Valedictory Debate

Barry Sheerman Excerpts

Friday 24th May 2024 Commons Chamber

[Mr Barry Sheerman (Huddersfield) (Lab/Co-op)]

It is a great privilege to be able to speak today as the longest-serving Labour Member of Parliament. I made my maiden speech on 3 July 1979, and here we are heading for a 4 July general election. I have been here a darn long time—nearly always on the Back Benches, although, in the mists of time, I sat on the Front Bench for 11 years under various Labour leaders.

I have had the privilege of doing a range of jobs in this House. I have been thinking back in order to give advice to Harpreet Uppal, who will be the Labour candidate in Huddersfield and would be coming to this place for the first time. I was thinking this morning what advice I would give new Members, and it echoes some of the things said by the former Prime Minister, the right hon. Member for Maidenhead (Mrs May), who has been a good friend of mine over the years. We can be friends across the political divide. She might remember that when she stood down as Prime Minister, I said, “Do not just disappear; stay on the Back Benches.” And she has done, because, as she had said, it is a wonderful thing to do.

I was so privileged to be elected in Huddersfield. I had had a hard time. The first seat I fought was Taunton, against Edward du Cann, and surprisingly I did not win—although I think I was the last Labour candidate to come second there. However, when I arrived in Parliament, I felt that I was representing the classic town—I cannot say the average town—of Britain.

I am an economist. I was at the London School of Economics with some very difficult people—one of whom is sitting right in front of me here. I learned to use the tools of the economist to assess the sort of job that I was going to do. The first thing that I did as a young Member of Parliament was to assess, as far as I could, the strengths and weaknesses of my constituency. Indeed, I raised some money to get Terence Conran to come to Huddersfield and assess the future of its once-vibrant manufacturing industry. We knew that there would be fewer manufacturing jobs, that the world was changing, and that, in order to maintain the high-quality, well-paid jobs that Huddersfield had had for 100 years, we had to have a diverse economy that did other things. One of the great things that his report said was, “Make sure that you expand that polytechnic into a university, because that is the future for the skills that this country needs.”

I had Sir John Major in my constituency recently, giving the Harold Wilson lecture. I reminded him that, thanks to him and Ken Clarke, another old friend of mine, Huddersfield transcended from having a polytechnic to having a university, which is absolutely crucial. I think all Members are aware of just how vital universities are in the towns and cities of our country. Indeed, the only partially political thing I will say today is that we urgently need to address the threat to the long-term stability of the higher education sector in our country. When I chaired the Select Committee on Education and Skills, we produced a very good report on the challenges for higher education worldwide. It became clear that we have to invest in the future of our universities and ensure that they have the diverse income streams they need be viable. We are at a critical point. It is now for all parties to assess that and do something radical about it, because it is so important.

I want to refer also to the role of a Member of Parliament in Parliament. Let us get the message out more, as the former Prime Minister did, about what a wonderful job this is. I am well known on these Benches as a bit of a troublemaker—the Speaker and Deputy Speakers sometimes have a really interesting expression on their faces when they are not quite sure what I am going to say on a particular topic. After my 10 years as a Select Committee Chair, I decided that I would just do Parliament—that I would be here, raise the issues and campaign. Much of the success that I have achieved has come not from just doing the party political job.

The House might not know that, as a young university teacher, I was involved in a head-on crash as I was coming back from our second daughter’s baptism, when someone on wrong side of the road drove into our family car. I thought at one stage that my wife was dead, but she actually was unconscious, and we all survived—the children, myself and my wife. When I got into this House, I was determined to make sure that wearing a seat belt would become the law of the land. It had been defeated 13 times, but we worked together on an all-party basis. My only successful private Member’s Bill was one that banned children from being carried in the front seat of a car without a restraint. Ken Clarke more or less helped me with that, although I think only on the basis that I would stop pushing for mandatory seatbelts.

It was a difficult job. As many people know, back in the day, Margaret Thatcher was against it and Michael Foot was against it, and the Whips would try to stop it happening. We had to bounce the legislation out of the House of Lords at a critical time, the night before the royal wedding of Charles and Diana. Because of the public holiday, a lot of people thought, “What a lovely weekend. We’ll get away on Thursday and we won’t have to come back till Tuesday,” so we hid our all-party troops all over the House, and when the Lords amendment came back down here, we managed to get seatbelts.

A wonderful friend of mine in the World Health Organisation said the nicest thing that anyone has ever said about me, at a conference three years ago, just before covid: “Barry Sherman, with his obsessive interest in transport safety, has probably saved more lives worldwide than any other politician on the planet.” That is rather nice—I do not believe it, but it is nice that it was said.

