Name – Jon Pullman
Political party – Freedom Alliance
Ward – Leith Walk
What’s your story?
My career background is computer programming within the finance industry although I have been working in various roles at NHS Lothian for over 10 years now. My current post is at a GP surgery in Leith.
I have long been cynical about mainstream politics, deterred both by the tribal nature of the established party system, and its increasing disconnection from truth and accountability.
Always curious about the broader picture of human affairs, it became ever clearer to me by experience and research that public perceptions of what is actually happening in the world, is often seriously manipulated to suit powerful vested interests. Multi-national corporations, state governments, and vast media conglomerates are now combining with ever greater effect to drive, maintain, and when necessary conceal the gravest examples of corruption, cruelty and injustice.
This prompted me to teach myself the basics of filmmaking and attempt to contribute as a grassroots activist in exposing some of these deceptions. An impulse to observe and investigate things directly led me to the Middle East, where I have travelled widely. It was in Palestine that I saw human rights abuses with my own eyes and the experience was life changing, due not least to my realisation that the shameful reality I had witnessed was largely ignored and in many ways facilitated by my own government. It was also then that I understood the extent of wilful ignorance, cowardice and in some cases deliberate misrepresentation of deeply important issues which pervaded the entire political and media establishment.
I cannot make claim to any previous experience in political office, but my work as a documentary filmmaker has brought me close enough to its structures and personnel to know that representative democracy, with all the collective moral good which, if functioning properly, should flow from it, is unravelling fast.
I am convinced that without determined political re-engagement by ordinary people to prevent their further disempowerment, the means by which we can exercise the already diminishing agency over our lives and livelihoods will be irretrievably lost.
The main issues I will campaign on
Freedom Alliance was initially formed as a response to the unprecedented assault on our historic rights and freedoms further to the pandemic. The party now continues to develop its ideas and the main campaigning issues reflect the broader crisis of social justice and state control of which the last two years forms but a part.
Notable among the party’s aims are the following:
– electoral reform that improves proportional representation.
– more decentralisation of decision-making
– a written constitution that safeguards personal sovereignty and certain inalienable rights
– a healthcare system which better reflects personal choices, priorities and needs, with regard to health and wellbeing
– an education system which reflects the natural diversity of aptitude and places greater emphasis on life skills
– an economy that reduces income inequality, shifting the tax burden from poor to rich, from small business to bloated corporations, exacts a sales tax from off-shore registered companies and improves minimum wage levels.
– diversification of the financial system to support digital currencies and restrict the dominance of central banks.
At a personal campaigning level, I call for an end to the increasing state overreach which now threatens public mental health and wellbeing. This includes government attempts to interfere with family relationships, overly politicised sex education of our children, medical coercion, abuse of behavioural science and the mechanism of fear in order to ensure compliance with government policy, growing digital surveillance, and the creeping influence of authoritarian controls over our freedom of expression.
I also believe that the recent and entirely disproportionate prominence of the transgender issue has caused unnecessary confusion to our young and helped create societal division more generally. In my view biological sex should remain the defining factor in how we frame policy and I shall campaign to protect safe spaces for women. This is not at odds with protecting human rights or respecting preferred gender identity as a lived experience.
The restrictions on human movement and interaction over the last two years has wrought destruction on small businesses and the communities they serve. I believe this is deliberate and that it serves the cause of an encroaching state to diminish collective morale, minimise personal enterprise and to hand over as much of the economy as possible to corporations, who are themselves linked, through vast financial networks, to the governments that facilitate them. It is essential that small businesses are protected from future emergency laws to shut them down. We should also recognise that the vibrancy of any community is largely determined by the degree of ownership felt by the people that live there.
Few people know it, but I was adopted at six weeks old. It is something which I have come to think as some explanation of my free-spirited nature. In the absence of any known genealogy or wider blood family, I see myself primarily as a citizen of the world and my political instincts have always reflected that.
Founding Editor of The Edinburgh Reporter.
Edinburgh-born multimedia journalist and iPhoneographer.
