I am grateful for the opportunity to stand to serve in an area that I have lived in for so long, and I know so well.
I will represent the people of East Wiltshire with honesty and integrity.
I will do whatever I can to improve the services that impact all of our lives here.
I am 57, originally from Essex, where my mother was a nurse and my father a secondhand car dealer. I joined the Army at 21 and met Lisa when we were both 24 and we celebrate 30 years of marriage this year.
We have lived in Wiltshire for 29 of those years. From Bulford to Chiseldon, to Wroughton in Army Married Quarters, but finally we tired of the moves and bought our first house together in Urchfont near Devizes. We lived there for 20 years, moving to Marlborough last year as our son Ben was about to start A-levels here. Like me, all of our three kids have gone to outstanding state schools. A shout out to the inspirational teams at Urchfont CofE Primary, Lavington School and St John’s Marlborough! Wiltshire has nurtured my family and delivered them the best start in life, and we continue to appreciate the welcoming Wiltshire community at our new home in Marlborough.
It was the warmth of Wiltshire life that ultimately made me leave the Army; we wanted to make a long term home here. So, I left the service after 15 years, having reached the rank of Major in the Royal Signals, gaining both an MSc in Information Systems and an MA in Defence Studies. I have worked since in technology, dealing with software for networking and Internet delivery particularly for co-working office space, helping startups and SMEs get the facilities and connectivity they need to prosper. I spent 2 years successfully setting up a new business in the US based in New York, but we of course came straight back to Wiltshire as soon as it was done.
Like most people, as the kids move through school you get involved. It is fun. I helped out with fundraising - at the PTA for parties, sponsored walks, BBQs, Discos (I am still a terrible automix DJ!). Lisa and I also set up a Youth Club, I was a school Governor, we helped out on maintaining Rights of Way and more recently with hedge planting with the Pewsey Vale "Plant for our Lives" group. We were fortunate to be in a position to help and house a Ukrainian family for over a year. None of this is special, many others do more, it just reflects the normal roots that secure you and sustain you in a local community.
The UK feels broken, and I am worried about the future for the country and the people that live here. People should be able to access decent healthcare, education, transport, and justice. People should have a decent, warm house to live in. Our waterways and beaches should be clean. Industry and business should have the confidence to invest for the long term, powered by an educated workforce and enabled by the infrastructure the state supplies. None of this is working as it should, our standard of living in the UK has become measurably worse and the economy plagued by lack of investment, skills and infrastructure.
I am not a career politician. I have had 2 careers already; I want to bring my experience to bear in helping solve the issues that face us. We need more technologists and scientists in Parliament, more people who have a lived experience in business, more people who have experience of the real highly connected world in which we live. An MP is both a legislator - a law maker, but also a representative of the community, the constituency that they serve. MPs have to listen, be approachable, to understand, to empathize and that needs real lived experience in that community. MPs have increasingly become a government helpdesk - with huge amounts of constituency casework which reflects the degree to which the services we all use are in such disrepair. But MPs actually need to fix the root causes of these issues, not just be a band aid of last resort. This starts with being honest about the problems we face, or we cannot begin to fix them. I want to try to make people’s lives better rather than just stoking division and blame.
There has been a fundamental breakdown in honesty from our political leaders who ask us not to believe the evidence of our own eyes. We see the staffing crisis in social care and the NHS, the costs of heating our poorly insulated homes, the lack of low cost quality housing, the lack of recruits and equipment for our armed forces, the expensive and unreliable railways, the crumbling schools, the terrible roads. Nothing is better, everything is worse,yet somehow we are still "world beating". We need an honest appraisal of how badly we have been governed and the situation we are in before we can begin to fix it.
Whilst we face many individual issues, I believe there are two fundamentals we need to address to drive postive change in the UK. The first is that our first past the post electoral system is broken. It leads to divisive and destructive bipolar politics. We have to make Westminster work better, more collaboratively and for the longer term and this means embracing Proportional Representation. At the last election nearly 6 in 10 people did not vote Conservative, yet they won landslide 80 seat majority. We have to stop Labour doing the same and ignoring this fundamental reform. It's not sexy, it's dull; but it's critical. The second is that there is no doubt that leaving the EU has damaged all sectors of our economy, made us all poorer, made life more complicated and has solved none of the problems promised. We need to work towards a closer relationship with the EU, and perhaps one day rejoin. At the very least we need to stop pretending that our departure has been a success or can ever be a success, or that it has not made the UK and Europe weaker and more fragmented in a dangerous and brittle world.
I’ll of course bring my own experience of living and bringing up my family here to my campaign. We need an NHS that works - with well trained and paid staff, dentists that will accept NHS patients, no sewage in our chalkstreams or waste backing up into our homes, better local buses that support real commuters, a well recruited and equipped armed forces, a functioning court system, more police, consistent support for farming, an end to homelessness, faster and determined action on climate change - its an endless list. But over the last 3 months I’ve been embarking on a huge consultation exercise to listen to East Wiltshire. Schools, doctors' surgeries, the hospitals, the Council, care homes, employers and employees, people on doorsteps, in high streets, at rail stations, on buses, in pubs. If I’m out and about, I’ll be ready to listen and hear your priorities for change.
Meet David on his bike tour of the constituency.
You only get one life. We need to make sure its a good one for everyone.
By telephone: 01672 837227
By email: david.kinnaird@eastwiltslibdems.org.uk
On Facebook: David Kinnaird for East Wiltshire
On X: David Kinnaird for East Wiltshire
In Person: On David's bike tour of the constituency
At a hustings: Upcoming hustings
190 Miles, 300 doors knocked, 150 opened! 500 + conversations almost all positive. People really do want a change in politics. Stop the games and deliver better lives. Be Brave, Vote Dave.
Snapshot of Life on a Wiltshire Dairy Farm (The visit was back at the end of April)
Starting just outside of GWH Swindon on 5th June, David and his wife Lisa will cycle around East Wiltshire covering 70+ villages and 5 town. Travelling through the heart of Wiltshire David wants to meet and listen to as many people as possible.
SDR 2015 committed not to reduce the Army to below 82,000. In January this year, its strength was down to 75,170 with still more soliders leaving than joining. Have we outsourced too much, leaving an overworked Army core that is now just too lean?
Do we believe in absolute rights for women, or not?
It may be a necessary in the long run, but as ceilings collapse on intensive care patients, is now the time to spend £2.5Bn on the A303 dualling scheme under Stonehenge?
