I am the very proud MP for Bury North, but I was born and brought up in Huddersfield. Before I got into politics, two things struck me as the first political questions. They might not seem to be political questions, but when we think about it, they are.
One is Bradley Mills cricket club, which was founded in 1875 in an industrial, disadvantaged part of Huddersfield. It went through two world wars, the great depression, the Boer war and everything the world could throw at it over 100 years. The local community saw it as a focal point and an identity; it was who they were, what they were and what they were about. It was a place where families went and people met, and it was central to that community. In the late 1990s, the local community gave up on it, and a huge green area—a field that had been used by children, families and people playing competitive sport—was lost forever. I could never understand why the community kept that club and what it represented to them going for that whole period of time, but in the 1990s something happened and it fell apart.
Like many of us, I spent my youth following my dad around. He played amateur football, and the best team in Huddersfield were called Brackenhall. They played football on Leeds Road playing fields, not very far away from Bradley Mills cricket club. That team were based in an area of disadvantage, but they were a team full of local people, a proud symbol of what Brackenhall was about. That meant something to people—looking back at the old photos, we cannot quantify that now, but it meant something. In the 2000s, that was lost. Why does this matter? It goes back to what my hon. Friend the Member for Newcastle-under-Lyme (Aaron Bell) was talking about: unless we have civic pride—unless we have some feeling for the area we are from—our areas are going to fail. We are not simply individuals, linked only by how close we live to each other or who we come into contact with. We have to have shared, collective experiences, and there must be symbols of those shared collective experiences that link us and bind us.
I could read out a very long list of what has come into Bury during my time as a Member of Parliament, but I just want to make the point that through the efforts of the Secretary of State for Levelling Up, Bury football club was resurrected at Gigg Lane. That is the 12th oldest sporting stadium in the world, but it had been left abandoned by bad management, bad regulation and the league, and was at real risk of being sold to developers. By providing £1 million, this Government saved that stadium, and it is now a facility that is run by the fans for the people of Bury and the local community. I will use those three examples to touch on what we should be talking about in this place.
We in this place are incredibly bad at talking in any terms other than monetary ones. We talk in monetary terms about everything, all the time. Clearly, that is incredibly important, but we do not often hear speeches like that of my hon. Friend the Member for Newcastle-under-Lyme, celebrating and lionising their community
and saying, “There is something else within this community that you can be proud of.” How do politicians take advantage of that? Some 5,500 people attended the first match at Bury—5,500 people in one place. There is no other facility in the metropolitan borough of Bury where 5,000 people can come together in one place. As politicians, we can say, “That’s just the way it is. That’s football; it’s a nice pastime.” Or we can say, as this Government did, “Let’s work in partnership. Let’s take those things that matter to people and look to invest in that stadium and that community.”
Gigg Lane proudly sits in an area with a wide variety of people from different backgrounds. How do we ensure that those 5,000 people have access to the best facilities, services, options and advice that they can get? We put them in the football stadium. We do not put them in a town centre or a long way away: we bring facilities and services in partnership to where people want to be, and where they are receptive.
In life, we all need a little bit of hope and inspiration when we get out of bed. When Bury football club disappeared from my town, a little bit of hope disappeared in a lot of people. With that club coming back, there is hope and a certain inspiration to want to play for town. That is important. What Brackenhall and Bradley Mills lost when they lost their community was very important, because nothing replaced it. At this moment in time, we are creating a society of individuals who are linked by money and talk to each other on social media. We no longer interact as local communities. Politics starts when you walk out of your front door—when you open that door and you nearly trip over that pavement that needs to be fixed. You see the pothole on the road that needs to be sorted out. You see the lamppost where the light is not working and the bus that is probably going to be late. All those things matter to people, and if you see those things around you, does that mean that your community is a proud community, one that is working at its best for each other? No, it does not. We need the symbols of civic pride.
Madam Deputy Speaker, you are from the great city of Doncaster; we are from nearly the same part of the world, the north of England. These are the great industrial centres of the north of England. When I say to people that I was born in Huddersfield, they often say, “You’re not born in Bury? How can you understand what it’s like to be from Bury?” Of course, you can. People in these industrial centres of the north were all linked by the same thing in their hearts—the same passion for where they were from. In the first world war, we saw the Accrington Pals and others like them going to war together, but we do not do things as a community any more, and we never talk about community in this place.
I would like to see an understanding of how investment in community, which my hon. Friend the Member for Newcastle-under-Lyme talked about, and investment in facilities and symbols of civic pride can impact the political process, and I would like to see that pushed up the political agenda. I am proud for many reasons to be an MP in this Government, but levelling up is a political idea of genius because it gives money to local people to invest in facilities and services that can benefit them. If services do not link people in to wanting to see their area improved, it is all a complete waste of time, but the Government have funded numerous projects that have
given a sense of identity, pride and passion back to the community we live in, which was ignored in the north of England for the 40 to 50 years before that.
We should invest more in sport, invest more in public health and invest more in our culture, and then we will have a better political system.
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