Tackling Poverty in the UK

Chris Skidmore Excerpts

Thursday 10th June 2010 Commons Chamber

[Chris Skidmore (Kingswood) (Con)]

Thank you, Madam Deputy Speaker, for allowing me to make my maiden speech. I congratulate you on your illustrious elevation and I am delighted to see a fellow Bristol MP in the Chair. I also congratulate the hon. Member for Makerfield (Yvonne Fovargue) on her maiden speech, and all the other hon. Members who have made their maiden speeches today. I have enjoyed listening to them all, and it has been heartening to hear the passion and conviction with which they have spoken about their constituencies.

For my own constituency, it is both an honour and a privilege to stand here as the new Member of Parliament for Kingswood. Located between Bristol and Bath, within the boundaries of South Gloucestershire, it includes the towns and villages of Kingswood itself, Hanham, Longwell Green, Barrs Court, Cadbury Heath, Emersons Green, Bitton, Willsbridge, Oldland Common and North Common, Siston, Warmley, Mangotsfield, Rodway and Soundwell, as well as a large part of the beautiful countryside that lies within our precious green belt. It is a great place to live, and as the new Member, I hope that I can play my part in making it an even better place to live and work. As a local man, who was born and grew up there and whose family have lived in Kingswood for generations, I am extremely proud to serve the local area that I call home.

Since the creation of the constituency in 1974, Kingswood has been fortunate to be served by some excellent Members whom many in the House will remember, including Terry Walker, Jack Aspinwall, Rob Hayward, and my immediate predecessor, Dr Roger Berry. They all have left behind a record of public service and civic duty that will be hard to emulate. Roger Berry is perhaps best known in the House for his tireless efforts to champion the rights of the disabled and most vulnerable in society, for which I pay him credit and hope to continue his hard work.

Like many of our neighbourhoods and towns, Kingswood has a rich tapestry of history. The town first came into prominence in the late 17th century through coal mining. Kingswood’s reputation was first founded on its people—the colliers who mined those deep seams underground. They were fiercely independent in spirit, and one contemporary wrote that

“the colliers were numerous and utterly uncultivated. They had no place of worship. Few ventured to walk even in their neighbourhood; and when provoked they were the terror of Bristol”.

It was into this lawless land that the preacher George Whitefield chose to venture. With no church nearby, Whitefield chose to preach beneath the open skies. On a clear night, if one looks out across the horizon of Kingswood, one can see the very spot he chose, Hanham Mount, for it is marked out by the green light of a beacon shining out from one of the highest parts of the constituency. Beneath it is a memorial—a grassy area with a large paved cross—beyond which a gorse-covered bank leads up to a stone platform with a wooden replica of a pulpit. It was here that Whitefield first preached on 17 February 1739. He was afflicted by a squint so severe that no one knew exactly where he was looking, and yet he began to draw vast outdoor crowds who never took their eyes off him. Benjamin Franklin, who later heard him preach many times in Pennsylvania, declared that he had a voice like an organ.

At first the local miners mocked Whitefield’s temerity, but his persistence paid off. The numbers attending his sermons grew steadily from a few hundred to nearly 20,000, and Whitefield himself noticed the effect that he began to have on them, not least from the white tracks appearing on their faces—black from coal dust—formed from the tears streaming down their faces. Shortly afterwards, Whitefield was called away for other duties. He sent for his friend, John Wesley, to fill the gap. Wesley later described his initial reluctance to participate in preaching outside, away from the sanctity of a church:

“I could scarce reconcile myself to this strange way of preaching. I should have thought the saving of souls a sin, if it had not been done in a church”.

Yet Wesley cast aside his hesitation and discovered his own revelation that there was no better place to reach out directly to the communities around.

We sit here now very much in our own place of worship, closeted away from the outside world. We talk between ourselves, quoting statistics and observing our customs, yet often, like Wesley, we seem hesitant to reach out into the local communities and neighbourhoods that matter and to understand the language that ordinary people speak. As a new Parliament, we have the opportunity to make ourselves relevant, to restore people’s faith in us and to create a new relationship with those who need our help—a relationship that looks outwards, rather than inwards.

Over the past few days, I have sat through many speeches, many of which have been excellent. That is testimony to the talent that many hon. Members bring to the House. However, I have been struck by how many hon. Members opposite have felt the need to blame the present problems facing our nation on the events of the 1980s. What we need is not a history lesson, however inaccurate. The past, whatever our respective views upon it, will not provide us with an answer. We need to look forward and to understand that now, in this the second decade of the 21st century, we still do not have all the answers and solutions needed to tackle the desperate poverty still afflicting many areas of our nation.

We will only begin to find these answers if we begin to seek to ask the right questions: how is it that, despite billions of pounds spent, in the past 13 years, the gap between the richest and the poorest has widened? How is it that, despite the state taking an ever interfering role in the lives of local neighbourhoods and communities, local people feel increasingly powerless over the decisions that matter in their own lives? And how is it that those men and women who once believed proudly in the value of work and the life-affirming capacity that it brings are being forced to stay at home and claim benefits for fear of losing the welfare on which they have become dependent?

It is clear that the state and its money are not always the best solution. Poverty cannot simply be measured in pounds and pence. Those in desperate need cannot be measured by a line on a graph. Each has their own problems and concerns that cannot be met unless we, in the tradition of Whitefield and Wesley, reach out beyond our confines and not just listen, but hear, what they have to say. I do not have an answer to the complex problems that I know the right hon. Member for Birkenhead (Mr Field) will attempt to tackle. I merely know that the direction of the previous Government has not worked.

On that note, it is perhaps best to recall the words of advice given by George Whitefield in one of his sermons:

“Press forward. Do not stop, do not linger in your journey, but strive for the mark set before you.”

Indeed we must press forward and not look back. The mark set before us might seem a difficult one, but it is one that, for the sake of all our constituents and this nation, we must now strive for.