Mostly Work and Politics
Ed Hall
sailor
A passionate and experienced offshore yacht racer, Ed completed his 7th Rolex Fastnet Race in August 2019.  He has raced boats in many different classes, from small sports boats to larger yachts in the UK, Caribbean and Mediterranean.  He is an RYA Yachtmaster and Advanced Powerboat skipper.

Ed is part of the Night Owl racing syndicate, and was 12th to the Rock in the 2015 Rolex Fastnet Race, 10th in IRC2 in the 2011 Fastnet, and overall winner of the JOG Offshore Series in 2009.  

Ed is also an active RNLI lifeboat crew member on the Thames Lifeboats where he has served since 2002.
Business
Activist
Ed has been leading digital television and retail businesses since 1998.  He has managed multiple TV channels in news, film, sports and entertainment.  He also built and sold a group of TV shopping channels in 2005, and has sat on the board of a wide range of television and retail companies.

He has led on complex business projects in Africa, Asia, Australia and New Zealand. He created the UK's first financial services televison channel, Simply Money (where Martin Lewis began as the Money Saving Expert), and he is often credited with creating the market in EPG positions on the Sky platform.

In 2011 he created Comux, a new company that beat the BBC to win the £25M contract to build the national broadcasting infrastructure for the new UK-wide local television network, reaching 13 million homes, a public sector project that was delivered on-time and on budget.

In 2017 Ed took on a role as interim CEO restructuring a national terrestrial broadcaster in Greece, returning in the autumn of 2018. 

To discuss new opportunities or for advice you can always get in touch with Ed through his office at Expert Media Partners.
Since the 2016 EU Referendum, Ed has been a strong campaigning voice for the outcome of the vote to be respected.  He resigned from the Conservative Party in August 2019, and has subsequently been selected as the Brexit Party candidate for the constituency of Dover.  He is the author of Brexit and the UK Television Industry (2017) and the Brexit Broadcasting Licensing Directory (2018).  

Ed has a background in political activism, and in 1994 he was the founder of the Armed Forces Legal Challenge Group, and he led the campaign to lift the ban on lesbians and gay men serving in the British Armed Forces.  His book, We Can't Even March Straight (Vintage), was published in 1995. He received several awards for this successful human rights campaign which succeeded in overturning government policy at the European Court of Human Rights in 1999.

Ed wrote and presented a range of programmes for BBC Radio 5 Live in the series Ed Hall Investigates winning a Sony Radio Award for News and Current Affairs in 1998.  The BBC News website carries details of his expose of a secret world trade in genetically-modified pigs click here.

Other radio programmes written and presented by Ed Hall include The First 100 Days (of the Blair Government) for BBC Radio, and Encyclopaedia Historica for the BBC World Service.  

In 1991 and 1992 Ed produced programmes for Channel 4 Dispatches and Thames Television on drug smuggling at Heathrow Airport and British mercenaries fighting in the former Yugoslavia.  

As a writer Ed's work has appeared in a very diverse range of publications including the Independent, The Times, the Sunday Times, the Guardian, and the Evening Standard.  He is a regular commentator on broadcasting, business and technology. 
Social Media and Contact
Ed uses Facebook most of the time to express views about current issues and to generate debate and discussion on current affairs and to explore ideas and policy possibilities.  He is also on Instagram @edhalluk.

He is also active and opinionated on Twitter and a search for @hall_ed will find him.  
sailor
businessman
writer
activist

Mostly Work and Politics

Standing up for Brexit in Dover

 by Ed Hall on 08/14/19

Just flicking through Brexit posts on here and seeing how sadly divided we have all become. As I read yet more Remainer posts and re-posts in which the underlying thesis is that intelligent, reasonable, grown-up people all voted to remain, and those of us who voted to leave are thick, racist, confused, were misled, and need the help (by any means possible) of the remain intelligentsia to save us from ourselves.

Then, in the subsequent comment threads, you all seem to agree with each other and tell yourselves how clever or wronged you are and how evil and stupid and self-harming we leavers are. On Twitter it’s even worse, with allegations of Nazism or Putinesque conspiracy accusations rampant.

Well, I thank you for your posts, but you already know I'm not in agreement with you.

Speaking for myself, I thought long and hard about how I was going to vote in 2016. You can still read my reasons for voting out at the time on the ‘Don’t Know’ page I created during the campaign, and the issues we are still talking about now were all widely discussed in detail then. We simply haven’t discovered major reasons or evidence to vote one way or another that weren’t available to us then.

