Alastair Mellon, SDP Candidate for Coventry South

Alastair Mellon is the SDP prospective candidate for Coventry South.  We spoke with Alastair about his decision to stand.

“I joined the SDP recently after about a year of conversations with William Clouston who I admire for his reasonableness, perseverance and calm management style”

I grew up in Coventry South.  My father passed away in 1999 and my Mother continued to live in the City until she died last October and so I was in Coventry every other weekend for the last 25 years visiting her which helped me to maintain friendships with people I went to school with and with whom I have been friends for 50+ years.

I’m a chartered Civil Engineer, I run a Contractor-Developer and I’m an Investor in startups.  I’ve built railways, factories, skyscrapers, office blocks, thousands of apartments and houses as well as 12 refugee centres for 25,000 displaced people in Bosnia during the Civil War in 92/93.  I’ve built and invested in several successful companies including Europe’s largest online psychiatry business which treats 200,000 patients and employs more than 500 staff.

“a local campaign with our focus on bringing back highly skilled, high paying jobs to Coventry which are the bedrock of family formation”

I joined the SDP recently after about a year of conversations with William Clouston who I admire for his reasonableness, perseverance and calm management style.  Their message of Family, Industry & Nation resonates with my experience of what works in practice.

I am running a local campaign with our focus on bringing back highly skilled, high paying jobs to Coventry which are the bedrock of family formation.  Without high wages it is very difficult to support a family, buy a house, raise kids and take part in the civic life of the City.  The SDP regards family as the cornerstone of society and I agree completely with that sentiment.

When my family moved back to Coventry from Liverpool in 1969 it was a self confident town with better pay than almost anywhere else in the country.  When I left in 1982 to go and work in a car factory outside Paris, unemployment in Coventry was 19.2% and Ghost Town by the ‘Specials’ was synonymous with Coventry.  

“My aim is to create a ‘Can Do’ atmosphere in Coventry, to inspire, enthuse and convene the citizens, the council, local businesses and universities”

The City’s businesses were pummelled by high interest rates imposed by Mrs Thatcher with many, including Standard/Triumph right next to my old school, going bankrupt with 13,000 redundancies in one day.  I’d taken the No.1 bus home from school for 6 years with men who worked there all their lives who couldn’t conceive that they’d lost their jobs to an experiment in monetarism.

My aim is to create a ‘Can Do’ atmosphere in Coventry, to inspire, enthuse and convene the citizens, the council, local businesses and universities as well as utilities, VC’s, Private Equity, regional and national government and to harness them all to rebuild the high value add economy we had.

“We have all witnessed the exponential growth of cities around the world who act like start-up incubators be it Singapore, Shenzhen or Dubai”

I aim to generate a Tsunami of imaginative proposals, to trial new ideas, to experiment with new industries and to become the indispensable, flexible place that makes us impossible for the government, of any stripe, to ignore:

  • Want to trial autonomous cars in the UK? -> Go to Coventry.  
  • Want to establish a new paradigm for building cheap nuclear power stations that dispenses with the crippling costs imposed by ALARA? -> Go to Coventry.
  • Want to know how to construct economically Build to Rent (BTR) housing and sell it to UK pension funds that are seeking long term, asset-backed, inflation-proof investments with solid cash flows from rental income which track wages to match their pension liabilities?-> Go to Coventry.

We will overcome our lack of resources with resourcefulness.

We have all witnessed the exponential growth of cities around the world who act like start-up incubators be it Singapore, Shenzhen or Dubai who started with far less than Coventry already has.  Shenzhen was a fishing village of 3,000 souls, Dubai a strip of desert, Singapore a rejected Malaysian state plagued by race riots  – why can’t we put our City back at the top of the pile?

Our football club, The Sky Blues, have been through a desperate couple of decades but under the inspired leadership of Mark Robbins they are demonstrating that, ‘there are second acts in the life of our great City’.