about Steve
Who am I?
My name is Stephen John Phillips, I was born in London in 1963 but spent most of my formative early years in Essex. I joined the Air Force when I was 18 for a brief spell as a General Duties Pilot, however I left to get married and then followed a career in IT after that. I am now in my silver wedding year married to Margaret and we have 3 sons Alex, Peter and Robert. We moved to Stevenage in 1986 after meeting at Southampton University. I am a Software Developer by trade and jointly ran a small Software House with a business partner for 5 years from Southgate House in Stevenage.
what makes me tick?
I am a born again evangelical Bible believing Christian, the real deal, and have been so since my Boys Brigade days in the 70’s. I currently attend the Allied Christian Worship Centre, one of the local Stevenage Churches and member of Churches Together in Stevenage (CTIS). This election, and my standing in it, is not about my religious beliefs, it is about a single, simple and straightforward policy that anyone can grasp hold of. However, my religious beliefs guide how I think, what I say, what I do and how I behave and I will hold true to those beliefs no matter what I get involved in.
what am I passionate about?
Apart from Motorcycles (I am a proud owner of a Yamaha R1 motorcycle), my passion is people and I am a profound believer in equal worth and value of all people, everyone has a role to play of equal value to everyone else. We need a balance of skills and aspirations in the country to make us function efficiently. We cannot have everyone going off to university because we need people in all walks of life. We need people in the trade jobs as well as the scientific jobs and everything we do, either with our hands or our heads needs to be seen with equal worth. Managers and workers are both vital functions but one should not be seen as more important than the other. It is right that managers should receive a higher remuneration to reward the extra responsibilities, accountabilities and risks that are undertaken but that does not make the function of management more important. When we can understand this and learn to co-operate rather than isolate then we will be able to achieve far greater things than any one person could do on their own.
an apology to all the other Steve’s of Stevenage
Steve of Stevenage huh? A pretentious title indeed, if ever there was one. Why do I have the audacity to give myself this accolade when there must be hundreds of people called Steve in Stevenage? It goes back a while but there were two main reasons and now there is a third. Firstly, when traveling around the country meeting people in my capacity as a consultant in IT, I used the title to help people remember me by. If I said Steve Phillips I was forgotten in 5 minutes but if I said “think of me as Steve of Stevenage” it somehow caught on. The second reason was to do with evangelising in Stevenage Town Centre. There was a case not far back when two evangelists were arrested by a Police Officer in Birmingham for what the Police Officer thought was offensive or hate speech. The evangelists were simply proclaiming the word of God. The case was soon dropped, however there was an under-current in that the two evangelists were Americans visiting a local Church and the word got around that “they were not from around here”. So I started using the “Steve of Stevenage” title to ensure that the same excuse could not be used here. The third reason is simple, unadulterated and blatant electioneering and the fact that I bought the domain names before anyone else thought of it.
