Baptist Church Hall 7pm - 9pm
Wednesday 26 June
Devizes Rugby Club 7pm - 9pm
Sincere thanks to Sarah Humphreys for arranging this for me.
In addition I am still busy trying to arrange opportunities in Colerne, Box, Semington, Market Lavington and Bishops Cannings.
In addition to these I have been contacted by a number of churches about attending hustings but none of them have given me a date or time yet. I just hope they don't clash with meetings I have already set up.
One final thing, I have been nominated to represent Reform at the live debate on BBC West and on BBC local radio but again haven't yet been given a date for these.
I hope to see you tomorrow morning in Bradford-on-Avon if you are free and able to come along.
At a press conference this morning (Thursday 30 May) Reform Party
leader Richard Tice and Chairman Nigel Farage announced a new policy to tax
employers for hiring immigrants for unskilled work by making them pay a higher
level of National Insurance to employ them.
This is a policy that I fully support and endorse.
The Conservative Government has very deliberately encouraged high levels of immigration because businesses have demanded it. This has been to guarantee a supply of cheap labour. The effect of this has been to force down wages, making working an ever less attractive proposition for British workers, especially post covid. The net effect has been that working no longer pays for hundreds of thousands of British people, who now are financially better off living off the state and have chosen therefore to be economically inactive.
As a result, last year net migration to this country was around 750,000. This is unsustainable. More people have migrated to the UK in the last two years than came here in almost 1000 years from between 1066 and 2022. One in 60 people that you meet has arrived in the UK in the last two years.
The knock on effect on housing, healthcare and transport, as well as other vital services, is tangible and that is felt in every town and city in the country, including in this constituency. We now have to build a new house every two and a half minutes to keep up with demand. You can’t see a GP or a dentist, hospital waiting lists are months long, the roads are jammed full and there is no money in the post pandemic era to invest to maintain infrastructure, let alone bring it up to the standards required to keep pace with the extra demand.
British people are paying more and more in tax and receiving less and less. Those who are economically active are having to pay ever more to finance those who are not and to keep public services afloat.
All of this is just about legal migration. It doesn’t even factor in the extra 100,000 people forecast to arrive in the country this year illegally. The bill for housing them alone is now around £8 million a day. That is money that comes from the taxpayer that should either remain in their pockets or be used to fix potholes or build houses for the ever-increasing number of homeless British people.
This cannot go on.
The Conservative Party has been promising for years to address the issue and instead it has done the opposite, to satisfy the demands of business whilst turning a blind eye to the effect on the British people, who have never been given a say in what has taken place.
The newly announced policy once again sets Reform UK apart. The three main established political parties are all in favour of maintaining the current situation with high immigration and low wages. Reform UK will tilt the balance back towards British workers and will make working pay again. We are the only party committed to ending high levels of legal and illegal immigration and investing in British people at work.
If you want change, you have to vote for it.
As reported in the Gazette and Herald today, Devizes has pretty
much adopted a blanket 20mph speed limit on its roads this week.
https://www.gazetteandherald.co.uk/news/24324118.20mph-speed-limits-implemented-key-wiltshire-roads/
Up until now Devizes has resisted following the example of other towns in the area, notably Melksham and Trowbridge in particular. It has maintained 30mph speed limits and kept decent amounts of time limited free on street parking.
The effect of this is that Devizes has been able to comparatively maintain much of its identity, it has kept independent shops and remained an attractive shopping destination as a result. People who come in to shop also use leisure facilities and spend money in pubs and restaurants.
Sadly now it seems as if all this has started to change and Devizes is destined to go the same way as other places around. It is likely that footfall will reduce, shops will close and Devizes will end up being yet another place where cyclists can pedal merrily up and down deserted streets past boarded up shopfronts.
To clearly make the point...
Our party policy is to end the war on motorists.
We will remove all 20mph limits, other than temporary ones outside schools at arrival and departure times.
We will ban all ULEZ and RPZ schemes.
We will take out bus lanes and cycle lanes.
We will restore all the car parking spaces that have been removed and urge towns to go back to free car parking to encourage people back into town centres.
We will slash fuel taxes and we will dump net zero, removing the ban on the sale of petrol cars.
