I couldn’t believe it when we won Hastings & Rye in 1997. ‘Hastings? Hastings?’ I kept saying to myself. ‘And Rye? It’s full of tea shops, isn’t it?’ Well, they must have been Labour-voting tea-shops, because we still hold it, 11 years later. Must be the MP.
However, it’s not going to be easy to hold Hastings at the next election. Nor Battersea, come to that. At least Battersea has a long history as a Labour seat, but it also has 5,000 new luxury riverside flats, so it’s not going to be easy defending a majority of 163 votes.
We have a strategy, which I shan’t reveal in print, but it involves a lot of campaigns, huge numbers of newsletters landing regularly on people’s doormats and a gargantuan printing machine which we call ‘The Beast’.
But I also have a long list of promises that we need from the government before the next election, including the building of a new health centre, the rebuilding of two secondary schools and a new rail link to put Clapham Junction on the tube.
I should also like to see the government give hardworking people, bringing up their children on limited incomes, more solid reasons for sticking with Labour. Areas it must address include:
Parenthood. We need to support parents with much longer and much higher statutory maternity pay and more after-school care so that bringing up children becomes less of a juggling act.
Communication. We need to tell people what the government is doing in their area by giving a hallmark to all government-funded projects, and by distributing quarterly Central Office of Information newsletters to every household
Children. We must give sons and daughters of existing social housing tenants a better chance of rehousing to ensure families and communities can stay together and to stop the social polarisation of our inner cities.
Policing. Safer neighbourhood teams have been a success in London but we need attached youth workers with every team so that they can offer young people a positive alternative to standing on street corners.
Public sector reform. I’m in favour of opening up public services to an element of voluntary or private provision to try out new ways of doing things, but we must say what the limits of contestability are. Public sector workers feel threatened by the open-ended involvement of the private sector.
Immigration. Unemployment levels are already high among some ethnic minority groups and we should stop issuing work permits in skill areas which can be filled by recruitment and training from among the existing population.
Air transport. We need to stop expanding Heathrow even if it means coming to terms with a new airport on the Thames. We can’t just make people’s lives a misery by subjecting them to endless aircraft noise.
And there’s one more thing we really need to do if we’re going to hold our marginal seats. We need to close the ‘Ashcroft loophole’ which allows Tory candidates to spend unlimited amounts before the election has even been called.
This used to be illegal. Spending limits kicked in as soon as someone declared them self a candidate. We accidentally opened up the loophole in our Political Parties Act 2000. We need a quick bill to close it. If we don’t, rich Tory candidates will quite simply buy their seats by sending out a steady stream of newsletters claiming credit for everything this Labour government is doing.
You don’t believe me? They’re already doing it.