 Very silence for the future, right honourable hopeful member of Parliament for Hortom, Mr James Smith, talk about open politics. Oh, you're there, hello. Thank you all for coming. This is cool, nice turnout. Yeah, I'm James Smith, some of you know me, some of you don't, and I'm going to talk about how to stand for Parliament, or as this talk could be called next year, the story of a terrible, terrible idea. So for those of you who don't know me, who am I? I'm an engineer. I've been a software engineer for 18 years or something like that, I lose count. I'm a parent, I've been parent for about six years, and I'm reasonably activist along with those things. So I've been tinkering around with Civic Tech for many years, sort of on the periphery of that community. I've worked on things like using the web for climate change, and now I'm looking at democracy. So one thing I obviously have a problem with is achievable goals. And so this, we have some problems, right, in democracy in this country, in the way that democracy is working. And this is one of them, you know, the general disengagement of people with democratic process and how we, you know, measured in turnout, that's going down. You know, it used to be nearly 85%, which seems amazing. And the problem is that as people become more and more disillusioned with the options they're presented with, new things become appealing. And unfortunately, that means sometimes things like this, which, you know, if this is the only thing that we get to choose, that's, you know, that's different. I find that quite disturbing. So about a year ago, I was feeling very annoyed with politics and, you know, the options available and so on. And I wrote a blog post about how depressing it all was and how much I disagreed with all of the options that I was being presented with and how there was nothing I felt I could actually vote for. There was nobody out there that was actually representing me about, you know, representing what I wanted from the future. So I wrote the blog post and I was inspired by, we saw a talk at OpenTech last year by GDS and this is a paraphrase, because I can't remember exactly what they said, but the words that stuck in my head, whether I heard them or not, were sometimes in order to change the system. You need to actually become part of the system and as GDS have done that with Civil Service, which is really, you know, you can't always change everything from the outside. And so I said in this blog post, you know what we should do? We need some new options. We should set up a GitHub repository and start collaborating in an open-source way on some policy for a better future. And then I resolutely refused to do that, because I already have far too many projects. So it was sort of throwing the idea out and hoping somebody else would do it. Unfortunately somebody did, where's Steve? He's not here. He set up the repository, which then, you know, I just thought I'll just go in and change a couple of things. And one thing led to another. And over the last year, a bunch of us, a bunch of different contributors have been working on using open-source tools, you know, the sort of GitHub workflow, making changes, discussing them, merging them in, working on building an actual manifesto. And this is the Open Politics project, which is now a manifesto with a decent amount of policy in it that's been discussed collaboratively that we've built together. And anybody can go and edit this. It's a little bit awkward, because you need to learn how to use GitHub. But, you know, a surprising number of people have actually managed that. You've not been developers, which is quite nice. It's not the best thing, but, you know, it's interesting. And it started as a kind of way of just inspecting your own ideas, your own assumptions and things and holding them up for review, and doing something a bit more than just moaning on Twitter and rather than saying, this is wrong, being able to say, well, this is, you know, this is what I'd be. So we did that for a while. And then we've got a decent amount of stuff there now. There's some gaps, but it's looking like a decent amount of content. And after the European elections in May, I suppose it was, I was feeling very annoyed with politics again. And this time, unfortunately, a year later, I thought, actually, there's something that I do think could be an option. There's a bunch of stuff that I do believe that I could stand up for. So I decided that that's what I was going to do. However, ill-advised that might be. So what I'm going to do in the talk is just sort of walk you through a few things I've learned over the last three months or so. It's not so much a how to stand for parliament. It's a how to stand for parliament so far. And it might be a good deal longer next year or a good deal shorter because I might have just decided the whole thing is terrible. So first thing to do, decide, do you actually want to stand, get pissed off, get, you know, realize there's nothing you can, you know, you decide the system wants to change, then needs to change, but nobody out there is going to do it. Well, your civic duty in a democracy is to provide the option yourself to do something to, as Tom Watson suggested, to join the parties to get involved to stand