5 years ago today I made my maiden speech in the House of Commons, in a debate titled ‘The Cost of Public Transport’ – how appropriate given my currently role as Labour’s Shadow Transport Secretary.
A maiden speech is the first opportunity a new Member of Parliament gets to speak in the Chamber, traditionally Members pay tribute to their predecessors and talk about the place you have been elected to represent, they’re usually light-hearted and a chance for some lesser known stories from local history to be shared, which I tried to do with the story of Royton Town Hall’s very own gunpowder plot.
In mine I paid tribute to the late Michael Meacher, he was a dear friend of mine and to the people of Chadderton, Oldham and Royton, he served our town with distinction for 45 years and will be missed and remembered locally by many people for all work he did to try and make Oldham a better place and to help the people of our town.
I was then, just as I am today, grateful for the trust that the people of Oldham West and Royton placed in me as electing me as their representative in Parliament. The Borough of Oldham played a pivotal role in the history of our country, our town was after all the King of Cotton. At its height there were 17million cotton spindles spinning in our town, which was more than in the whole of the United States and 80% of the total number of spindles in the UK.
But the history of our town is not all sunshine and roses, the truth is that people were exploited in the making of our town; people came to Oldham for a better life, but sadly they struggled in poverty whilst a lot of the money they generated left our town and the slaves picking cotton in the American south faced unimaginable exploitation.
And sadly, today for too many in our town work does not pay and they are still struggling to make ends meet. The last ten years have seen living standards, a welfare state that supports people when they need it and decent homes and jobs have all been eroded.
The battles of the North-South divide I warned about in my maiden speech half-a-decade ago still ring true today, power must be moved away from Whitehall to empower communities, rather than simply moving power from central government to another layer of government. If devolution is to be a success in this country, we need to bring people with us in a co-operative manner.
Thank you to everyone I have encountered over the last five years as the Member of Parliament for Oldham West and Royton, whether we met on the doorstep, at a constituency surgery, in the street or in the supermarket, these little encounters stay with me more than you may realise and you sharing your lived experience of our town has helped me represent everybody in Parliament better.
Jim McMahon OBE MP 