A trip to the tea room, and a new committee job

By Lisa Nandy MP

One of the many pieces of advice I’ve been given over the last few weeks is to learn how to catch the Speaker’s eye. I spent Monday bobbing up and down at education questions hoping to do just that so I could draw attention to the casual and thoughtless axing of the Future Jobs Fund, which will devastate many young people’s lives in my constituency of Wigan.

It’s becoming clear though that the Future Jobs Fund is just the tip of the iceberg. The cuts announced this week are nothing to do with repaying the deficit and protecting the economy; if this was the motivation then schemes like the Future Jobs Fund and the vital economic engines that are the Regional Development Agencies would be safe. Look beneath the service and – just as in the 1980s – the raft of announcements are simply a breathtaking and scandalous transfer of resources from poor to rich.

I heard the lunacy of the coalition’s strategy articulated best at Saturday’s Compass Conference when I had the daunting task of following Jon Trickett MP, Ken Livingstone and the brilliant economist Michael Burke at Tribune’s fringe event: investment not cuts. Michael is the clearest exponent of why the cuts are not simply immoral, but economic madness. Up until now I felt we were losing the argument, in the PLP and in the country. After listening to Michael I feel sure we can win.

But as a new MP I’m still learning the ropes and so I took myself off to the tea room this week to get some advice from the older members about how to be an effective opposition MP. Getting into the tea room can be something of a trial since I’m mistaken for a researcher on a regular basis and routinely denied entry to various parts of the Parliamentary estate until I can produce my green MPs’ pass.

A number of MPs told me I need to get elected to a committee in an area I want to make headway in. Although an extremely daunting prospect, I went along to the backbench committee meeting on Tuesday and am now, astonishingly, the proud vice-chair of the Communities and Local Government backbench committee. I am really looking forward to getting stuck into issues that I care passionately about, such as housing and am looking forward to working with our excellent new chair, Toby Perkins.

As a PLP we have to make sure we learn from the frontline battles Labour councillors are fighting all over the country; it’s there that the real impact of this coalition will show itself. I’ve been a councillor in opposition before and it’s a thankless and lonely slog that deserves the support of MPs. So here’s a challenge to my new colleagues: I’ll be campaigning to lend support and profile to the fight our councillors are facing in Wigan and around the country. I hope I’m not alone.