for something else or to create a new option. And that's open to everyone because I have absolutely no idea what I'm doing. And when I started this, I had no idea what I'm doing, and I still don't. And that's okay. Because we learn as we go along, you know, it's like hacking anything else, nobody knows what they're doing when they start with a new bit of hardware or something, we just work it out as we go along and democracy is no different. Then decide where you want to stand. Does anybody know who that is? Hey, I live in Horsham, which is his constituency. And one of the things in our manifesto is that, you know, parachuting people into safe seats and whatever is a bad idea, so people should stand where they live. So I have to stand where I live, which is his constituency. It's incredibly safe. And, you know, it's, yeah, it's going to be interesting. But in a way, it being so safe is quite liberating, because actually, it doesn't matter who I annoy. And for people that want to vote for me, it doesn't matter because they won't have to worry about letting somebody else in. So that's good. Got to look positive, right? Then decide, do you want to stand for a party? Do you want to stand as an independent? Is there an existing party that's right for you? If there's not, what are you going to represent? I kind of ignored this question for a while and just sort of started as independent. But I'll come back to that. And one important thing is that I'm looking at this as a long haul thing, right? I'm not expecting to win in May. That would be ridiculous. It's a long haul thing. And I think we're used to thinking about things on very short timescales in this, you know, rapidly moving world of technology. But what we're looking at here is generational change for politics. You know, this is, if it's the same in 30 years' time, then we'll have missed the opportunity. But we can, you've got to start somewhere. So this is where we start. So decided to stand. Next thing, get some online presence, get something up there that people can see. I created a very simple website. I'm a developer. I know nothing about design. So Bootstrap's really handy for that. Having something that people can go and look at, see the very basics about who you are, what you stand for, and a way to get in touch or to be contacted. So simple mailing list and a Facebook page. I really wish I didn't have to use Facebook for this. But everything, everyone's there. That's where everything's going on. And it really annoys me that I have to use Facebook now more than I ever used to. I wish I could delete my account, but I just can't. So, sadly. I didn't worry about the name too much. I'll come back to that. But now you've got somewhere people can go. Well, let's announce it. What can go wrong? I wrote a blog post announcing this and stuck it on Medium and my own blog. And then I thought, right, I'm going to wait, I'm going to wait for the perfect time to tell everybody about this. And then I waited about 10 minutes, got all itchy and published it. Because it's just sitting there. What's the point of that? And so, you know, bugger, proper timing. That's boring. And within a couple of weeks, I'd had a chat with that looks terrible there. Sorry about that. I'd had a chat with the local paper, who gave me a nice little half page, right up, explaining what I was doing. The really interesting thing about this is that so while a whole bunch of people online saw the blog post, a lot of people outside the constituency saw the blog post. Nobody in the constituency really did. But they did see that. So that gets you in the mind of the locals in the local constituency. And also the people who really read the local news are all the other candidates and all the counselors and people like that. They're reading the letters. And so, yeah, one thing you have to just stop reading local newspapers, which is fine. It's fine. I'm just not used to it. So that's really good because it's not that now everybody in the constituency knows who I am, but all the counselors do. And everyone who's involved in local politics knows, hang on, who the hell's this guy? Which is good. So I did that. That was cool. At this point, I thought, I wonder if any of this is legal. Because I hadn't checked. So at this point, I thought, I'll call the electoral commission. Because you look on the electoral commission website, there's a whole load of information. It's actually really good. They have now published their guidance for the next election, finally. Though, obviously, I'm doing this a bit earlier than most other people do, apparently. But it can lead you in circles a little bit. It's a little bit difficult to find what you need. But they've got phone numbers. Remember those? You can phone up and talk to humans and they're really, really helpful. And so, phoning them up and saying, am I doing this right? Have I done something wrong already? It's really, really good. Unfortunately, I haven't. None of, you know, you don't need to register anything or do anything. You know, before you say, yes, I'm gonna stand. So you can do that on a whim, because that's the best way to do these things. When it comes down to it, what you do need is you need to get nominated. You need to submit nomination papers before