Great British Energy Bill

Julie Minns Excerpts

2nd reading
Thursday 5th September 2024 Commons Chamber

[Ms Julie Minns (Carlisle) (Lab)]

Thank you for calling me, Madam Deputy Speaker. I also thank the hon. Member for Frome and East Somerset (Anna Sabine) for her maiden speech, made on what I understand is a very difficult afternoon for her. I am sure that everyone in the House would join me in sending condolences to her and to the family of her friend.

This has been a most entertaining and enjoyable debate. Any debate that marries ABBA, Stan Laurel and Shane Warne is one that I want very much to be part of, so I am delighted to have the opportunity to make my maiden speech in this context. It is also apt that I make it during a debate on Great British Energy. It is apt not just because the transition to clean energy and tackling climate change are critical to Carlisle—flooding has already decimated our city twice during this century, and local villages are too often cut off by localised flooding—and not just because we need to remove the obstacles that prevent Cumbria’s farmers from connecting their solar and wind farms, but because people right across Carlisle and north Cumbria tell me that they are desperate to see that cut in their energy bills.

It is also personally apt that I speak on this topic. My great-grandfather, a Conservative alderman and councillor for Carlisle, was a man of unusually progressive thinking. In 1909, he urged our city’s industries to set aside coal and instead harness the hydroelectric power of the three rivers on which our great border city stands. I like to think that, whatever our political differences, my great-grandfather and I would have agreed that Great British Energy is not just right, but essential for Carlisle, for Cumbria, and for our country.

I am the first Carlisle-born Member of Parliament since 1918, and the very first woman to represent England’s most northerly city. It is a city of many little-known facts. For example, in the 1830s, it was home to Britain’s first black police officer. In 1916, David Lloyd George nationalised all our city’s pubs and breweries, declaring that their intoxicating effect on munitions workers was doing more damage to the British war effort than the entirety of the German submarine fleet. In 1963, the Beatles were thrown out of Carlisle’s Crown & Mitre Hotel after a complaint from the local golf club that the young Liverpudlians were too casually dressed. My predecessor John Stevenson is himself a keen golfer, and I like to think that while he might be a stickler for the rules, he would have recognised the fledgling talent of the Fab Four, and would not have been so hasty in demanding their removal. I say this because John was a strong advocate for the potential of our young people, and played an important role in securing the new Pears medical school at the University of Cumbria, which will open its doors next year.

In over 2,000 years of city history, the University of Cumbria is a relative newcomer, and its creation is testimony to the work of the last Labour MP for Carlisle, Eric Martlew, who did so much to secure a university for our city. I look forward very much to the opening of the new medical school, and the contribution that it will make to our Government’s mission to rebuild our NHS and train the next generation—like my own daughter—of home-grown doctors, nurses and paramedics.

My constituency lies between the Lake district and Hadrian’s Wall. It is plentiful in sheep and cattle, and is populated by folk known for good craic and a love of XL crisps. For the uninitiated, let me explain that the XL crisp is a savoury, cheesy—no onion—delight, whose availability in the catering outlets of this House I shall passionately campaign for. I shall also campaign for more critical matters, such as the completion of our flood defences—defences that were promised but not delivered by the last Government—the rebuilding of NHS dentistry across north Cumbria, and the growth of Carlisle’s night-time and visitor economies.

Carlisle and north Cumbria already have much to offer visitors. I challenge Members to name another UK city than can boast not only citadels, city walls and a Norman castle, but a Victorian railway station, a cathedral, and original Turkish Baths. At this point I must declare an interest, as chair of the charity working towards the refurbishment and reopening of Carlisle’s historic Turkish baths. It is one of only 12 original baths still in working order in the UK, the only one left in the north-west of England and the only one with a tiled interior made by the company responsible for the exquisite tiles here at the Palace of Westminster.

We are also blessed with a rich industrial heritage. Over the years, Carlisle has been a hub of food manufacturing, with the sweet manufacturer Teasdale, famous for its liquorice Nipits; Cavaghan & Gray, which produces not just any ready meals, but M&S ready meals; and Carr’s biscuits, home of the Table Water and employer of generations of cracker packers.

I could not be prouder to represent the city where I was born and raised. I owe a debt to Robert Ferguson school and Trinity school for helping a working-class child from Denton Holme to become the first in her family to go to university. Without university, I would not have become involved in politics and would not have had the privilege of campaigning for John Smith, a great parliamentarian, to become leader of our party. Nor would I have realised the ambition of my distant cousin Ernest Lowthian, who was Labour’s first parliamentary candidate for Carlisle back in 1918.

In conclusion, I return to my great-grandfather. At the opening of one of the bridges that cross the rivers whose energy he sought to harness, he said:

“Our job as servants of our great border city is to leave it a little better than we found it.”

That, Madam Deputy Speaker, is the task that I have set myself.

[Several hon. Members rose—]