Looking forward to our website going live
Mystery pic: where is this? It was taken in about 2005. Clue: it’s in a picturesque market town with a reputation for fine dining. Use the Comments section to have a guess.
By Robert J Davies
It’s 11.30pm on Saturday night and I thought I’d get going with a debut entry into the RCM blog on our new website. This was the weekend when I was hoping that the site would go live but it doesn’t look like it will turn out that way. Things always take longer than you think and I’m only too well aware that most of the work at getting the Rural Conservative Movement off the ground falls upon me, although I have a small team helping me to whom I am very grateful.
What is keeping my morale up is the fact that this new website is going to be vastly better than the previous one. It’s flexible and will give us the opportunity to grow content in a meaningful and flexible way. It’s vitally important that I am fully on board with the layout process and have the ability to change things as necessary. As a small group, we just don’t have the resources to pay for website designers and it would be both impractical and expensive to have to pay someone else to update our pages. A couple of weeks ago, a neighbour shelled out over £600 just for a single-page website. Well, we just can’t afford that.
On the subject of hard cash, I will shortly be looking at ways of seeking to bring funding into the RCM as a vital resource to help us grow. For now, and I do not say this cynically, this will mean asking supporters to fund me, individually, as I seek to expand the Movement. As a freelance writer, journalist and publisher, I am giving over an increasing amount of my time to the RCM but making no money from it, while funding all costs, including the running and hosting of this website out of my own pocket. But I have a wife and children to provide for and a duty to put food on the table! If I can get even a small dribble of income I will be able to devote more time and energy to it. Yet I am grateful for the chance, as a self-employed person, to get involved in conservative politics. It’s so hard for anyone in the pay of someone else to do so, since it is a favourite strategy of the Left to seek to close down their opponents by “doxxing” them - publishing their personal details on the internet; denouncing them to their employers in the hope that they’ll lose their jobs; making personal threats and of course, loads and loads of verbal abuse. All in the name of free speech and tolerance, of course!
It’s not easy being on the Right politically in modern Britain or indeed, modern anywhere. The Left can virtue signal to their hearts’ content - even with plenty of racism thrown in (cos racism is all right, so long as it’s against someone white) and pledge to spend loadsa money on their various pet projects, safe in the knowledge that someone else will foot the bill. But when political decisions are easy, they are rarely the right ones. Unquestionably, we have a very tough time ahead of us if we are to save our way of life as we know it. I am aware that I will potentially pay a considerable personal cost for seeking to play my part but I’m ready for the challenge and I want to get others on board with me. There’s a lot to be done!
