The Commons is not a student debating society but should reflect the reality of people's lives. I therefore aim to ensure that there is no misunderstanding of our past and prospects in the North East.
I contributed last week to a Commons debate on unemployment to say it wasn't a theoretical issue because our people have lived through it.
My own grandfather was sacked in 1926 for having the temerity to go on strike. He was blacklisted and died in poverty. My father was forced down the mines in 1935 as a 14 - year - old when, he has told me, they were treated like slaves. People did not march from Jarrow to London for the fun of it. They did it because the private sector let them down.
In the 1930s, a miner was killed in the mines every six hours, not through too much red tape, but because of failure to invest.
So at the end of world war two, the people threw that Government out. The new government built a million houses, created the NHS and nationalised the major utilities and the railways. Come 1959, the Tory Prime Minister said that this country had never had it so good thanks. With Mrs Thatcher, we ended up huge dole queues and closed mines, shipyards and steelworks. People struggled and saw communities going down the drain. People were burgled by their neighbours' children and saw drugs in villages where there had been nothing but hard work for two centuries. We saw houses falling down that people had kept going for a hundred years.
The highest unemployment rate in the past 13 years where I used to live has been 7.8%, which is far too high. In 1986, in the week that the mine I worked in was closed and 721 miners were thrown on the dole, the rate was 18.6% - before the pit was closed. Labour took action and used public money to put right some of those wrongs with, for example, the national minimum wage, rights for people at work, new schools and hospitals as well as regional development agencies to help regenerate run - down areas. Now we are facing savage cuts. Some say we have no choice. The truth is we could choose to cut our deficit, for instance, by making the banks pay much more and attacking tax avoidance and evasion and not just slashing jobs and services. If we don't learn from the mistakes of history, we end up repeating them.
Newcastle Chronicle and Journal
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