This article is from the January issue of Total Politics
Communications were different in 1987. How were you told that Thatcher had gone?
I remember getting onto a train to Stoke-on-Trent, and there was somebody with a copy of the Evening Standard. There was some reference on the billboard, but there wasn’t any instant communication.
What was your reaction?
Thatcher totally destroyed my community. The miners’ strike, the bitterness, the havoc and the destruction that it brought was just unforgiveable. It’s going to take generations to recover. We’ve just started to recover, to some extent, and we’re back in a situation of huge cuts, an area that hadn’t recovered properly in the first place...
With Tony Blair as PM in 1997, how different was the culture of Parliament?
It was hugely different. There was a sense that ‘we can do things, and do things in a different way, and change things’. We had a whole load of new MPs, many of them women, who were all committed to trying to realign and recover from the huge poverty and deprivation. I look back now, and there are a lot of things that Labour didn’t do but, at the same time, every single primary school in my constituency was either completely refurbished or rebuilt.
Did Blair make Labour electable?
No. If we’d have had John Smith, we would have been in a totally different place. The Blair government had its trusted insiders who really weren’t in touch with the foot soldiers of the party at the grassroots – including some of their own MPs, like me. They never understood that you needed people who could deliver at the local level what we were legislating for at a national level.
Do you have any lingering frustrations, or a job you’d like to do?
I was a shadow environment spokeswoman and a shadow transport spokeswoman. At the time, it was a great disappointment. I never got a chance to put policies into practice in the Labour government.
Why?
I’m sure Blair has his own reasons for that. You quickly realise in this place that what matters is not what you say, but what you do, and I consistently tried to put into practice work on environmental pollution and environmental issues. Now, I’m thrilled that I’m chairing the environmental audit select committee of the House of Commons, and that I can speak up for what we need in my constituency. That’s the most important part. Sometimes you can get more done without having to toe a government line.
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