Voice for the Valleys, a changed man who’s seen life’s tough side
In his latest Martin Shipton Meets podcast, our chief reporter’s guest is Richard Taylor, the Brexit Party candidate for Blaenau Gwent, seen as the party’s most winnable seat in Wales...
AS a convicted thief who served custodial sentences as a teenager and then became a born-again Christian pastor who spoke in tongues, Richard Taylor is one of the most unusual General Election candidates in Wales.
Now a disciple of Nigel Farage, he is mounting a strong challenge to Labour in Blaenau Gwent, which had the highest percentage Leave vote in Wales in the 2016 referendum at 63%.
The author of an autobiography called To Catch A Thief, Mr Taylor spoke frankly about his life, at one time breaking down in tears during the podcast as he told how he had stepped down from the church he ran because of an affair.
He said: “I’m not your standard politician – I haven’t gone to Oxford, Cambridge or Eton. I’m from the streets, to put it mildly.
“I was brought up in a workingclass household. My dad was a heavy drinker, my mother was involved in drugs, so my life was very coloured by those things.
“As a result, I experimented at an early age with cannabis and within a few years became addicted to much harder drugs.
“To feed that drug addiction I committed crime, which to this day I’m regretful of.
“I was put into foster care too. At 10 years of age my mother dumped us in social services. She couldn’t cope with us and she left me and my three younger brothers. We were split up and living with people we didn’t know as our parents. It wasn’t the ideal upbringing, and as a result of that I ended up going off the rails with the wrong people, doing a lot of wrong things.
“As a young man I ended up in a young offenders’ institution because of it. Rightly so. I was in a bad place – a bit of a mess. It was what a lot of kids in the estate in Llanelli I lived on turned to because they didn’t have nothing [sic] else to turn to.”
Mr Taylor said there remained a widespread problem with drugs in Llanelli, as well as in other areas like the Valleys.
Asked what were the causes and what were the solutions, he said: “The lack of opportunity is a big one, poor education is another one. Whether it’s local investment, the right upbringing, having the right parents. There were kids going through difficult times who didn’t turn to drugs.
“The idea that we can stop the drug problem is just absurd, because I don’t think we can. There’s been talk about legalising certain drugs and taxing it. I’m not sure that’s the answer. I think that prevention is always better than cure.
“Education is important – I spent many parts of my early life, after I’d turned my life around, going into schools, speaking to children about the dangers of drugs, the culture you’re involved in. It’s not as glamorous as these gangsters you see on TV, with their gold chains and their big cars. We live in Wales. You see these guys who think they’re gangsters in Wales. They’re not gangsters.”
He said his drug addiction, which started at the age of 13, was about him “trying to suppress the pain of rejection”.
Asked how he had felt when he adopted an aggressive and intimidating attitude towards others, Mr Taylor said: “I didn’t feel anything. My emotions were non-existent. I think drugs take away any sense of responsibility or consequence or what you’re doing to hurt people. It makes you numb because you think the world owes you everything, and it owes you nothing really.”
When he was on remand for some serious offences, he was referred to a Christian organisation in Abertillery. He said he had a “spiritual encounter” which turned his life around.
He said that when he was in court, he felt that someone was putting their hand on his shoulder: “I turned round to see if anyone was there,” he said. “But there was nobody there.”
Later, Mr Taylor said Jesus had appeared to him and spoken to him.
“Some of your hearers may find this a bit strange, but this is my story,” he said.
“I was in the Bush Hotel in Abertillery [a Christian centre] and I closed my eyes out of respect for the Christians I was with – at that point I wasn’t a believer. I had a vision and I saw Jesus Christ on the cross, saying that he loved me and died for me, forgiving me my sins. No-one needed to tell me I was a sinner – I knew I was a sinner, a bad sinner. At that moment I fell on my knees and started to cry uncontrollably. And I felt this warmth over me.”
After becoming a born-again Christian, Mr Taylor studied theology and went to work in an evangelical church in the West Midlands where he developed his preaching skills and spoke in tongues. Later he founded a church with his wife in Cwmbran.
Asked why he no longer ran the church, he said: “I went through a moral failure with my wife. It’s painful for me still. It’s still raw for me and my wife. I committed adultery against my wife. I stepped down from the ministry because I was not in a very good place. It was a very dark period of my life. I became very suicidal – I thought I’d ruined everything. The people I thought loved and respected me turned on me as well.”
Now running his own business, Mr Taylor says his life has got back on track. He joined the Brexit Party after hearing Nigel Farage speak in Merthyr Tydfil, got involved in the Brecon & Radnorshire by-election campaign and was persuaded by Mark Reckless, who leads the Brexit Party group at the Senedd, to stand in the General Election.
He believes his life experience would enable him to be an MP who knows more about real life than most politicians.