Assertiveness

I am an experienced trainer and qualified further education teacher. Donington Training is a not for profit entity.

I am also the founder of the Movement for Panocracy and originator of the Education For Its Own Sake initiative.

I live in Alvechurch, a village just south of Birmingham, in Worcestershire, UK.

Educating

I am a qualified adult education teacher and I have worked as a teacher, tutor, trainer and lecturer since 1986. Organisations I have worked for include Leicester University Extramural Deparment, De Montfort University, Wolverhampton University, Leicestershire and Derbyshire adult education services, The Co-Operative College, Charles Keene/Leicester College and the WEA. I have delivered training in Hungary, Latvia, Palestine and Sri Lanka as well as numerous private courses in the UK.

Co-Counselling

I was first trained in the fundamentals of co-counselling with Co-Counselling International (CCI) in 1984 and I have been having regular co-counselling sessions ever since.

I have also been trained in Re-evaluation Counselling (RC) and actively co-counselled with RC for a number of years. I teach CCI co-counselling and I was the UK contact person for CCI from 1996 - 2011.

Politics

I have been a member of the Labour Party and the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) since I was a teenager. I have been very active in both in various times in the past. I was a Leicestershire County Councillor from 1977 - 1985.

I was involved with the Faslane 365 campaign particularly helping to run non-violent direct action training sessions for people planning to take part in blockading the Faslane base. I am a pacifist.

Voluntary work

I was a magistrate from 1978 to 1994. I was a Community First Responder for the East Midlands Ambulance Service from 2016 to 2019.

Philosophy

Questions were part of what took me into personal development work. What I have learned since leads me to believe that oppression is what underlies most of the world's problems.

Look at it this way. Our problems arise from people making irrational decisions, including the decisions of most people to let other decision makers, people in governments, businesses etc., get away with irrational decisions.

People make irrational decisions because they make them compulsively, they make the decisions that they feel they have to. In other words, people do not feel that they have much choice even though, objectively, they have a lot of choice. They feel powerless, which is is the same as being oppressed.

Being oppressed is not about what other people do to us, it is about being indoctrinated to believe that we have to put up with it.

The way out, then, seems to be through empowerment. This means helping people to learn about the possibilities that exist, learn how to act on more of these possibilities and learn to feel that they have the right to make their own choices about how they handle any situation. In other words to become more self-empowered, more in charge of themselves and their world.

I see most of the world as being organised in self correcting (step out of line and you are likely to be punished) self perpetuating (passed on from generation to generation) oppressive societies.

My work is all about finding ways in which we can work towards self correcting (supporting everyone to be self-empowered) self perpetuating empowered society.

My ethical position is that for anything to be ethical it must be empowering.

Engineering

I am a chartered electrical engineer. I worked for the UK National Coal Board for nearly 20 years, much of it at collieries - including plenty of work underground!

Computing

I am enthusiastic about open source computing and I do not use any Microsoft software. I use up to date Linux from Debian which I have installed on several computers, some of which will no longer run current Microsoft software and some which are used by friends for their everyday computing.

Apart from my interest in computers, this also has a political dimension. Microsoft's domination of software is oppressive, it leads most people into feeling that there is no alternative.

And it is not even rational to use Microsoft software. Microsoft software will always be inherently vulnerable to malware and it forces people to dispose of computers after a few years.