We will make road maintenance a priority. Potholes kill people, especially cyclists and motorcyclists.
The trade off for this is that we would also invest in policing and increase the penalties on irresponsible people who break laws, cause accidents and kill.
Motorists are not a cash cow to be endlessly milked for money. Cars and motorcycles are vital tools, especially in a largely rural constituency like ours.
Politicians need to remember they are elected to serve, not elected to inflict their dogma on constituents.
We are supposed to help people live their lives, not block them, frustrate them, criminalise them and find ever more ways of taking money from them.
The left will, of course, claim all of this is necessary to combat “climate change”.
We have to keep reminding people that this is simply a lie. The truth is this country produces less than one per cent of all global harmful emissions.
Do you know how much CO2 is in the atmosphere?
About 0.04 per cent. Scientists estimate it has increased from around 0.03 per cent in the last 200 years and that manmade activity accounts for about 12 per cent of the increase.
Private transport emissions account for a tiny percentage of 12 per cent of 0.04 per cent of one per cent.
China alone increases its emissions by more than the entire output of the UK every 12 months.
It makes absolutely no difference to the climate what vehicle you drive.
The Conservatives, Labour and Lib Dems all have identical policies on all this and many other things.
Their policies INCREASE congestion and pollution and contribute greatly to turning High Streets into ghost towns.
Studies show no benefits in safety.
We are the only party that tells the truth and stands up for motorists and small businesses.
The desperate need for our own hospital has been underlined by a story that has appeared in the Gazette and Herald today.
People in the West and South of our constituency have the Royal United Hospital in Bath as their designated General Hospital.
People in the North and East have the Great Western in Swindon.
The need for a General Hospital of our own isn't just driven by the dire state of affairs relating to the Royal United, it is a similar story with the Great Western.
It is massively over-subscribed, waiting lists are awful and the local Council has deliberately engineered it to be difficult and expensive to access for people who cannot get there by public transport or on a bicycle.
We must have our own hospital. Constituents need and deserve rapid and convenient access to top class healthcare facilities. The system is overloaded by demand and failing - there has not been anything like enough investment in essential infrastructure to support the increase in population and housebuilding continues unabated.
If you haven't already, please sign this petition and circulate it to friends and family on your social media.
And if you can please register on the Gazette and Herald website and add a comment supporting my call for our own hospital to be built. It will be of equal benefit to all the people in the Bath and Swindon catchment areas because it will add capacity and reduce waiting lists.
https://www.change.org/p/central-wiltshire-needs-its-own-general-hospital/
Image courtesy of Newsquest
Labour defecting "Conservatives" underline the need for Reform
Having been out delivering leaflets all morning I've just come home to the news that another Conservative MP has defected to Labour.
Being (small c) conservative means something. You cannot be a conservative and not hold core conservative values. The Conservative Party historically understood this very clearly. It started to lose sight of them under John Major and completed that under David Cameron and Theresa May.
Politics is not like football. You don't put on a different coloured shirt and change your tactics just to win at all costs. In politics you fight for what you believe.
Conservatives at core are classical liberals and believe in small state, person freedom, low taxation, law and order, free market economics, sovereignty and patriotism. They abhor statism and collectivism in all its shades, clunking fist legislation, high taxation, limitations on freedom, government interventionism and bureaucracy.
That's why EU membership was always incompatible with core conservative values. It's another layer of self serving, self perpetuating bureaucracy designed to impose conformity on an entire continent. You can't be a conservative and support the EU and you can't be a conservative and feel that you have anything in common at all with the Labour Party.
By crossing the floor this MP shows she never held conservative values. She is a charlatan. She believes in nothing but herself and her own career.
This is everything that is wrong with the Conservative Party and wider politics now. Self obsessed careerist MPs who believe in nothing and have forgotten they are elected to serve, not elected to rule.
The Parliamentary Conservative Party is now stuffed full of these people.
The message you all need to take out to your friends and contacts is simple. There is nothing conservative about the modern Conservative Party. Just as there is nothing Liberal or Democratic about the Liberal Democrats and just as the Labour Party holds the working classes in contempt.
If you want a political party that you can trust to hold core conservative values you have to vote for Reform UK.
