My name is Jon Chadwick, and I run a Distillery.  Before I made Gin and Vodka I worked for the Government, and the NHS, mostly in very senior jobs.   I experienced first hand most of the what the State does from healthcare to prisons.  Now I work on an industrial estate, just outside of Durham.

I am also a miserable twisty faced Nothern malcontent, who hates paperwork and bureaucracy and all that goes with it.  Which is probably why I don’t work for the Government any more.   I should make that clear from the start, as it will influence what I write.

I started this blog, because I wanted to talk about the differences between how the world looks from the perspective of big government, to how it looks from the world of small business.

Specifically why and how I came to discover that lots and lots of things that I used to believe about the UK economy, employment, unemployment and all of the stuff that goes with that, is wrong.

I don’t pretend that what I am talking about is economics.   It isn’t.  Sometimes I will borrow bits from Economics, and Business Studies, but a lot of this is going to be mix of data and anecdotes – trying to compare what we think is happening to what I see around me.

I don’t pretend that everything I am going to write is going to be right either.  In fact part of the reason for starting the blog is try and set out ideas in writing so that they can be tested, and either developed or discarded.

Because I intend to use a lot of anecdotes about real people I will sometimes switch things around so that it isn’t possible to identify the subjects.   I would hate for someone to browse the internet and discover that something that happened in their working life has ended up on here.  If you do think that I have made you identifiable, or I have just got something wrong let me know.

While there is nothing overtly political here I do think that our failure to understand the working lives of so many of the people we meet every day is one of the reasons why left wing political parties are failing to connect with people.   Our lives intersect with lots of other people but increasingly we know very little about their working lives.   What we do know comes from Government statistics and articles in the press, rather than direct experience.    Left wing political parties are stuck trying to manage a map made up of Government statistics, think tank reports and newspaper articles rather than living in the territory of the real Labour market