Unite Community calls for help for the most vulnerable

Chesterfield and North Derbyshire Unite Community

PRESS RELEASE

Contact name:    Colin Hampton

Contact tel:         07870387999

Email: colinhampton45@yahoo.com

Embargo: none 

 

Unite Community Calls for help for the most vulnerable

At its monthly meeting Unite Community in Chesterfield has called for immediate assistance from the government for the most vulnerable in the present coronavirus crisis.

Unite Community, part of Unite the Union, brings together people, students, claimants, pensioners, those not currently in work, and allows them to organise giving them a voice.

‘As the coronavirus crisis deepens we need clear and decisive action to prepare health services and protect the most vulnerable in society’ said Colin Hampton secretary of the local branch. ’This crisis will impact most on those with the least and the Government has had very little to say about this.’

The branch members had outlined at their meeting how years of underfunding had weakened essential public services and the social security systems that many need to survive.

Unite Community in Chesterfield and North Derbyshire is calling for the Government to respond positively to the demands for

·        Full sick pay for all workers making sure that the many workers in precarious employment are given financial security preventing destitution. Thousands of workers now fall into this category including the many bogus self-employed in the gig economy as well as those on zero hours or minimum hours contracts.

·       There should be no benefit sanctions and the five week wait for Universal Credit should be stopped.  Those currently on benefits and the thousands who will lose their jobs as businesses close down need social security.

·       There should be immediate end to evictions for rent arrears across both social housing and the private rented sector with provision for a moratorium on rent and mortgage payments.

·       Emergency provision should be provided for the homeless who will be particularly at risk during the crisis.

·       There must be support for families and children where school closures take place.  Many of our most vulnerable families rely on free school meals to feed their children.

‘Our community came together to support the miners and their families during the great strike 35 years ago.  Today we face an even bigger task, and the cry of ‘They will not starve’ must be heard again with community coming together to make sure all of us get through this crisis’. Colin went on to say, ‘People have to rally round but Government at all levels must play a key role with immediate emergency funding and support.’

/ends

Colin Hampton

c/o 1 Rose Hill East

Chesterfield

S40 1NU

01246 231441

07870387999

Also from -
 

The scale of the challenge right now is difficult to overstate. The collective responsibility and action required of us to keep each other safe is tremendous.  Some will find it easier to rise to the occasion - to self-isolate, to work from home. Others will be weighing impossible decisions - deciding between their health, their livelihoods and the wellbeing of the communities and employees they support. As we face unprecedented insecurity, we need to meet people's real needs with workable solutions. Not only to address the crisis of today, but to look to the future and how we can build a resilient, healthy and good society that will withstand the crises of tomorrow too.  That's why Compass is calling on the Government to take necessary action and guarantee a basic income for everyone in the UK without delay.

Sign our petition now

As the coronavirus crisis unfolds, the case for a guaranteed basic income is clear and more urgent than ever.  This level of economic insecurity is new but for millions of people insecurity has been a day-to-day experience for years. Our economy has been changing since before the virus hit. Automation, climate change and a broken welfare system have already pushed people to breaking point and beyond. Two weeks ago, Compass launched the Basic Income Conversation to kickstart a broad and popular movement for basic income in the UK.  We set out to have a serious public conversation about what basic income could mean for this country. To find out what people really think of the idea and grapple with the difficult questions and tensions it throws up. That conversation is now more important than ever.  But in this turning point, we have to respond. Help move the needle on basic income by signing and sharing this petition now.

I'll sign the petition

A basic income alone is not going to get us out of this. But it's one piece of the puzzle that will give people what they need right now - and can bring us closer to remaking the public realm and creating a new political and economic settlement for the future. 

In solidarity,

Neal

 

 

Worthy Of Our Support - The Derbyshire Unemployed Workers' Centres.

 
  I am deeply concerned that the newly Conservative controlled North East Derbyshire District Council has ended that Council's financial support for the essential work of the Derbyshire Unemployed Workers' Centres (DUWC).
   The DUWC are first rate organisations who provide telling assistance and help to deprived and depressed unemployed workers.
   When I was the local MP between 1987 and 2005 for the NE Derbyshire Constituency I developed a close relationship with this body and held half of my MP's surgeries in their office which was then situated on Saltergate in Chesterfield. Due to the shape of North East Derbyshire which curls as a C shape around Chesterfield , I felt that the venue was an important central point where constituents could visit me for my own assistance. Of course, I kept Chesterfield MPs informed of my activities within their constituency boundaries. Then I held the rest of my surgeries scattered around the Constituency itself.
   I hope that people will closely examine the value of the work of the DUWC as far as the well-being of this areas most deprived people are concerned. And that you will then press the leaders of the North East Derbyshire Council over the need to restore that bodies former support for the DUWC's essential operations. To help make up the current shortfall arising from the Council withdrawing its financial support for the work of the DUWC, donations can be sent to them by individuals, trade union branches and other progressive bodies. Your help is keenly needed on this.

