Sport: Team GB and ParalympicsGB

Steve Yemm Excerpts

Thursday 10th October 2024 Commons Chamber

[Steve Yemm (Mansfield) (Lab)]

Thank you, Madam Deputy Speaker. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Mid Cheshire (Andrew Cooper) on his inspiring speech; I feel that I know his constituency a little better now. I commend all those who have delivered their maiden speeches today and in recent weeks.

It is a huge honour to stand before Members today as the newly elected Member of Parliament for Mansfield, which is the place of my birth. It is truly an honour for me to make my maiden speech in a debate on sport and ParalympicsGB. I am proud to have been elected with this new Labour Government—a Government committed to opportunity for all.

I pay tribute to my immediate predecessor, Ben Bradley, who was the Member of Parliament for Mansfield for seven years. I have always found Councillor Bradley to be extremely cordial and hard-working. He was both my MP and my local councillor, and I must pay tribute to his work ethic and dedication. I also pay tribute to the service of a further three predecessors, all of whom I have known personally. First, Sir Alan Meale, who was the Member of Parliament for Mansfield for 30 years, won six general elections and served from 1987 to 2017. Secondly, Don Concannon was the MP between 1966 and 1987, and introduced me and my wonderful wife Julia to the Labour party in Mansfield as teenagers.

Finally, Bernard Taylor—Lord Taylor—was the MP for Mansfield from 1941 to 1966, and was made a life peer in 1966. I enjoyed many a cup of tea and conversation in the other place with him. Lord Taylor served the people of Mansfield in one distinguished capacity or another for 50 years. Like me, Bernard was from a Mansfield mining family. He was a trade unionist who was locked out of Sherwood pit after the 1926 strike, and a committed Bevanite. What better role model could a new MP for Mansfield have than Bernard Taylor?

I am the first MP for Mansfield to be born in the constituency and elected as a new Member since Bernard Taylor in 1941, and indeed my family has a great deal in common with Bernard. In 1926, my grandfather was locked out of the Cwmtillery colliery, in the south Wales coalfield, and had to walk for 10 days from south Wales to Nottinghamshire with his wife and young son in search of work, settling first in Kirkby-in-Ashfield and then in Blidworth. He worked with his three sons, including my father, as coalface workers at the Blidworth colliery.

I was born in Rainworth, a pit village to the east of Mansfield, and attended the local village school, Heathlands primary. I launched my election campaign in June by giving a TV interview at the school gates. During the election campaign, I knocked on the door of the house where I was born, in Southwell Road East, Rainworth, and also the house where my mother was born, on Burns Street in central Mansfield. I am pleased to tell the House that they were both Labour households. I am so proud of the positive campaign that we ran in Mansfield; we completely and unashamedly focused on the need for opportunity and real change. I put on the record my thanks to the many people who helped over many years to get me here.

I bring to Parliament 30 years of international private sector business experience as a senior commercial leader and general manager in life sciences and technology, including as a chief executive officer of a US corporation and managing director of an Israel-based technology company. For the past five years, this has been with a focus on the application of machine learning and artificial intelligence to life sciences, drug discovery and genomics. I began my career as a medicinal chemist in the pharmaceutical industry, which I joined after leaving the Brunts school in Mansfield.

Mansfield has always been my family home. I grew up there at a time when the local economy was dominated by coalmining, engineering and textiles. Now it is home to successful and modern international businesses, including Linney, Power Saving Solutions, and Integrated Doorset Solutions, to name just a few.

Mansfield is a compact constituency with diverse neighbourhoods such as Mansfield Woodhouse, Forest Town, Rainworth, Ladybrook, Oak Tree and Warsop, and they are all special and unique. Our football club, Mansfield Town, is based in the oldest ground in the football league, dating right back to 1861. Given the topic of this debate, I congratulate and pay tribute to Charlotte Henshaw, a local Paralympian and gold medallist in both swimming and canoeing, and to Sam and Ollie Hynd, medal-winning Paralympian swimmers—all good friends hailing from Mansfield, and local heroes for all of us.

Our local hospital, King’s Mill, is where my wife Julia is employed as a consultant radiographer, and where all our children and grandchildren were born. Julia has worked in the NHS for over 37 years. My priorities in this place will of course be aligned with my background in science and technology, but, more importantly, they will always be informed by my own journey—from a pit village to becoming a scientist and business leader, and then to Westminster—and will focus on ensuring that every boy and girl in my constituency and our country knows that they have a life of great opportunity within their grasp.

I am proud to be here representing such a fantastic constituency. As Betty Boothroyd, a former Speaker of this House, said:

“It’s like miners’ coal dust underneath your fingernails. Very difficult to scrub out. I’m a social democrat to my fingertips.”

This is, for me, truly the opportunity of a lifetime, so once again I say, “Thank you so much” to the people of Mansfield for putting their faith in me. I will not let them down.

[Several hon. Members rose—]