the election. You need 10 people to sign that. If you can't find 10 people to sign your nomination papers, then the entire thing is in trouble. So that hopefully will be fine. And they have to be local residents. And then you have to put down a 500-pound deposit. And if you get 5% of the votes, you'll get it back. So that's the minimum. That's all you need in order to actually stand, to have your name down on the ballot paper. Obviously, it's better if you can do more. But that's the minimum. There are some rules around finances. So there are spending limits when you're campaigning. It depends on the size of the constituency. I think the limit in Horsham is about £32,000. And that's divided into what they call long and short campaign periods. You know, based on, you know, people tend to spend more nearer the election in the short campaign period, the long one goes a bit further back. If people donate your campaign, you have to verify who they are. You have to check against the electoral register to make sure that they're valid donors. And that's quite interesting as a, you know, it's an interesting logistical challenge as to how to actually do that. Because they can come from anywhere in the country. You have to actually make sure that they're not donating on behalf of somebody else who's already donated. You have to track the original source of the money rather than just, oh yeah, this guy's giving me some money. It doesn't matter where it comes from. You also have to track all your expenditure on various campaign activities. And you have to include notional donations. So if somebody's giving you a bunch of their time for free, which would be really helpful, you still have to count it at market rate for that as a donation. So that'll be interesting. Some interesting dates. Can anybody actually see that? It's a bit small, sorry. Interesting dates. The long campaign when the finances start getting regulators, it doesn't really matter before that. That's around 18th of December. So until then you can pretty much do what you like. The short campaign is only that last month before the election, after parliament recesses, or whatever the word is. So most of the spending goes into that last month. Nominations only close literally one month before the polling day. So you can decide, you know, at the end of April that you actually want to do this and you can still do it. And then of course election day itself is going to be on the 7th of May. It's really quite useful. We now have fixed term parliament so we know when the next election is going to be, which is unusual. That's tiny. Sorry. I've been tracking my expenditure. I work for the Open Data Institute and we're all about publishing data openly in structured formats and things that people can reuse. My expenditure, such as it is so far, it's not a lot, is published as open data, which I think with a schema designed by Spend Network to, you know, to have, it was kind of their dream list of all the things they'd want to know about election finance. So I was like, yeah, let's do it. When nobody cares what you do, it's easy to do fun things like that. So that's quite nice. Next thing is to start looking into the data around the election. So there's a lot of data that's published about the outcomes of elections and the spending and so on. This is some of the, some useful stats. These are the actual votes. You really can't see that at all. The actual votes cast in the last general election in Horsham. So the conservatives got just under 30,000. It was about 28,000 votes. Lib Dems around 17,000 and so on. So it's quite a, quite a drop off. And then a bunch of minor parties down there. Labor not really figuring in anything. And UKIP are down there as well. So, but you know, useful stuff like knowing actually how many voters there are. There's 77,000 voters in the constituency and 55,000 of them voted. So 72% turnout, which is well above the average. So that's, what does that mean? That's interesting. I expected with a safe seat that actually it was going to be lower turnout. People weren't really going to bother because it didn't make any difference. So that was surprising. There's an interesting correlation here. The next one is spending. And the spending follows pretty much the same pattern. The orange bar is the short campaign. The blue bar is the long campaign. So you see obviously most of the spending goes into the short campaign. What's interesting here, you probably can't make out the scale, but that's about 7,000, 7.5,000 pounds. The conservatives who got those 28,000 votes who, you know, own the constituency basically only spent about 11,500 pounds. Again, that was a lot less than I expected. The spending limit is about 32. None of them got anywhere near. So that was fun. This is nice. There's a gap here. That gap is the green party. I always wondered why I didn't get a leaflet from them. And now I know. When I first announced a couple of people, two different people said to me, what are you doing? Why are you splitting the green vote? It's crazy. You obviously believe in a lot of the same things they do. What are you doing? And I since looked at the stats, they got 570 votes and they spent no money. So I really don't care. They don't want my vote. They don't want