   For more details about the essential work of the DUWC and how you and the bodies you are associated with can aid its essential operations, click here.

   

Politics And The Dialectics Of Debate

 
 Derbyshire Miners Industrial Day Release Students 1983.


Especially concerning politics I have always had a commitment to the dialectics of debate.

Approaching my 21^st birthday (and for the following four years) I wrote 29 letters to the Sunderland Echo and the Northern Echo in discussion with people such as the Chairman of Dorman Long on the issue of steel nationalisation and to the Secretary of the Durham Area Communist Party with a heading “Russia, with its privilege class, isn't Socialist”. Then some three months after my first letter I joined the Labour Party in order to participate in an essay competition on “Nationalisation” being run by Mannie Shinwell our local MP. I manage the second prize.

In the following year I became my local Labour Party branch Secretary and immediately arranged for them to have a speaker plus a debate at each alternative meeting. Soon afterwards a local Fabian Society was established and I became Secretary drawing in speakers such as Sam Watson the Durham Miner's leader. Our first speaker was the then General Secretary of the Fabian Society, Bill Rodgers. He was later to become part of the Gang of Four who set up the breakaway SDP. Many years later we met up as officers of an All Party Parliamentary Group on Strokes. So you can work with political opponents on specific matters.

I have always been keen to encourage and develop the holding of Labour Movement Discussion meetings.
 

At the age of 24 I went to study Politics and Economics full-time at the Ruskin College in Oxford, which in those days was for adults without formal qualifications. Lectures were followed by questions from students, seminars involving fuller discussions and weekly tutorials were held to discuss our written essays with tutors. After two years I then gained the qualifications to study Politics and Philosophy full-time at Hull University where similar methods of study took place. I came to appreciate the claim made way back by John Stuart Mill that the person who only knows their own side of the case, knows little of that.

Then for 21 years I mainly taught classes of trade unionists via the Sheffield University Extramural Department – especially coal miners, steel workers, railwaymen and classes of various shop stewards. The only shortcoming of these being that few women ever attended. A typical course would last over three years. A tutor would normally take a year's weekly class over 24 weeks, being with a class from 10am to 4pm each day. Sharing the coffee breaks and the lunch time period with students. The classes worked when the students were encouraged to involve themselves fully in debates and produced regular written work. Tutors got to know their students well and could draw people fully into debate as they came to appreciate their understandings and views on issues. It was fully the dialectics of debate. Any indoctrination by tutors would have been entirely inappropriate.

Depending upon their circumstances and commitments, numbers of such students went on to study at Adult Education Colleges such as Ruskin. Numbers of others became local Councillors, NUM branch officials, social workers or voluntary helpers for worthwhile causes. The very first class of South Yorkshire Miners I ever taught included a future MP, a future MEP and the NUM Branch Secretary at Cortonwood where the 1984 miners' strike emerged. It is a pattern we miss.

In time I also taught Philosophy on evening classes ran by our Department for adult students who had no formal qualifications, but were seeking places to study full-time in higher education especially at Sheffield University itself. Those who progressed via our range of classes were to achieve better degree results via Sheffield than the average normal intake. Our Department was also the only one with school inspectors and I was impressed when one of them took a full part in a discussion in one of the seminars I was running. I went on to become the Director for these courses, which unlike the Trade Union classes drew in a majority percentage of female students.

When I became an MP from 1987 to 2005, my pattern of the dialectics of debate came under something of a challenge. Procedural arrangements, whipping and Government control of the main agenda became the order of the day. This probably shaped my fairly regular rebelling against Tony Blair. But there were other openings for me to pursue. Select Committee work looks into different sided issues . I went for matters such as European Legislation and developments in Northern Ireland which gave plenty of scope for fully-fledged debates and are key areas today. Then parliamentary colleagues (some from other than the Labour Party) could be contacted to be drawn into official or unofficial meetings to discuss concerns about Derbyshire County issues, Civil Rights for Disabled People, Electoral Registration and other matters. Then there were plenty others initiatives by others that could be followed, such as concerns to protect remaining and former coal mining communities.

I have always been keen to arrange for Labour Party Discussion Meetings. Shortly after arriving in Dronfield 50 years ago I became the local Constituency's Political Education Officer. Then under different hats helped to arrange many debates in Dronfield under the umbrella of its Branch, a local Fabian Society and the modern ILP - Independent Labour Publications. I have just finished a 12 year period as the Dronfield Labour Party Political Education Officer covering over 130 discussions in that time – including one on the exact day itself  of the 120^th anniversary of Keir Hardie and others meeting to found the ILP. Such meetings are now being continued by others.

