Code of Conduct and Modernisation Committee

Jack Abbott Excerpts

Thursday 25th July 2024 Commons Chamber

[Jack Abbott (Ipswich) (Lab/Co-op)]

Thank you, Madam Deputy Speaker, for calling me to speak. Let me say congratulations and welcome to your place.

I have been moved and inspired by so many contributions over the past few days, and it is an immense privilege to be making the first maiden speech of today. I also offer my best wishes to the hon. Member for Central Suffolk and North Ipswich (Patrick Spencer), who will also be making his maiden speech today. Not only is he my neighbour, but he is representing a place that is really close to my heart.

I am incredibly proud to be making my maiden speech as the new Member of Parliament for Ipswich. However, this is not my first contribution in this House. Yesterday, I asked a question at PMQs, highlighting the huge potential that Ipswich possesses but saying that, after 14 years of neglect, we desperately needed Government support to help revive our town centre.

However, corners of social media instead focused on a very gentle joke I had made, when I pointed out that my home county of Suffolk once again had a premier league football team, unlike our friends north of the border in Norfolk. One keyboard warrior in particular took umbrage at that. His name is Ed Balls, and apparently he used to work here. He said that Norwich has had a 15-year unbeaten run in the Old Farm derby—a run that will now, sadly, be extended due to Ipswich being promoted to the premier league and Norwich getting knocked out in the play-offs last season. I am sure that that will be a bitter pill for Town fans to swallow as they visit Anfield, the Tottenham Hotspur stadium, the Etihad and Old Trafford next season. Ed’s tweet also represented my most significant celebrity beef on social media since Steve Brookstein—yes, the first winner of “The X Factor” nearly a decade ago.

Ipswich has a rich and long history—so rich and long, in fact, that I am going to use this as an opportunity to settle an old score. Now that Colchester has vacated its town status, I am laying claim to Ipswich being the oldest continuous town in England. No, I have not checked that with the House of Commons Library, as I might have been given an answer that I did not want to hear, but two minutes of searching online tells me that I have a decent chance of being right—and I presume that, as I am now stating it as fact in Parliament, it now becomes true.

Thomas Wolsey is arguably Ipswich’s most famous son, and we in Ipswich have been celebrating his legacy throughout the past year through the Wolsey 550. Wolsey does not always get the praise he deserves. Climbing the greasy pole will not win you many friends—something to which Members of this House will attest, I am sure. However, his story, rising from humble beginnings to becoming one of the most powerful statesmen in England, was remarkable, and he left his imprint on our town too.

Ipswich can also lay claim to Ralph Fiennes, Constance Andrews, Thomas Gainsborough, Jean Ingelow, Brian Eno, Edith Cook and even Richard Ayoade, to name but a few. My job over the coming years will be ensuring that kids growing up in Ipswich today get their chance to make their dreams a reality, so that when my successor comes to make their maiden speech, they have a few more names to mention too.

I would also like to mention my predecessor, Tom Hunt. While an MP, Tom often spoke about being neurodiverse, and was open about challenges that he faced growing up. He looked to tackle some of the stigma that still exists, and that is an incredibly powerful thing for a Member of Parliament to do. On election night, Tom charitably mentioned our shared commitment to improving the lives of children with special educational needs and disabilities, an issue that I have campaigned on for many years in Suffolk. I will now use my role to fight for those families here in Westminster.

The SEND crisis is a national issue, and I know many colleagues from across the House will have heard countless stories about the struggles that families have had to endure to access the services that should be theirs. In Suffolk, we have had a decade of the most grotesque and repeated failures. I remember five years ago, after another damning report, the front page of our local paper, the East Anglian Daily Times, showed the faces of just some of the children and families who had been so badly failed by a broken system, with the heartbreaking, desperate headline, “We must be heard”.

As ITV’s report shows today, so little has changed half a decade later. Those children and their families have still not been heard. This is not just about the educational impacts on children, immense though they may be. It is also about the exhaustion, desperation and isolation that families suffer, day in, day out; the months—years, even—battling for an education, health and care plan; the time spent waiting by the phone, or checking emails, hoping that they might finally get some positive news; and the energy they have to find just to try to navigate this broken system, fight through tribunals, and submit mountains upon mountains of new documentation and information, all while trying to care for their family.

As a Labour Government, we cannot let the suffering of vulnerable children and their families continue. It will be my personal mission in this place to fight this inequality and injustice. If I can make one final plea on this issue, as a former teaching assistant and proud GMB MP, I urge that when we talk about the crisis in retention and recruitment of teachers, we include specialist and support staff in the conversation. They are crucial to breaking down barriers to opportunity, too.

I would like to touch on another subject that is incredibly important to me: the energy transition. This is not just an environmental necessity but an economic imperative. It can boost our economy, reduce bills, ensure greater security and deliver the well paid jobs that we need. With GB Energy, we will be able to achieve that. If Britain is to become a world leader in this area, as the Labour party has pledged, I want Ipswich and Suffolk to be right at the heart of this national renewal. Why should we not be? Over the coming years, thousands of jobs will be created in new nuclear at Sizewell, in offshore wind and in solar. I am unapologetically ambitious for our town and our county. I do not want those jobs and that investment to drift away elsewhere. I want kids growing up in Ipswich, or people looking to retrain and upskill, to get those secure, well paid jobs. I want local businesses to benefit from the billions of pounds that will flow out of these projects, and I want our area to be the centre of national excellence. That is our future, if we are brave enough to grasp it.

As a Labour and Co-operative Member of Parliament, it is particularly welcome to me that our commitment to community energy sits at the very heart of this mission. The greatest-ever expansion of community energy projects, delivering a million new owners of energy, will be genuinely transformational, and as a proud Co-operative party MP, I will champion the growth of such projects, so that local people will benefit from our green transition too.

Many of us are just a few weeks into our new role, and as this debate is about second jobs, I will be honest in my contribution and say that I have no idea why or how any Member of Parliament would have a second job. We all know what I am talking about. To be the Member of Parliament for Ipswich is the greatest privilege of my life, but to be frank, it is not like any other job. I think about Ipswich, and its beautiful, award-winning parks; its waterfront looking absolutely glorious on a sunny day; the music festivals that we have now, which I would have loved to have been to as a teenager—I am only slightly older now than I was then—and the fact that our town once again has a premier league football club. I might have mentioned that already.

I think about Suffolk too, the place I moved to 25 years ago. I still hang out with my friends from Debenham high school. I still play for the same cricket club, the mighty Eye and District cricket club—my batting just as terrible, and my bowling just as slow, if not slower. I still want to walk around Fram castle, and along the beaches of Southwold, Aldeburgh and Dunwich. I still pop into Coes, a family business founded nearly 100 years ago, and I love nothing better than eating at the Lighthouse restaurant, or drinking an Adnams or an Aspall in the Woolpack or the Greyhound. I am still surrounded by my friends here, my family and my neighbours, not to mention a million happy memories, having been shaped and inspired by them for nearly a quarter of a century. I have no doubt that I will make some mistakes along the way, and I know that there will be some times when my constituents disagree with me, but know that everything that I do here will be out of service, friendship and love for my home, Ipswich and Suffolk.