The reasons I eventually decided to vote leave are as clear and simple now as they were then, but the bottom line is that we had a choice in 2016. There were perfectly good reasons to vote remain, and perfectly good reasons to vote leave, it was a choice, just as we have choices at every election. I have never had the temerity or arrogance to tell a remain voter they were wrong, and I never will, because it was their choice, with compelling arguments presented and argued on both sides. In a democracy we don't always agree with each other, but surely that's the point?

Since 1992 and the Maastricht Treaty, the proportion of the UK population that wanted a referendum grew at every single election. By 2014, when UKIP finally won the European elections outright, this was far, far more than an internal Tory squabble, and the arguments for leave appealed to lifelong left wingers Tony Benn and Jeremy Corbyn amongst others, even Nick Clegg once campaigned for a referendum.

In 2015, the Cameron-led Tory party that had promised a referendum in its manifesto won the election with a working majority, and when they introduced the referendum bill as they had said they would, 550 out of 650 MPs voted for it. The Liberal Democrats abstained, but even they did not vote against it.

In 2016, we finally held the in/out referendum that increasing millions of people had voted for, and which all the main party leaders had offered at some stage and then failed to deliver. Every household in the country was told *in writing* that the government would implement what they decided. To my mind, that is as binding as the relationship between government and voter can get.

In June 2016, with a numerical turnout of record-breaking scale, a clear majority voted to, and I quote, "leave the European Union."

By a large majority, 450 MPs voted to trigger Article 50, thereby ensuring that the UK would leave on 29 March 2019. That date was voted for by MPs.

In 2017, Theresa May called a general election in which c.85% of voters chose to support parties that said they would respect the result. Even Philip Hammond was elected to serve in a government that said it would leave on 29 March 2019.

Theresa May said in her own words to the country and parliament hundreds of times that we would leave on 29 March 2019, and parliament passed the EU Withdrawal Act that said we would leave on 29 March 2019.

And yet we didn't leave on 29 March 2019.

We can see clearly now that Theresa May oversaw one of the most inept and incompetent pieces of statecraft in modern political history, by-passing the relevant departments and running her own private diplomacy exercise in secret. She failed.

She failed in part because despite their comprehensive electoral promises, a majority of MPs repeatedly refused to either pass the flawed transitional deal, or propose any alternative.

The issue for me is only in part the fact that I voted to leave, it is also to a huge degree the profound anger and disappointment I feel in the House of Commons and the Conservative Party who have signally failed to do what they said they would do, what they were elected to do, and what they passed primary legislation to do.

To use a phrase we are going to hear a lot in the weeks to come, I have no confidence in this parliament, this Conservative Party, or a system that is able to shrug and slip and slide and set aside a decision that, for better or worse, was unambiguously given to the people for them to decide.

It's as though we had ignored the remain vote of the Scottish referendum and offered the SNP independence in defiance of the wishes of a majority of Scottish voters, or if we had adopted AV after the referendum result said that no we didn't want it. I hear strong arguments now about the blunt and unsophisticated nature of referendums, but I didn't hear them from the same people when Scotland voted to remain in the UK... these arguments are the exclusive preserve today of those who don't like the result.

This House of Commons and the Conservative Party have offered us a late Brexit, a fake Brexit or no Brexit at all.

And that's not good enough for me.

I know this will surprise some, annoy others, and upset some good friends too, but I have thought long and hard about how to respond to something about which I feel so strongly.

• Do I ignore it? 
• Do I just post about it here? 
• Or do I do what I have told countless other political commentators on social media to do? Get off social media and fight the argument in the real world.

I have accused too many people of trying to fix the world on Facebook or Twitter to do that myself.

So, after much soul-searching and a lot of thought, I have made a big decision, and am now able to announce that I will be the Brexit Party candidate in Dover, if we have a general election.

I'm very excited to be campaigning for something I believe in, and I look forward to getting to know the town and people of Dover much better over the coming weeks and months. It's a great constituency with the famous port and castle at its heart, but also with many smaller towns and villages that need a voice, and with all the usual challenges of health and education and infrastructure that we all face.

You will be able to follow my new political roller coaster on a political Ed Hall facebook page or my Twitter @hall_ed, if you wish to do so. 

Even if you don't agree with me, I hope that you will at least understand why I am doing what I'm doing, and just as I have done for friends standing for multiple diverse parties on left and right over the years, perhaps even wish me luck (even if you have to cross your fingers and hold your nose).

Thank you for engaging in the debate with me on social media over the last three years, I’ve enjoyed our sometimes heated, but mostly polite and thoughtful threads.


Ed xx

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