I am very much aware that today we have a new technology where discussions take place on web-sites. There seem to me to be two problems we need to tackle. First, those using comment boxes far too often make crude opposing comments, rather than seeking to enter into genuine and meaningful debates. It is rather like people just farting at each other. Monitoring by the operators of web-sites can contain this type of activity, but only a growth of serious initial contributions and similar forms of responses can deliver their potential. And it is a potential that related discussion meetings (under the dialectics of debate) need adding to.

There are also educational needs to incorporate the type of avenues I stressed above into our modern era of a changed technology.

In Memory of John Cummings, former Easington MP

I was particularly saddened to hear of the death of John Cummings, whom I knew well in the period when we were fellow MPs from 1987 to 2005. He continued as an MP for a further five years after me.

It is not only that the MPs you get to know the best are normally those who are part of your own intake, but the only two times when John and I ever met outside of our parliamentary years both help to illustrate our strong connections.

We first met when both of us were seeking to be selected as candidates for the Labour Party, for the different areas in which we lived. There was, however, a big difference in our positions.

John was the leader of the Easington District Council, an electrician at his local pit and fully active in the National Union of Mineworkers in an area still dominated by pits. He clearly already had the nomination sown up from the start. Yet the surprising thing is that he became the only miner ever to represent the coal mining constituency of Easington or its previous Seaham Constituency. His Labour predecessors being Sidney Webb, Ramsay McDonald (who then defected to National Labour), Manny Shinwell and Jack Dormand. I always felt that Easington needed to be served at some time by a miner. John turned out to be the appropriate person.

In contrast, when I became MP for North East Derbyshire I become the first non-miner ever to serve the Constituency in the Labour interest. Although even with the pits in rapid decline, my own selection as a candidate turned out to be a much closer matter than John's.

When John used parliament to pursue the interests of his constituents, I followed his work with a special interest. For both my wife and I originate from the area covered by the Easington Constituency. My wife's father having worked at the coal mine at Shotton Colliery and my father at Easington Colliery.

During our period in parliament John and I (along with my wife Ann) went to Nigeria as part of a Commonwealth Parliamentary delegation. It was good to be with John whom we felt so close to. One of our visits took us to a rather isolated area with less than the normal first class hotel provisions. There was no shower nor other bathing facilities (beyond a bucket) and John informed us that he had had a “sparrow's bath”. It is a phrase (and practice) I have pinched from him whenever I am in a rush or face similar difficulties.

Unfortunately, I only met up with John once after we both left parliament. It was a somber but appropriated occasion.

There had been a pit disaster at Easington Colliery in 1951 when 83 men were killed (including two rescue workers). My father was at the pit at the time, but was working in a different seam to the one that was devastated. Local memorial services were held in remembrance of this disaster in 2011.   I met up again with John on this solemn occasion, which included a march from a local Church of England service to the mass grave at the Easington Colliery cemetery. It was led by the still existing local colliery band, playing Gresford – as it had be done many times during the funerals in 1951.

John had worked at Murton Colliery which was a neighbouring pit. Although this memorial was to be our final meeting and was built upon sad memories, it is also appropriate that it is the last time we met. It showed that the political path which he had followed was often a serious and somber business. In many difficult circumstances he showed that he had the background, values and abilities to seek to deliver improvements in the lives of those he served.

It is a pattern for others to seek to follow.

I also have a close personal debt to John. When my mother needed to be moved from accommodation in Donnini House at Easington into a care home (at the former residence of the pit manger), he helped in this process. This is a photo of him below, taken at Donnini House a decade later.

Orgreave Truth and Justice Campaign

The Orgreave Truth and Justice Campaign is organising an all-day conference in Sheffield on Saturday 1 October 2016, 10am – 4pm, at the United Reform Church on Norfolk Street, Sheffield  -  not far from the Cruicible Theatre and an easy walk from the train or bus/tram stations.

Its aim is to provide a platform for a range of campaigns that are on the front line in challenging and resisting the role played by the state, with Sheila Coleman from the Hillsborough Justice Campaign in the Chair.  Speakers include the Shrewsbury 24, the Blacklisting Support Group, the Police Spies Out of our Lives, the Rotherham 12, as well as Barbara Jackson for the Orgreave Truth and Justice Campaign.

Registration is free and open to both interested individuals and representatives from organisations, with lunch and refreshments provided  -  orgreavejustice@hotmail.com  Full details are given below in the above flyer and the following letter.