Progress: Tell us a little about yourself as a person.
Chinyelu Onwurah: I was born in Wallsend, my mother was a Geordie and I grew up in the constituency I’m now standing for, Newcastle Central. My father was a medical student from Nigeria and my mother was a Labour party member and activist. One of my earliest memories is watching my mother watching the trade union and Labour conferences on TV. So politics has always been a part of home life. As a young baby my father took us to live in Nigeria, just before the Biafran war, but my mother had to bring us back because of famine caused by the blockade.
We returned to Newcastle with nothing. We were housed by the council, in North Kenton. We were very poor but very privileged because we had great schools just down the road, we had good housing. And although my mother had cancer she never had to worry about treatment costs.
So from an early age I saw what a large difference strong public services can make to people’s lives, and my mother made us understand how lucky we were lucky to be living in a city and living at a time where having little need not be a barrier to achieving what you want to achieve.
I always wanted to be an engineer. I think that’s partially because in Newcastle we value building and making things. I went to Kenton School, the local comprehensive. My teachers had a strong sense of social justice as we call it now, and as a pupil I was supported in reaching my ‘dream,’ if that’s not too clichéd a word!
Then I studied electrical engineering at Imperial and I’ve worked as an engineer for the last 22 years in the UK, France, the US and Nigeria. That has been my way of making a difference because I believe science, technology and engineering can be forces both for progress in technical terms, but also in democratisation. Technology can help people to lead their lives more easily and it can also bring people together and support a more just political system.
P: What sort of things do you have in mind?
CO: If you take telecoms in Nigeria, I was working to build out the first mobile network. There is huge poverty there so many cannot afford phones, but instead can hire or rent to help them build their own businesses or know the market price of what they’re selling. This means they can avoid having to spend five hours of their day walking somewhere. Technology also helps people access information which can mean they can make better-informed choices. Of course technology can have a negative impact on people’s lives, especially when it is imposed from above or without respect for the local environment and community.
P: You mention your background as an engineer. What about diversity in terms of the professional backgrounds of those in parliament? Are there enough with engineering and science backgrounds?
CO: There aren’t enough people in parliament with science or engineering backgrounds, especially women. There’ll likely be no women engineers except me if I am lucky enough to get elected. If I am then it will be an important part of my role representing Newcastle, a city with a great engineering heritage devastated by Thatcher’s indifference to the traditional northern industries such as shipbuilding, mining and the steelworks. Now there is an opportunity for Newcastle to build a green industrial base: we’re close to one of the greatest sources of wind power in Europe, the North Sea, and we already have strong expertise. Take Narec, the New and Renewable Energy Centre, which is based in Blyth, near to Newcastle, for example.
Now the country as a whole has woken up to the fact that we can’t just be reliant on financial services as the sole basis for future growth, so the north east can help achieve this. This is an opportunity for Newcastle to come to the front, to help the country build a more diverse economic base. I was very pleased to hear the recent speeches from Peter Mandelson and Gordon Brown on the importance of science and engineering and renewables, and the concrete announcements supporting apprenticeships and access to broadband for poorer families Should they win, the Tories’ focus will be on supporting the financial sector.
P: To what extent is the responsibility on engineers and scientists to ensure they are represented in parliament?
CO: That’s an interesting question. I think there are two things. First is that there is responsibility on scientists and engineers to get involved and be better at translating what science and engineering means for daily life. Too often it’s often quoted as ‘scientists say we should do X,’ but we need to be able to say what the implication of a given development is, for daily life, otherwise we’ve failed.
There is also a need for political parties to have selection processes that are open, accessible and widely understood, to attract different type of people. I think Labour is doing most to meet those criteria: it has had more success than any other party and we should be proud of that as a party. I don’t think we generally spend enough time recognising what we have achieved and getting that across. In a representative democracy getting a representative group of people into parliament is what makes it work.
P: As a possible member of the class of 2010, how can parliament restore credibility to itself?
CO: One of the biggest challenges for the new parliament is to make politics and parliament synonymous with, and identified, with change for the better, with conviction politics rather than sleaze and self-interest. It is a real shame that the actions of some MPs have tarnished the whole system. Jim Cousins, Newcastle Central’s sitting MP, emerged from the expenses scandal completely unblemished, and there are many like him, but in the eyes of the public all politicians are affected. The way to do better is to focus on what people want. Parliament can often – and I am myself an outsider at the moment – it can often appear a village which isn’t demonstrably connected to the rest of the country. It’s a cliché but MPs should serve the people who sent them there.
And linked to that, the greater diversity you have, such as having more women, more engineers, more working people, the easier it is for everyone to see the connection to the real world. Politics has got to be seen as more of a partnership between those who vote and those who sit in parliament.
P: What would you say is the meaning of ‘progressive’ as in ‘progressive politics?
CO: For me it is a question of it doing what it says on the tin: it’s about making progress. The question is, of course, what are you progressing to? For me that’s also simple: there’s a broader consensus than what you might think, a consensus which centres on fairness, that what you achieve is thanks to hard work and your own abilities, not things you have no control over like your parents’ income or the postcode you were born in. People also want a society where the vulnerable are protected and there is a sense that we look out for each other. We don’t have this across the UK at the moment and for me it’s about moving towards these goals.
Economically it is about delivering jobs, but also about delivering better jobs. The gap between rich and poor is important, and we need a living wage as well as a minimum one. This is something important for Newcastle council’s Labour group which has just issued a call for a living wage commission in Newcastle, and I hope to be able to pursue this and related goals in the future.