VAT: Independent Schools

Antonia Bance Excerpts

Tuesday 8th October 2024 Commons Chamber

[Antonia Bance (Tipton and Wednesbury) (Lab)]

Thank you, Madam Deputy Speaker. I am honoured to speak for the first time in this House as the Member of Parliament for Tipton, Wednesbury and Coseley. I represent the village of Coseley in Dudley, as well as the towns of Tipton, Wednesbury and Hateley Heath in Sandwell. In the last Parliament, Shaun Bailey was a tireless advocate for this special corner of the Black Country, and I wish him well as he resumes his legal studies.

Let me tell you about Tipton, Wednesbury and Coseley. We are an industrial constituency, shaped by factories, foundries, mines and canals. We have beautiful parks, laid out for the leisure of working people, and civic buildings of grace and gravitas, such as the grade II listed Tipton central library and the 16th-century St Bart’s in Wednesbury. But more than anything, we have the people of the Black Country—creative, ingenious, hard-working and down to earth people like Thomas Barratt. Born in Coseley, he stopped the enemy advance and saved his patrol at Ypres. He was a boilermaker, awarded the Victoria Cross posthumously at just 22.

The workers of Tube Town, the metal finishing capital of the world, went out on strike for two long months in 1913 for a decent wage. They were backed all the way by their wives, heroes in their own right, who somehow kept 25,000 families fed amid near destitution. They won. I am proud to say that their union became my union, Unite. Workers have come to the constituency from Ireland, the Caribbean, Bangladesh, Kashmir and Punjab; they left their homes to provide for their families, facing racism but prevailing, building churches, temples, mosques and gurdwaras, and seeing their children succeed. We are a proud, working-class community. Too often, people have stood in this place and talked our area down. I will never.

Of course, the name “Black Country” is for the smoke of heavy industry; there has been coalmining, steel fabrication, metal finishing, and nail, brick and chain making. We are where the industrial revolution started. James Watt’s first steam engine hauled coal in Tipton, at the Bloomfield colliery. Today, despite everything, a quarter of all workers in our area are still in manufacturing. We may be the Black Country, but modern manufacturing is clean, high-skill and high-wage. In Sandwell, 1,000 firms —with 21,000 jobs—make everything, from street furniture to hinges to locks to the precision metal forming for aeroplanes and power plants. I am proud to wear the “Made in Britain” badge, and to back our new deal for working people.

If we are to have a new industrial revolution here in the UK as we meet the challenge of climate change, let us make it with our hands and our brains, in the place that was the crucible of the first industrial revolution, the Black Country. I stand for no more and no less than this: prosperity for every family. My friends at the TUC worked out that if wages had risen in the last decade by the amount by which they rose between 1997 and 2010, the average worker in my constituency would be £93 a week better off. That is nearly five grand a year more in people’s pockets. In the Black Country, we work hard, but forces bigger than any individual—deindustrialisation, Thatcherism, and the cruel austerity of these last 14 years —mean that good folk there earn less and have fewer chances and fewer choices than people elsewhere.

Fully half of our kids grow up below the poverty line, in infested B&Bs, in homes with damp dripping down the walls, or in flats made for two, but home to three times that. For many, most weeks, the money stretches, just about—until the week when it does not. I want to turn the thoughts of those in this House to the young people in my constituency, almost none of whom go to fee-paying schools. Four in 10 kids in my constituency did not get grade 4 GCSE in maths and English last year. That has to change, and we will change it.

As I stand here today, the obstacles to delivering prosperity, and more than that—comfort, security, leisure—to every worker and every family seem almost insurmountable, but we take heart from our history: from Ernie Bevin, who forged the working-class women and men of the UK into an industrial machine that, from a standing start, equipped our country for victory. In my area, those in saucepan factories made grenades, and car makers built the machines to defeat fascism. That is a reminder that once we turn our minds to something, the ingenuity and drive of the British working class can rarely be equalled. It is for us, here, to set it free.

I will always stand against decline and for progress. After all, I grew up in a world where people like me could not get married, but now our beloved daughter has both her mothers’ names on her birth certificate. To believe in progress is to believe that once again this country can work for working people. It is time, Madam Deputy Speaker, so my final words are to the people of our towns. Tipton, Coseley, Wednesbury, Hateley Heath: I am here to serve you always.