I began Liberating Yorkshire with four bold aims:

• An autonomous Yorkshire
• A constitution shaped by its people
• A democracy led by citizens, not elites
• An economy built on fairness and sustainability

These aims are ambitious, but they come from lived experience. Working with council housing tenant groups in Kirklees taught me that ordinary people—not officials—are best placed to shape their communities. It was both my years as a Justice of the Peace and my time as a volunteer visiting men serving sentences in Wakefield’s top-security prison—listening to them week after week in the privacy of their cells—that convinced me something drastic must change if we are to build a fairer society.

If you share the same love and hope for Yorkshire that I have, I invite you to join me. At the bottom of each page, you’ll find space to share your thoughts and aspirations. Together, we can begin by looking honestly at the Centre’s failures—what went wrong and what we can learn from the past. From there, we start moving forward positively, looking for ways to improve life in our region.