About

In 2015 I was running a pub in Lincoln with my partner. The conversation in the bar was about Brexit, and the version of it that circulated was that leaving the European Union would improve the economy. I did not read the policies. I voted Leave on the 23rd of June 2016. The voice I trusted on the way to that ballot was Nigel Farage's.

After the referendum politics fell into the background for a while. My partner and I decided we wanted a child, which meant the household budget needed to grow, so I went back to the programming background I had built up before the pub years and went to find proper software work. We moved to Rugby in Warwickshire for a role. The plan worked, our daughter was born, and over the next few years I worked through a few more roles in the same industry.

In November 2024 we made a different decision. We wanted our child to grow up near her grandparents, so we moved back to Lincolnshire. One weekend I walked down to the local pub for a pint. The route took me past the polling station where I had cast my Leave vote. Next to it was a shop that had closed. The economics of Brexit was supposed to improve our lives. I was looking at a closed shop in the middle of my village.

That moment ended the habit of trusting the front man. Since then I have read policy documents directly, every time, and stopped voting on rhetoric. Reading the actual material led me to Richard Murphy and Gary Stevenson, both of whom set their economic case out from primary sources rather than vibes. The question that followed was the obvious one: who in British politics can actually enact change of the kind the country needs, and how do I help anyone else avoid making the same mistake I did?

I applied the same reading discipline to the parties themselves. The Green Party's published programme was the one most likely to enact the economic framework I had come to via Richard Murphy, so I joined. Locally that meant East Lindsey. I am the East Lindsey Green Party's named communications officer, which is a procedural rather than hierarchical title; the communications work is shared across a three-person team. I picked the comms role specifically because of my technical background, and I run the open-source software that keeps the local party's online operations going.

This site is the writing half of that work. When a major political party publishes a policy commitment, I want there to be at least one place where that commitment gets read in full and traced into the everyday-life consequences the headline framing leaves out. Every claim on the site is linked to a primary source you can check yourself. As a disclosed Green writing about other parties, the only honest move I know is to make every line auditable.

Professionally I have spent over twenty years in computer software and development. The site is hand-written. There are no analytics, no trackers, and minimal JavaScript.

I can be reached at paul@pgw.report, on Bluesky at @pgw.report, and on LinkedIn.

Original writing on this site is published under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 (CC-BY 4.0). You are welcome to share, adapt, translate, and build on the work, including in your own ward, newsletter, or community group, as long as the source is credited. The full licence and reuse details are on the licence page.

Source trust tiers

Every tracker entry needs at least two qualifying sources before it can be published. Each source attached to an entry sits in one of four tiers, and the tier sets how much that source contributes to the verification rule.

Gold-tier sources are peer-attested in the strict sense: Lord Mark Pack's published Reform-tracker, the council's own register or election results page, and a small number of investigative outlets whose record on a specific beat is itself the institutional check (Hope Not Hate on far-right extremism, the Local Democracy Reporting Service on council news). Gold-tier sources count as two under the verification rule, which means a single gold-tier source is enough on its own. Major investigations from the BBC, Guardian, Times, and similar national outlets do not automatically reach gold; they sit at primary.

Primary sources are the outlet of first publication for the story. Corroborating sources are independent outlets that confirm the same facts after publication. Primary and corroborating each count as one. Cross-check sources are useful context that did not originate the story and do not directly corroborate; they count zero toward the verification rule but stay on the entry for the audit trail.

This tier system is encoded in the database and enforced by a check function at publication time. The full implementation is in the open-source migration file 016_trust_columns.sql in the repository.