the constituency. So, you know, that's one thing about parties choosing where they're going to fight. They really don't care. What I don't, I don't understand why they bothered. That's all. So next bit of financial planning, what am I actually going to need to spend? And I'm still working this out, but this is just what I've worked out so far. On top of the deposit, the main thing I want to do is I want to make sure I get a leaflet through every door, right? Tom, stop grinning. You're going to correct everything like that. I think it's really interesting to learn that you get a free delivery through the door by the Royal Mail. They'll deliver your leaflet for you once. So that's how they all do that. I didn't know that was a thing. So actually, if I can get the leaflets printed and get them to the Royal Mail, then I can get them through every door, which is great. They'll do it addressed or unaddressed, so you can actually send one to every voter or just to every household or apparently there are hacks that let you do a bit of both. Though I don't know anything about that. And you can phone up the Royal Mail. They have an elections department and again they're really helpful. They seem to love people calling them and like explaining the whole system. And they'll tell you useful things like how many households they delivered to in the EU elections and that was 47,000 last time. So I'm going to need 47,000 plus a bit leaflets to get one through every door. And going to some local printers and working out the cost, that's going to cost me about 1,500 quid, which I thought it'd be way higher than that. This seems disturbingly accessible to actually get a message across to people. And this comes back to the sort of the paper candidates and the minor parties who never got a leaflet through my door. If you can't raise two grand, why are you bothering? What's the point of having someone on paper and not trying to get the message across? I don't really understand. So that's kind of where I've got on the financial planning. Obviously there's going to be a load more, but that's where we are at the moment. I'm learning as we go along and blogging all of this and trying to explain it in public as I go. One things I really want to do is crowdfund that money. So not really because I really need to, but because if we can show that it's crowdfundable and that anybody can say, I want to stand and crowdfund the money, that's helpful. It opens up the options for people. It makes the whole system more accessible because you have to prove who your donors are and you have to reject donations that are not from proper donors. 10, good. You have to reject donations that are not from proper donors. This is going to be interesting. So actually how that works will have to work out. I'm hoping to talk to some crowdfunding companies to try and work that out. So we'll see. Research the area. Find out about the local area. I mean, I've lived in Horsham constituency for nine years, but there's still so much stuff that I don't know. I didn't grow up there. So obviously I'm going to have a lot to learn. Work out what the local issues are. For us, where we are, there are big issues around housing development. Gatwick is just to the north of us. So second runway at Gatwick is a thing that's going to affect local residents. And we're right in the middle of the world. So we have shale gas right underneath. And so that's something that's concerning people. And that sort of leads into potential allies and things and other local groups that you can talk to, get in touch with local groups. I mean, our town has a really active Facebook group. Engaging on there is really important. Talking to other pressure groups, community groups, youth groups. There's a youth council in the town. It's going to be really, really useful. One of the ones that I really like is to do with the fracking thing. Who knows where Bulkham is? Well, not where it is. Who's heard of Bulkham? Right, you knew. So obviously. So Bulkham was the centre of the protests last year, a couple of years ago, against the sort of early fracking exploration wells where Caroline Luke has got herself arrested and a bunch of other things. And that's in my constituency, which is cool, my constituency. You know what I mean? It's where I live. It's fine. Which is really great because they've not just objected to the fracking, but they've formed a group that's creating a solar farm to power the entire village. So they're not just saying, no, they're saying, let's do something better. And that really ties in with the way that I think. And it's lovely to have them in the area. So there's some really nice sort of things like that that you might learn. The other thing is, what's the shape? What is this place? Can anybody see that? You can make out the just working out what the boundary is. It's not what you think. It's the electron boundaries are weird and they keep changing. But the Ornant Survey have a really helpful thing which shows you the boundaries. And then I thought, right, I'm going to have a big map on my wall. So I ordered a custom map from the OS. If you ever get a chance to order a custom map from the Ornant Survey, do it's wonderful. You can run your hands across it and feel the print. It's lovely. So