This has been quite a week in politics.
First we had the ECHR showing its true colours by ruling that the Swiss government is guilty of failing to protect its citizens by not adopting its preferred radical policies on "climate change".
Then we had a salutary reminder of exactly why we were right to vote to leave the EU with the Belgian Police breaking up a meeting of elected Conservative politicians in Brussels, just as Nigel Farage was addressing them.
We have had the latest illegal immigration figures showing that Channel crossings are already 20 per cent up on last year.
We have discovered that the Deputy Leader of the Labour Party is being investigated for several different alleged offences by a Police Force that is commanded by a Labour PCC and a Labour Mayor.
Another Conservative MP has lost the whip after being accused of behaviour that is frankly beyond belief and finally the husband of former Scottish Nationalist leader Nicola Sturgeon has been arrested and charged with embezzling £600,000 in donations.
At the end of all this we learn from polls that the Conservative vote may be down to its lowest level in 60 years, Rishi Sunak is personally polling at the same level that Jeremy Corbyn reached before the last general election and our polling remains steadily on the increase. We are the only major party in the country that can boast this.
So, time to put our feet up, crack open a beer and enjoy some welcome sunshine? Not a bit of it. We're meeting at The Pilot, Bowerhill (https://thepilotbowerhill.com/) at 11.30am on Saturday 20th April. Come along and hear what we are up to locally, ask me whatever questions you would like answers to and then, if you fancy a bit of a sunny Saturday afternoon stroll, join us to deliver leaflets to the good citizens of that fine part of Melksham.
I am delighted to hear that Lee Anderson has this morning become the first Reform UK MP.
Throughout his career Lee has shown himself to be a free-thinking person with real convictions who is not afraid to voice his opinion.
Being a Conservative means something. There are core values attached to Conservatism.
Politics is not football. You don't change tactics just to try to win votes. You hold core values and convictions and you fight for them.
The Conservative Party hasn't just eschewed many core values, it actively shows contempt for them and for supporters and members who maintain them.
The Conservative Party has manoeuvred itself into a political void by desperately trying to win votes at any cost.
Voters should ask themselves if they are happy with what the Conservative Party stands for now and the way it has run the country for the last few years.
If they are, of course they should go ahead and vote for them. I guarantee that people who feel that way are now in a tiny minority.
If not then why vote for more of the same?
Clearly Lee Anderson has thought about this and has realised that he can no longer support the Conservative Party. He has concluded what I have concluded – that Reform UK has taken on the core conservative values that have been abandoned by the Conservative Party.
Don’t let anybody try to persuade you that you should vote for a political party that you are unhappy with on the basis that it might be the least worst option out of the two largest.
Use your vote positively, otherwise you have no right to complain about what you are left with.
If you do what you've always done, you'll get what you've always got. If you want something different you have to vote for it.
Lee has blazed the trail, now we must ensure that he is simply the first of many.
Of all the many ways that the Conservative in Name Only government has failed the nation since 2010 is in its complete failure to address the left wing politicisation of charities and the civil service which was a legacy of the Blair and Brown years.
This has raised its head again in the last few days, on a national level with an organisation called Wildlife and Countryside Link, whose members, among others, include the National Trust, The RSPCA and the Council for the Protection of Rural England, stating to an all-party Parliamentary group that the countryside is a "racist colonial white space".
It goes without saying that the WCL and all its members are funded directly by your taxes, are all completely democratically unaccountable and all take homogenous left wing political viewpoints that they perpetually shove down the throats of all those forced to pay their salaries.
I can't, for the life of me, understand why a "Conservative" government would fail to recognise and tackle this clear iniquity. I can only conclude that they are either too cowardly, in which case they are complacent, or that they simply don't want to, in which case they are complicit.
Failure to tackle the issue of politicisation of the civil service and publicly funded bodies means that we live under a de facto left wing government, regardless of the composition of Westminster.
We see the effects of this on everything from immigration to policing, to the judiciary. We see it in net zero, war on motorists, culture wars, the BBC and the NHS. Every public body has been politically captured and works to its own agenda, regardless of the views of the people who pay for it and regardless of what the Government says.
