Category: Pauls’ Campaign Diary

People in Eastbourne are sick of Southern Water. Spillages, sewage, leaks, and bosses trousering bonuses. I met up with Fergal Sharkey, the water campaigner and former Undertones front man, to talk about how we clean up our water. Labour will get tough with the water industry, fining firms which pump sewage into our sea, and banning bosses’ bonuses when the fail local people.

We were joined by Dave Rowntree, the Labour candidate in Mid-Sussex, and Tom Gray, the candidate in Brighton Pavilion. Music fans will spot a supergroup in the making – Dave is the drummer from Blur and Tom plays guitar with Mercury-prize winning band Gomez. With Fergal on lead vocals, we got ourselves a band.

I was pleased to meet up with Lou Haigh, Labour’s shadow transport secretary, at Brighton station. I’m on Southern Rail three or four times a week, and I am looking forward to the railway being fully publicly-owned and publicly-accountable. I chatted with Aslef members about their dispute and the need for a settlement. Lou Haigh also mentioned Labour’s policy for a new generation of municipal bus services, which would make a huge difference to our system of public transport.

Eastbourne Labour is twinned with Hastings & Rye Labour and we are helping Helena Dollimore become the constituency’s Labour MP. I went out on the doors with Helena. She is incredibly well-known and winning people round. We met up with Joe Fortune, the general secretary of the Co-op Party to discuss the idea of a ‘community-to-right-to-buy’ assets such as pubs. This is a brilliant policy to pass community assets into local ownership, saving local facilities like pubs. I want to see the derelict buildings that blight the centre of Eastbourne turned over to the community to own and run.

Knocking on doors around Belmore Road, it is clear people want change. There were local concerns about antisocial behaviour and drug dealing. The bin lorry had nearly knocked over a lamppost, leaving it at a precarious angle. A couple of Kurdish gentlemen were keen to talk about their experiences in Eastbourne. I was happy to share my experience of visiting Erbil to meet with parliamentarians in northern Iraq, at the heart of the Kurdish region. We are getting a great response to Labour’s message of change.

I was delighted to take part in the Shinewater primary school General Election. The teachers are organising an election project for the pupils, with me and my Tory and Liberal Democrat opponents each taking over an assembly. The idea is that if you can get 8-11 year-olds interested in voting and politics, they will be ready to be active citizens when they hit 16. We discussed how important voting is, and that so many people around the world want the vote but don’t have it. It was a great morning, with great staff and switched-on pupils.

Like every retailer, the Co-op in Shinewater is routinely targeted by looters. Organised crime gangs send in looters to steal high-value goods for resale, and staff are powerless to prevent it. The police seldom turn up to the multiple cases on shoplifting in Eastbourne. It’s completely out of control.

Labour will make assaulting a shopworker a specific offence, with tough new penalties for the low-lifes who attack shop staff. We will put more police on foot patrol to deter looting, and respond faster. No-one should face violence and abuse at work, and Labour will start to make a difference in the battle against looting.

Change is in the air. In Hastings, you can sense the solid rejection of Rishi Sunak’s government, after 14 years of the Tories. People were already fed up with Sunak, and his recent behaviour has only made things worse.

But, the election is not over. I met plenty of people still making their minds up. Plenty of undecideds, greens, and folk ‘not voting’. Plenty of ‘shy Tories’ who may well vote for the Conservatives, despite everything. I don’t believe a word of the super-polls that suggest ludicrous Labour majorities and hugely-reduced numbers of Conservative MPs. Politics has never worked like this. It will be close in seats such as Hastings & Rye, which is why we’re doing what we can to get Labour elected in the battleground seats.

There’s still time to get involved. Check out the nearest Labour campaigning on the Labour website and be part of something special.

I was shocked to learn that a recent cyber-attack on London’s hospitals has disrupted the supply of blood products, especially blood in type O negative and O positive. When the call went out to give blood, I signed up. The NHS relies on blood donors. There’s a book by a Fabian Richard Titmuss written in 1971 called The Gift Relationship.

It compares the system of blood donation in the UK and the US. In the US, blood is bought and sold as a commercial relationship. It means blood is often sold by people desperate for money, who may well have hepatitis or other conditions. We’ve seen the dangers inherent in this approach in the contaminated blood scandal in the UK, when blood products were imported from the US.

In the UK, we donate blood without cash changing hands, although we may get a KitKat and a glass of squash. We do it because of a sense of shared citizenship, and a belief that we can help others without knowing who they are. Donated blood is a gift to strangers. You can see the principle applying across the NHS. To introduce a cash element, as some Tories and Reform UK want, is to undermine our relations as citizens. Anyway, I was very brave and I would encourage you to sign up, especially if you have type-O blood. 

Today’s the day Labour launches the manifesto Change. I’ve just had a read, and it’s filled with policies to fix our broken country. The whole project is anchored on economic growth, in every sector, and in every part of the country. In Eastbourne, that means support for local small businesses, more skills for young people, investment in our rail, road, and seafront, and a revival of the high streets.

That means a rebalancing of the economy away from our reliance on financial services in London and the south east, and towards creative industries, green manufacturing, leisure and hospitality, co-operatives, and the tourism industry. The only way we get the world-class services we need is to get the economic growth to pay for them. The manifesto offers real change, just like the Labour manifestos in 1945, 1964, and 1997.

I know not many people read political manifestos, but we will all be affected by the policies in them. We now have just three weeks to persuade people that these are the policies to improve their lives.

Around Firle Road, Seaside, we met voters who are still making up their minds about how to vote on 4 July. It is always important for campaigners to remember that most people don’t think about politics very much, even in an election. We chatted to people about their businesses and neighbourhood, but there were plenty of ‘sorry, not interested’ and ‘not going to vote, you’re all as bad as each other’.

The latest British Attitudes Survey (BAS) out this week shows that trust in politics has hit a record low. Dissatisfaction with the way the UK is governed is now at 79%, higher than in expenses scandal in 2010 and the Tories’ sleaze in 1995. This is very worrying indeed, because without a degree of trust in the system, democracy falters. And when faith in democracy declines, populism and demagoguery fills the gap. The answer is two-fold: politicians who are trustworthy, and a system that works for people. Labour will deliver both.