then I'll draw on it with a felt tip because you can't just print out the election boundaries. That'd be far too easy. So, yeah, it's now I have a felt tip OS map on my wall. That this here, this is Crawley, which is Labour, I think. So, yes, it's we're sort of a very rural constituency. Welcome's over here. That's Horsham. That's Crawley. Gatwick's up there somewhere. So, yeah, so that's fun. Public meetings. They're fun. We had a public meeting with a grand total of 10 people. Twice as many as I expected. It was really good. And that was great. We had a couple of other candidates turn up and sort of cancel the candidates. It was really handy to just sort of verify those assumptions about what the local issues are. They were actually, you know, it's not obviously a great sample, but just starting to this is something I'm going to have to do a lot more of starting to do meeting, surgeries, whatever to to meet up with people. And then the other thing I need to do a lot more of is write. Write a lot. Write to the paper. Local papers are desperate for opinion pieces all the time. They're desperate for things to print. So, you know, we need to be writing those, writing letters, all sorts of things. Writing all the time, which can get a bit tiring, but. So there's a few things I didn't bother doing at the beginning. I didn't assemble a team because they'll kind of choose themselves later on. I figure I don't know if anybody's interested. I didn't optimize my personal brand. I'm not going to start wearing suits. I'm not going to change my Twitter handle, which is frankly ridiculous. And, you know, I'm not going to be like James Paul Horsham because that would be shit. I didn't bother chasing the media particularly. I think, you know, I'm very. And I want to, you know, this to be a kind of a not sort of case of those traditional ideas of having big splashes in in media and things like that. We can do this organically. We have the technology, right? So let's not bother with that. And I didn't agonize over naming. I launched with what was great, frankly, a terrible name of open Horsham. It's just appalling. And I hated it when I chose it, but it was just like, you know, there are three hard... Buck's up the joke now. Two hard problems in computer science. Naming things, cash and validation, and off by one errors. But if you say three, it doesn't work. Well done. So where next? That's kind of where I am now. So where next is kind of an adventure over the next best part of a year to work out what the hell else I need to do. And how to actually get some votes. Engage with local people. I need to do a lot more writing, talking, meeting people and working out what's going on. It's not a great detail to do list. It's very vague. I just want to answer a couple of questions that I'm often asked. And the things that are often good, often put to me. Why bother, right? Voting doesn't change anything if it did, they disallow it. Standing won't change anything. I'm standing in a safe seat. What differences are gonna make? The way I figure it is, if you think that things are wrong, you've got a couple of options. You need to take part, whether that's by joining parties, as Tom suggested last night, whether it's by standing up for something yourself. You need to take part, you need to get involved. Because the only other option is not moaning on Twitter. The only other option is to get out in the streets. And unless you're gonna do that, we have a system that you can work within. When that breaks, feel free. The other one is often around the surveillance conversations and things. Yeah, but what if we need to work on better security software? We need to get people using encryption, particularly around surveillance. That's true, but it doesn't answer the whole thing. I think if you want to end up as the technological underground in some dystopia, then that's probably okay. I mean, they have cool outfits, that's all right. We probably won't be that cool. Matrix reference, that's really quite dated. I couldn't think of anything else. I don't really want to end up there. It seems like a lot of hard work. I'd rather have a society I actually want to live in not one that hates me, basically. So, when we come back to the independent thing, I'm nearly done. I don't think that standing as an independent is the right way for me to go. This is a ballot paper. I'm fairly sure taking a photo of your ballot papers are legal, but there's a lot of them online. So whoever this guy is, wouldn't want to be him. I don't know where he lives. Somewhere in Hove. Anyway, interesting thing about this list here, right? Layla, Green Party, Lib Dems, UKIP, Conservatives. Oh, there's a sort of space there. There's really annoying thing about being independent is you don't have that kind of brand. You don't have any brand identity and people don't see it on the ballot paper. They all get a logo. I think you can get a tagline or something. It's just, and you've just got independent and your name. You've got to make people aware of your name. And my name's James Smith. It's quite depressing. So I don't think that's really good enough. And the other thing is that if I stand as an independent and I make some progress and I get a bunch of people behind me and then this