There was a time where people said that all-party groups were dangerous or disreputable. Some of the best things that I have done in this House have been on a cross-party basis: campaigning on the environment, campaigning for educational change and campaigning for clean water—all the things that we are passionate about. I spent my life as a social entrepreneur looking for people who want to do a little conspiracy—not 36 barrels of gunpowder in the basement but a conspiracy to do something that needs doing. The only criteria I used, and still use, were to attract people with experience, knowledge, passion and courage. We can do that on an all-party basis, and we have. I hope more of that will happen in future, because it is essential to this House that we identify what needs to be done and use those sorts of little plots and plans to make things happen.

We also need to involve people from outside—I am looking at the Chairman of the Justice Committee, the hon. and learned Member for Bromley and Chislehurst (Sir Robert Neill) when I say that, because when we started looking at miscarriages of justice, we found there was a whole world of senior King’s counsel, probation workers and others who wanted to work with us to do something about the real inadequacies of the justice system. The hon. and learned Gentleman and I have become friends over the years, campaigning on a number of things in the justice sector.

By representing a constituency, we learn so much about its problems. If we are doing our job, year in and year out, we learn about child poverty, unemployment and employment. We learn what is happening in the economy. By looking at our constituency, we can see what the need will be not just tomorrow and the next day but over the next five or 10 years.

I sometimes get irritable, and I do not want to criticise too many people who are or have been Members of this House, but people waft in here and have a go at being a Minister or shadow Minister. They think, “I have done that,” and off they go to do something else. I do not believe that is the right spirit. Being a parliamentarian is a sacred trust. Once a person is elected, they have a sacred trust and responsibility to the people who live in their constituency, and they should make them their priority. Members should not try to become famous or try to find a nice little niche somewhere. Their primary responsibility is to their constituency and its future welfare. I am sure that Harpreet Uppal, who will very likely replace me on 4 July, will carry that standard.

I will now say something about the bigger issues. Like my fellow Members who attended the London School of Economics, I have always sought “to know the causes of things”, which is the LSE’s motto. Why is this happening? What has changed socioeconomically?

I have been in the House when really good things have happened and when absolutely disastrous things have happened. I am a totally committed European, but I have not always been. When I was a very young candidate for a council in south Wales, somebody asked me to speak to the local women’s Labour party because the local Labour MP was much too enthusiastic about Europe, and I spoke against Europe. And then I grew up. I saw the huge benefits of being linked with Europe, both for our common defence and for the future of our economy.

My constituency has a high level of exports in top-quality fashion, womenswear and menswear, and top-quality engineering. Everything top quality in Huddersfield depends on the export market, and we have had some very severe cutbacks since we left the European Union. Huddersfield is like everywhere else. Two of the Kirklees constituencies just voted to remain, and two constituencies just voted to leave—the picture was very mixed.

I finish by saying that not only should we all be looking to our constituencies, listening to the voices of our constituents and campaigning, but we should not get too depressed about life. Many Conservative MPs are desperately envious of me, because I was taught at the London School of Economics by Michael Oakeshott, who some people regard as one of the greatest conservative philosophers. I did not only his history of ideas course, but his special subject: for two years, a group of eight of us studied Machiavelli—what a privilege. Because I was interested in the history of ideas, I used to lecture on the subject, and I was always absolutely struck by the work of Thomas Malthus, who was the rector at Bath. He wrote the theory of population, which held that so many people were breeding so quickly that the country would not be able to feed its people, suggesting that it was the end of the civilised world. As I lecture on Malthus, I think about the present concern with global warming and climate change, which is the existential challenge that we all face.

I want to end on this note: I am an optimist. Malthus was wrong, because he underestimated how clever human beings are. We revolutionised agricultural production with the crop rotation system. We developed fertilisers. We invented not only canals, but railways. We transported goods and people. We changed the whole basis of the Malthusian project. Today, there is the existential challenge of climate change and global warming—it is going to happen. I recently helped to launch “Here Comes the Sun”, a book on this issue by Professor Steve Jones, and the fact of the matter is that that challenge is coming, but we humans are clever. Through our universities, businesses and Members of Parliament, we will get the answers so that our planet does not start to fry and life does not end. That is my message today.

It has been a privilege and an honour to be here. I have wonderful staff in Yorkshire and wonderful staff here. I have given hundreds of young people the chance to get into politics through all the internship programmes that we have had with the LSE, Cornell University and so on. Thank goodness that I have had the chance to be here all these years. Thank you, Madam Deputy Speaker; thank you, fellow parliamentarians. I love you all.