First of all, thank you for shortlisting me and giving me this opportunity to introduce myself: I’m Helen and I want to be the next Labour Councillor for Mossley Hill.

I’ve been working in the voluntary and community sector for 14 years. In that time I’ve worked with children and young people as a playworker, I’ve taught adult art classes in community centres and I’ve supported charities and community groups with digital marketing.

Before I started working in the voluntary sector, I didn’t pay that much attention to politics, but as I’ve watched the impact of budget cuts on public services, Ive seen how the sector steps in to provide the support people need.

In 2010 I was facing redundancy from my job as a communications officer and I decided I wanted to start my own social enterprise centred around digital inclusion and community engagement. So I did, and 9 years later it’s still going. Since starting that business I’ve picked up a wide range of skills, such as bookkeeping, bid writing, admin, marketing and project management – all skill that I think will be used=ful in the role of a Councillor.

I joined the Labour party in 2015 because, after 5 years of the coalition government, for me, Jeremy Corbyn represented that something different the country needed to repair the damage of austerity. And after a few, eventful, years in politics, I felt being a member wasn’t enough. I wanted to do something. So I got involved with my CLP, joined them on marches and protests and helped with leafleting and door knocking in the local election. Now I feel I want to do something more. So here I am.

The most important thing, for me, is community. Creating a safe and vibrant place for people to live, work, and play. I can only do so much through my work, and that’s why I want to be on the city council: to help keep our services going, make sure our libraries stay open, protect people’s jobs and ensure our green spaces are there for future generations to enjoy.

Mossley Hill is a beautiful part of Liverpool. It reminds me a lot of where I grew up in Crosby, Blundellsands ward. Both have high education attainment, low crime rate and long life expectancy. And while, relatively speaking, it is more affluent than other parts of the city, there are pockets of deprivation here that are largely overlooked. Those residents especially, need Labour Councillors to make sure they’re not forgotten, to fight on their behalf and ensure their voice is heard in the town hall.

So if you select me tonight, and I really hope you do, I will work with [the current Labour councillors] to promote Labour values, engage with residents to understand what their priorities are and win the confidence of voters.

The campaign to retain that Labour seat in Mossley Hill starts tonight, and I know it’s not going to be easy, but I can’t wait to get started and I look forward to working with you all to make it happen.

Pleased to say I was selected and will stand for election in May 2020.

This week Green MP, Caroline Lucas, made a rather unpopular suggestion of creating an all female cabinet of cross party MPs to prevent a no deal Brexit. To say it fell flat is an understatement. I’ve had a couple of discussions on social media about this subject, but social media can get heated so I want to make clear my thoughts on this subject.

Women

On the surface I quite like the idea of an all female discussion because having sat in many board meetings over the last 10 years, I have witnessed first hand, time and time again, that women don’t engage as actively as men. Men are generally very confident in their own beliefs and opinions and have no fear of sharing them with an air of authority. Women tend to listen, take on board the opinions and views of others and understand where their opinion has come from. Often they hold back on sharing their own opinion because it feels unlikely that it will be understood in the same way and there’s a chance they’ll be argued with or patronised in some way. The feeling that if we don’t agree we must be wrong, is enough to keep us quiet. I am not speaking for all women at this point. It is definitely what I feel and I have observed many women in meetings, holding back from sharing their views. On the flip side I’ve been in all women meetings where everyone has felt able to talk, we’ve shared our opinions, even if they differ, we listen and understand each other’s position and we find ways to compromise. So my initial thought when someone told me that Caroline Lucas had suggested bringing together female MPs from all parties to discuss preventing a No Deal Brexit was “What a great idea that is”.

Shortlist

Of course, at that point I hadn’t read the article or the letter that had been sent out and I hadn’t seen the list of women who had been invited. To say it’s not the most diverse group of women would be an understatement and I’m sure in hindsight Caroline Lucas will look back on this as a huge error of judgement. It’s shocking that in putting together a list of women to represent the UK, it doesn’t doesn’t appear to have occurred to her to include BAME women. While in some cases she invited the leader of the party or the only female MP of the party, that explanation doesn’t hold up in the Labour representation. Alongside Emily Thornberry, she could have invited fellow shadow cabinet members; Diane Abbott, Dawn Butler, Valerie Vaz or Shami Chakrabartit, all of whom are much more senior than Yvette Cooper.

Anti-Corbyn

Lib Dem leader Jo Swinson has said she won’t enter into a coalition with Jeremy Corbyn. That’s a whole other subject, but I mean, come on, Labour is Labour, the leader is just one person who is answerable to the members. People need to stop getting their knickers in a twist about Jeremy Corbyn and come to terms with the fact that the vast majority of Labour members believe in the policies and direction Corbyn has taken the party. If you want to work with us, that’s what you get. If Jeremy Corbyn steps down, the membership will vote in another leader with the same values and principles because since becoming leader, since unveiling the transformational manifesto, the party membership has more than doubled.

