Contact and About

I'm Ash Ford-McAllister, and this blog is a refocusing on, and relaunch of, my true self - a creative, a thinker, an ideas-man, and, above all, a writer.

All things which people have told me I had to stop being.

All things I put aside because they didn't pay the bills - only to find out there were even more barriers to me entering any other field that paid the bills.

I unfortunately lost the access details to my previous blog, Ashley Ford-McAllister, which I took off public search, and stopped updating, "because employers won't like it!"

It turns out employers don't like the fact that I'm registered blind, don't have a passport (financial reasons, logistic reasons - there may be posts about those in time), and am medically banned from holding a driving licence, either. So, stuff what they do and don't like: I'm nearly 40; I've spent over 20yrs trying to figure out how to make people like me, and, in the past 5yrs, I moved away from liking myself.

So, who is this self I'm going to reconnect with?

I'm a management, leadership, and EADI consultant (check out The Productive Pessimist Ltd for that side of my life - I'm actively booking consults) I can be contacted for that work by email: theproductivepessimist@yahoo.com

I've previously been a freelance writer, from 2014-2017, and am open for written content only (I can't do videos/TikToks, unfortunately - haven't found an editing software that plays nicely with my sight loss!) commissions - email ashleyfordmcallister@yahoo.com for this.

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Radical Reform - Elect Problems, Get Solutions

After every General Election - literally, immediately after, as newly-elected MPs for various regions are announced by returning officers - there are calls for a "reform of First Past the Post ". The Party of government wants to scrap First Past the Post because they believe it will make it easier for them to win subsequent elections, with larger majorities. Parties experiencing returning an MP to Parliament for the first time want to scrap First Past the Post because they believe it will result in them returning more MPs at future elections. And the losing Party wants to scrap First Past the Post because...well, they don't want to lose again, and demanding a change to the way votes are counted is a lot easier than actually doing the work to become re-electable. A lot of ordinary people in the electorate want to scrap First Past the Post, too, because it just seems fundamentally unfair that larger regions are always more likely to get their preferred candidate elected

Identity, Experience, and What's in a Name

If you've taken a moment to have a look at my publication history , you'll notice that my writing to date has been published under the name Ashley Ford-McAllister (as was my previous blog, that I lost the login details for...) So - why the move to Ash Ford-McAllister? It's a very small change on paper (which it technically isn't - Ashley is still my legal first name) but a huge change on a personal level, and one which reflects a lot. Ash was a name that, at 9yrs old, and with an absolute certainty that the answer to the question of "What do you want to be when you grow up?" was "a man", and a belief that the "change" people kept warning me about would be when I'd get the same genitals as my Dad had (yes, a female puberty came as a hell of a shock. Such a severe and upsetting one, in fact, that I just assumed what was probably severe endometriosis was "just normal girl stuff" - PSA: if you're bleeding for 6+ days, a

The Great British Debt Crisis

On Friday 20th September 2024, it was revealed that the UK’s national debt was equal to the income the UK was able to generate; in short, debt was at 100% of GDP. This last occurred in the 1960s - and resulted in the following decade, the 1970s, being extremely difficult for ordinary people, with standards of living declining sharply across all demographics, something which, inevitably, hit those who were already experiencing poverty the hardest. The 1970s saw a massive loss of manufacturing in Britain - historically, the one sector that had been able to pull Britain through the downturns of economic cycles, because the UK used to be known, and respected for, exceptional quality of its manufactured goods, and many countries around the world were keen to purchase what were considered premium brands from Britain. Manufacturing is also a very forgiving and open sector for employment, with low barriers to en

Ash Ford-McAllister

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