time next year I decide that this is just so awful that I don't ever want to do it again, nobody can pick it up and carry on, right? It's just lost. All that effort is lost. So I'm much more concerned about building a movement. I think we need a new political option. We need a new movement in this country. And so you've got to build something. Something different. Something exciting and something new. And this is the thing that we're going to build. That's the name. That's what's going to be on the ballot paper, which is quite nice. It's like a little mind virus. You thought you initially, you look at it and you go, huh? And then you think, ooh. And then you think, ugh. And you do that for about 15 minutes. And every time you mention it to yourself, it's like a little confirmation bias in your head. And every time you think negatively about it, you think, oh no, I don't want something new. No. This is what we're working with at the moment. It's inherently optimistic. It's looking forward. And that's something that's really lacking at the moment in politics in this country. So we'll see how that turns out. And we're looking at a movement with principles of democracy, of reinvigoration of democracy, of transparency for governments, for companies, liberty and privacy for individuals, as opposed to the other way around, which is what we have at the moment. Everything's transparent for you guys. And companies have as much privacy as they want. So that seems a little bit backwards. Rationality around evidence base around policy is important, the courage to take hard decisions, to look to the future for problems that are difficult to deal with in that normal chasing tomorrow's headline cycle. We need something with a bit more courage. And we need something optimistic, something that's saying, actually, we can make the future better, not that's campaigning in a negative way, and saying, God, aren't all these things awful? Look at all those horrible poor people, they're taking your money. It's something optimistic. Some optimism in politics, I think, is really lacking. And a party designed to deprecate itself, right? To work within the system, to create a party that will work to make sure that parties are necessary. Because we can do things better. We don't have to send MPs to Westminster on a horse anymore. I mean, the digital democracy thing earlier was talking about how we can do things better. And we can go there. We can work on that. But something designed to explicitly to deprecate itself is what we're looking at. So I'm done, I'm nearly done. It's 250 days. Today it is 250 days till the 2015 general election. That's the time we've got left. And so who thinks, quick survey, who thinks there should be more people like us technologically capable understanding of the world we find ourselves in? Who thinks there should be more people like us in power, in parliament? Okay, good. Who would like to see that in our lifetime? Right. So if not you, then who? Probably. I hope that's not the answer. But we're here. We're the one, it's our generation now and we're growing up and it's time to take some responsibility. So that's me, you can find me there. That's the Open Politics Project. And we're having a meet up for anybody interested in democracy, politics, digital democracy, all those things, half eight in the workshop just over there. Come and join us and ask lots of questions and discuss things. I'm done. Have I gone over time? We've got time for a couple of questions. Actually, I can think of one. Who here'd vote for James? Say aye. That's not bad. Sorry? That's fine. Do we have any questions now or a voice later? I'll let you choose. Go for it. Hello, what do you think the answer you'll get your deposit back? No, that's kind of the aim. It would be really, really good to get deposit back this time. That's quite unlikely to be fair. I'm going into this realistically, but I'm going into it knowing that this is the first. It's not the last. It's not the only time. This is going to be something that's going to have to, as I said, it's a generational change. We keep going until we're the white-haired old guys. I'm getting white-haired already. It's losing the youth vote with the gray. Given what you've just answered, just then this might be a bit redundant, but have you made any preparations towards becoming an MP in the day-to-day of what that would involve? No, no, not really. No, I suspect that's probably not going to be an immediate issue. Obviously it's an aim. Obviously I'm in the race to try and win, to try and convince people that there is something better, but realistically, this time probably not. I hear there are training courses. But they don't offer them to people who they don't expect to win, so that's fine. The stakes are obviously a lot of time and stuff. I mean, what about your day job? Ask the guy behind you. Yeah, that's, don't actually ask him, good God. Wait, evenings are good, but also I have children. It's difficult to fit it in. And one of the things I've said to my wife when I was the first person I discussed this with, obviously when I was considering standing was with my wife to say, look, I understand this is going to be difficult, but if it starts to affect children or family or anything like