And the worst thing about it is that all of these people are apparently self selecting and beyond any true scrutiny or accountability.
We urgently need to address this, to depoliticise the whole system. It could not be more clear though that the Conservative Party has neither the will or the spine to do this.
And so it must fall on us as Reformers to put all this under the spotlight, for the sake of democracy.
I wanted to drop you a little teaser ahead of the meeting on Monday evening.
The main purpose of this meeting is to present to you my five point plan for the constituency.
I think it’s important to have policies specific to the constituency, over and above the national policies which Reform UK stands for.
The local policies are all related to the national policies and I have put these together partly through my own knowledge of the constituency but also through talking to local people over the last few months.
So, if you vote for me in the next general election I promise to:
1. Campaign for no more housebuilding without investment in infrastructure
Melksham and Devizes in particular, but also other town and villages throughout the constituency, have seen largescale housebuilding in the last few years with little or no commensurate investment in associated infrastructure.
By this I mean roads, schools, healthcare facilities, retail leisure facilities and dedicated commercial areas. The result of this has been that living standards have dropped markedly as pressure has increased on all these things.
I will campaign vigorously to not just bring the infrastructure up to an appropriate level for the housebuilding that has taken place, but also to insist that it must be further appropriately developed before future housebuilding takes place. No infrastructure – no more housebuilding.
2. We need our own hospital
This follows on closely from the first point. With the great increase in the number of people living in the area it is iniquitous that people in the West of the constituency are dependent on the Royal United Hospital in Bath and people in the East have to travel to either Swindon, Salisbury or Bath.
Bath in particular is now very difficult to get to quickly and cost effectively due to the transport policies of the Council there. All three hospitals have terrible backlogs for appointments and operate way beyond demand levels that they were designed for.
I will campaign that we should have our own hospital in the constituency, with increased capacity for General Practitioners and dentists operating alongside it.
3. Support our farmers
This remains very much a rural constituency with very many people employed directly or indirectly in agribusiness and food production. Our farmers are under terrible pressure with supermarkets forcing prices down to maximise their profits and buying food in from other countries where farmers are more heavily subsidised. As a result many farmers are going out of business or giving up fields for subsidised solar farms or housebuilding. We cannot be reliant on importing our food from other countries. We must ensure that we grow our own food. We must support our farmers.
4. Prioritise the needs of local people
All across the country migrants are being prioritised for housing and healthcare, even if they have travelled here illegally. This must stop. I want to make sure that local people have priority for housing and healthcare, especially homeless ex service men and women and I will fight to make this happen.
5. Combat rural crime
Police numbers have been greatly reduced and what officers we have are hampered by endless bureaucracy. As a result the majority of their focus is on urban centres, where the majority of crime takes place and it increasingly feels as if rural areas are overlooked and forgotten. Criminals are aware of this and can see rural areas as soft targets. Rural people deserve equal law enforcement and I am committed to campaigning for more visibility and better service from the Police throughout the constituency, not just in urban and suburban areas.
There policies have been put together with you in mind and for that reason I would very much appreciate it if you could come along on Monday, if you are able to, to debate them with me, let me know what you think or let me know if there are other local policies which you think are more important.
To recap the meeting will take place at The Green Dragon, 26-28 High St, Market Lavington, Devizes SN10 4AG on Monday 29th January, from 7pm.
I hope to see you there.
You
are cordially invited to our next meeting which is taking place at the Green
Dragon, 26-28 High St, Market Lavington, Devizes SN10 4AG on Monday 29th
January, from 7pm.
Please do come along and participate in discussions about the current state of politics locally and nationally and how we are going to make a difference.
This is going to be a fundraising event. We need to raise funds for printing so that we can create leaflets and get canvassing. I would also like to have a branded gazebo made so that we can set up in town and village centres and engage with people. As such I propose to hold a raffle and ask you all to bring something to donate. Raffle tickets will be £5 each and prizes...will depend on you!
The Green Dragon is a regular haunt of mine. As a result they are making no charge for the venue hire. They do absolutely superb food and have offered to provide a buffet for us if we have sufficient numbers. This would be £20 a head. Please let me know if you can attend and if you would like to sign up for the buffet so that I can go back to them with numbers.