But I’m not convinced that this is just a cynical move to prevent  a general election and a Labour Government. Jo Swinson may not want to work with Jeremy Corbyn but I doubt anyone on the left much wants to work with her either… And while I don’t particularly like the idea of working alongside austerity enablers, they do represent their voters and any proposals to prevent a No Deal Brexit, should take into account all sides of the debate… which incidentally means including socialist MPs which Lucas seemed to have also overlooked.

It took a teenager, Greta Thunberg, to make us sit up and realise that climate change has reached the point of an emergency that we need to do something about. And now we’re 2 months away from leaving the EU with no deal in place and a new unelected Prime Minister who couldn’t care less about it. This feels about as catastrophic as it gets and I welcome any bold ideas to find a way through this mess rather than continuing to repeat the same old dance we’ve witnessed since the Withdrawal Agreement was first presented to the commons.

Obviously, Caroline Lucas doesn’t have any authority to bring together a cabinet to lead on Brexit and any strategies such a group might come up with would have to be voted on. So in that sense, the idea is a bit daft. But I do think that bringing together women from all parties to have a discussion is a good idea – maybe not the specific women that were listed and definitely with better representation of all women – because I do think that given the freedom to speak, debate, listen to each other and understand opposing views, women can change the world.

Hands up who watches Derren Brown and thinks “I don’t care what he says, he’s definitely got magical powers’?

I’ve heard so many anecdotes from people leaving his live show, overhearing such comments from attendees.

Why are we so committed to believing the unbelievable despite the evidence?

The thing I admire the most about Derren Brown is that he shows us the trick. All the way along he reminds us that he’s not psychic, it’s just an illusion. In his TV programmes, he explains in detail the tricks he’s using and how they work to manipulate people into believing the unthinkable.

The experiment where he made a young man believe he’d murdered someone was one of the most thought provoking programmes I’ve ever watched and made me question everything about my own emotions and how they’re triggered.

I think Derren Brown is both terrifying and utterly brilliant at the same time. I love watching his shows but I’d absolutely hate to be in the same room as him because I think I’d go insane with paranoia. There was a period of time, after watching the experiments, when I would notice things: words on posters, graffiti, adverts and think “that word again, am I being Derren Browned?” I suppose more than anything Derren Brown alerted me to something very important: we are incredibly gullible and easily manipulated.

This fact has made the marketing industry billions. When radio stations flood the airwaves with the same song, it tops the charts, but who decides which songs get played? Whoever spends the most money.

I recently watched The Great Hack, a documentary about Cambridge Analytica and how it influenced the outcomes of several high profile political events across the world.

With digital and social media, data analysis and artifical intelligence we now have something far more sinister than marketing.

Like cold reading on steroids, algorithms collect and analyse all kinds of data, building up an accurate profile of a person: their character, likes, dislikes etc.

Then social media posts, adverts, and memes are targeted at individuals, subliminally giving them information to influence their opinions.

We’ve all had a conversation about something and then an advert pops up on Facebook about that same thing. We’ve paused outside a shop and looked in the window and then adverts for that shop started appearing in our newsfeeds. And we acknowledge that it’s a bit creepy, or we think it’s a random coincidence, sometimes we even make the link between our data but still, we fill in those pointless personality quizzes, giving faceless tech giants more information to help their algorithms send us content that will influence us to do what they want us to do.

This isn’t just for fun, it’s not light entertainment, it’s not something they do and then reverse the trance so the target stops clucking like a chicken every time someone says “breakfast”.

This goes beyond mainstream media’s biased reporting and companies paying for more advertising than their competitors.This is tech giants selling our data to be analysed. This is people losing their ability to think for themselves. This is the people with the most financial power, rigging elections to ensure they retain their power.

This is an infringement of our democratic rights.

The Great Hack follows a whistleblower who explained how it worked, they exposed the con and showed us how entire nations had been manipulated into voting one way or another, or in one case they created a targeted campaign to convince young people not to vote at all.

There is something fundamentally wrong when people are being discouraged from exercising their democratic right.

Technology continues to evolve at a rate that most of us can’t comprehend and it stands to reason that it takes a while for legislation to catch up. But something has to be done to safeguard our democracy and protect the global population from being exploited.

There has been so many head scratching moments in recent years and I fear we’re on the precipice of an apocalyptic catastrophe. And I can’t shake the feeling that the only way we can stop it is if Derren Brown clicks his fingers and we all wake up.