that, then fine, that's it, it's done. You have to be realistic and appreciate the impact it's going to have. It's going to be very difficult. I'm probably going to be taking some time off in April. Well, technically, I think you can do it, but that was a really bad idea I wouldn't want to. Yeah, I don't know, I'll have to find somebody else. So I think there's two things I wanted to say. One is your name, James Smith. It just made me immediately think, well, you are every man, and I think that's quite a powerful thing. And the other thing is, I like the idea that you're not intending to win almost, you're intending to set a precedent, you're creating a new model, it's really important. And it reminded me of in Italy. And to a racial level of debates as well. Yeah, and it reminded me, in Italy, there was that party that just really blitzed the social networks and they really got on everyone on board and then they got in. Yes, I mean, that's, I'm not surprised they're five-star. Actually, we don't know what to do. And then they handed it back over to the people that had the skills, but next time they're ramping up their sort of membership and then they're going to come in and really hit them hard. So I think it's really important. Yeah, yeah, I mean, this is about building movements. It's stuff that does take time to build and needs a lot of people involved. Let's say you win and you are now James Smith MP, independent or something new. What do you do next? How realistically do you expect that you can enact progressive change in parliament? As an individual MP, I'm pretty sure Tom would back me up at none at all. It needs something bigger than that. You need to have a whole bunch of people. You need to have a, I mean, look how long it's taken. The other parties have hundreds of years of history. I mean, UKIP have taken 20 years to get within spitting distance of maybe having one. It takes a long time, but you know, you've got to try. Did that answer the question at all? Probably not. Exactly, that's it. The more of us who stand, the more chance we'll have. So, the question, so you have a movement, you don't have a party, the idea is you are yourself. Now, okay, disclaimer, I'm a member of political party, so the reason why I joined the political party is that despite it not being perfect, I can share a set of core values with that party. The problem I see with this new way of doing it. Sorry, so the reason why you have some doubts about this other way of doing politics is that people need to identify, or generally need to identify with the set of core values. If these values are not well defined, they will either change from time to time or become, you know, their variance will be quite high. And that's a problem I'm from Italy. We've seen that quite a lot with movements. You know, they tend to get together right-wing extremists and left-wing extremists. How would you address that? How do you think this can address the problem? So I think you're right. People vote for parties because of the values, not necessarily because of the things they do. I think we see that with the main parties. They're trading on values that they've had for a very long time, but don't actually seem to pay much attention to anymore, but people still vote for them based on those values. I think there's a set of values that's not being expressed by any of the options. I think there's a set of values that I would hope a lot of people here share about moving into a better future, about using technology to make the world better, about, you know, we're looking forward, and I don't see that in any of the existing parties necessarily. They're, you know, very split down the traditional political lines, whereas we have perhaps a new way forward combining bits of both to move to something more, more dynamic, more forward-looking. Run out of words there. Hello. Hello. I have a question about, in Horsham, how did the local councillors and existing concentrations of power respond to you coming onto the scene and your announcement? So I haven't spoken to that many of them yet. I think they probably think it's a bit strange. There are some other independents in Horsham who are going to be standing for council and hopefully to build some kind of alliance with them would be very good, the sort of, you know, confluence of interests. There is generally a, there's a really interesting trend at the moment in Horsham where there's a lot of secrecy in the local council. Among the local papers is campaigning on transparency in local council, which is, you know, plays right into my hands, which is really nice. So it's, yeah, it'll be interesting. I need to talk to the other councillors. I haven't met Francis yet, so. I did write to him about drip and said I'm standing against you next year. Could you not vote for this, please? Sorry? Twitted him? No, he doesn't have, well, he doesn't have a Twitter account. That's his. I'm told that he has one that he uses to read, but not an actual identity, apparently. Anymore? I'm afraid for now we're pretty much out of time. I apologise, but do go to the tent at half-eight. In the workshop. As much as you want to drink. Yeah, bring a beer. As long as you bring it yourselves. Yeah, no, so thank you very much, James Smith. Thank you.