I look forward to seeing you on the 29th!
A few people have approached me over the festive period and have said that they feel strongly attracted to Reform UK policies and would like to vote Reform UK in the next general election but are scared that this would let the Labour Party into Downing Street.
Conservative Party MP Lee Anderson yesterday made this point in a media interview. On very many issues Lee Anderson and I have pretty much identical views and ambitions. He is flat wrong about this though.
If the Conservative Party was still a bastion of conservatism I would be celebrating my 26th year as an active member, rather than my first with Reform UK. It may sound like a trite cliche, but the Conservative Party left me, I did not leave it.
We have to end the de facto two party political landscape that the Conservative Party, the Labour Party and Lee Anderson are desperately trying to perpetuate. What it guarantees is a fight for centre ground and disenfranchisement for the overwhelming majority of people who sit outside this narrow trough. That is why there is so much common ground between the Conservative and Labour Party policies, with high taxation, high public spending, a cost of living crisis, massive and ever increasing public debt, open border immigration and overwhelmed public services that are completely swamped by demand.
If you do what you’ve always done, you will get what you’ve always got. It’s time to do something different.
We can't continue to have negative voting where people try to choose the least worst option out of fear because they are too scared to vote for something that more accurately represents their views and ambitions.
Vote for what you want, not against what you fear. It is the only way to effect change. If you are happy with what the Conservative Party has done since 2019 then crack on and vote for more of the same. I really don't know many people who will admit to that. If you want even higher levels of the economic and social damage wrought on the nation by the Conservative Party then crack on and vote for Labour. I really don’t know many people who will admit to that either.
Happy New Year!
Malcolm Cupis
Just to wish you, your family and friends a very happy and joyful Christmas and a prosperous and successful New Year.
2024 is going to be a momentous year. We are going to have a general election and it is vital that we make our voices heard. This will be the last chance we get to vote for something different for a very long time. We must make it count.
To start that process, over the holiday period I ask you, if you have half an hour spare, to send me an email and tell me what you are concerned about, locally and nationally, and what you would like me to raise in the campaign ahead.
What can I do that would have a significant beneficial effect on you, your family and friends?
If I am elected to Parliament this is how I will prioritise my time. I will be using my ears for you and using my mouth to represent your needs and aspirations in Parliament.
I won't do what careerist politicians now default to, which is the opposite. Using their ears to listen to what their party wants and then their mouths to tell their constituents what they are allowed to have.
Politicians are elected to serve, not elected to rule. I'm here to serve you.
In the meantime I hope you enjoy plenty of servings of turkey, Christmas pudding, mince pies, chocolate and the odd glass of something appropriate to wash it down, in the loving company of those closest to you.
Merry Christmas!
Malcolm Cupis
MALCOLM CUPIS CONFIRMED FOR MELKSHAM AND DEVIZES
Reform UK has confirmed Malcolm Cupis as its official spokesman for the newly formed Melksham and Devizes constituency.
Malcolm is a genuinely local man. He grew up in Melksham and went to school at Aloeric Primary School and George Ward Comprehensive.
Malcolm has spent his entire career working in the media as a journalist, Editor, advertising copywriter and Public Relations Consultant. He has travelled very widely with his career, spending extended periods of time in various parts of Africa, the Middle East and the Far East.
Malcolm moved back to this area in 2019 and lives in Keevil with his wife Caroline. He has strong views on the need for true local representation in national politics. "Parliament is stuffed full of careerist politicians who use their ears in parliament and their mouths in their constituencies, when they can be bothered to appear. I'm a local man, I care. I promise to do the opposite. Use my ears to listen to constituents and then my mouth in Parliament to fight for what they need and aspire to."
Outside politics Malcolm enjoys walking in the countryside with his dogs, restoring and showing classic cars and motorcycles. He is an avid supporter of Bath Rugby and Somerset cricket and has a deep interest in British history.
" Parliament is stuffed full of careerist politicians who use their ears in parliament and their mouths in their constituencies, when they can be bothered to appear. I'm a local man, I care. I promise to do the opposite. Use my ears to listen to constituents and then my mouth in Parliament to fight for what they need and aspire to."
Malcolm Cupis
