It is an honour and a privilege, not only for me but for my constituents in Islington, South and Finsbury, to be asked to second the loyal address. I was also delighted to hear that I was to be doing a double act with my good friend and western neighbour, my right hon. Friend the Member for Holborn and St. Pancras (Frank Dobson).
It is very strange to be a Back Bencher and to speak in this Chamber when it is so packed-and when everyone is so well behaved. I am used to being in this Chamber when there are only about half a dozen of us present, and even then, things can get pretty heated. I was fully expecting a parliamentary punch-up when I advocated the rights of lesbian mothers, but I was amazed at the passion I aroused during the fisheries debate. All I said was that the sea belonged to the children of the inner cities, too. I had been visiting Islington schools to talk about the Marine and Coastal Access Bill and some children had written to me about it, so I took some of their work into the Chamber. I took, for example, a new version of the Pink Floyd hit "Another Brick in the Wall", which went like this-do not worry, Mr. Speaker, I am not going sing; I know that, even under the new modernising regime, I am not allowed. It went:
"We don't need no grilled fish fingers,
We don't need no cod 'n' chips,
No pointless murder of the dolphins,
For some reason, it was not a universal hit with the salty old sea dogs in the fisheries debate, but I do not believe that we can complain about kids not engaging in politics if we do not make the effort to listen to them.
I recently asked a group of 10-year-olds how they thought I got my job. "Did you apply for it in writing?" No. "Did you go on a course?" No. "I know, miss, I know-did you marry Tony Blair?" No, that arrangement really would not have suited either of us. However, it was for a school visit to Parliament that I cycled in early on the morning of 7/7, unknowing as I did so that I cycled through Russell square just after the first bomb exploded and just before the second. I had only been elected a few weeks previously, and I will never forget that day. In the next few weeks, I worked closely with my right hon. Friend the Member for Holborn and St. Pancras and leant on him heavily, as I did on my good and hon. Friend the Member for Islington, North (Jeremy Corbyn); I shall always be grateful to them for their help. We visited the sites of the bombings and did our best to hold our communities together-and they did hold together, because in Islington and Camden, our diverse peoples not only get on with living together, but they like it that way.
Islington is home to people from all over the world and from all backgrounds. We are not just cappuccino bars and Georgian squares, awash with the chattering classes and the birthplace of new Labour; we are more than that. At my recent surgery, people from 17 countries came along. We have a large gay population and gay weddings are held at the town hall every Saturday. We are a tolerant community. We tolerate the bankers living among us; we tolerate the journalists living among us; and my constituents even put up with the large number of the biggest social pariahs of all: Members of Parliament. Believe it or not, there was a time when four Labour women MPs lived in my ward, and famously, for a few hours in 1997, the new Prime Minister lived there too.
Of course, it is not just MPs on the Labour side of the House who live there. I see a number of Opposition Members looking slightly uncomfortable at the turn my speech has taken, but they can be assured: I am discreet and I will not out them as members of my constituency. However, I say to them, "The next time you are invited to a coffee morning, please come-you're very welcome and you can be assured that the coffee will be fair trade."
Alongside those from a range of backgrounds, we have extremes of rich and poor. My constituency is the poorer half of the eighth most deprived borough in Britain. That is why areas such as mine need a Labour Government on their side. All the social housing has been done up under the decent homes programme; all my secondary schools are new or have been rebuilt; we have new buildings for the best sixth-form centre in London; and we have world-class hospitals-several of them-looking after my constituents.
The assumptions made about Islington, South are only part of its story, and sometimes the assumptions made about its MP are only part of her story, too. They say that I am posh, and to a certain extent, I am. I worked for 20 years as a barrister, I am married to another barrister and, of course, I am an MP. Quentin Letts says that I am "magnificently county" and has even called me "scrumptious", but I was pleased to be Lettsed, because you have not really made it as a Labour woman MP if you have not had Quentin Letts be really rude about you in the Daily Mail.
It could be said that I am county, but it is true only insofar as the large council estate on which I was brought up was four miles outside Guildford. Having been thrown out of our house by the bailiffs in their bowler hats, we were homeless and destitute, and we were saved by social housing. My mum was a single parent who was caught in a poverty trap. She struggled on benefits, bringing up my brothers and me when we were little. It still would have been hard, but without doubt, the minimum wage, tax credits, nursery provision and flexible hours would have really helped my mum get out of the trap that she was in. Of all the things that Labour has done, that is what I am most proud of.
Later in life, my mum became a Labour councillor-one of the few in Guildford-and the Tory council kindly named a road in her ward after her: Thornberry way. It runs from the sewage works to the dump, but we were chuffed. The two secondary schools I went to have both had fresh starts as academies. The first-a secondary modern-never really expected a lot of us 11-plus failures. I remember asking my careers teacher what he thought I would do with my life. He said that he was not really sure, but perhaps I would spend some time visiting people in prison. Whatever he meant, I am sure that he did not expect that I would become a criminal barrister and do an awful lot of prison visiting that way. I qualified as a barrister during the miners' strike, and I found myself going up and down on the train to the coalfields. I represented good men and women who were criminalised by the strike. I read a lot about solidarity as an earnest young radical, but it was my experience of the miners' strike that taught me what solidarity really means.
My early life informed my politics, and I have always been driven by a desire to make life fairer. The only party I could ever have joined was Labour, so here I am-posh or not-proud to serve my community as a Back-Bench MP of a Labour Government. The MPs who represented Islington, South and Finsbury before me have been as remarkable and varied as the constituency itself. Finsbury elected the first Asian MP 117 years ago: Dadabhai Naoroji, who was elected with a majority of just five. In Parliament, MPs found "Naoroji" too difficult to pronounce, so they called him "Mr. Narrow Majority". I think I have a bit of an affinity with him, and although he was a Liberal, I forgive him, because the Labour party had not been invented then. More recently, Chris Smith was the first openly gay MP-he was our MP-who later became a Cabinet Minister: the first out Cabinet Minister in the world.
Although I am the constituency's first woman MP, there is an eastern corner of my patch where that is nothing new. In the 1920s and '30s, Islington, East elected three women in a row. They liked their women representatives so much that the third one-Thelma Cazalet-was even a Tory. I do not think that she was a real Tory, however, because she was a member of the Fabian Society and, during the war, she successfully amended a clause of Butler's Education Bill, so that women teachers could be given equal pay. Churchill was so furious that he got rid of the whole clause, so the House can see that she was not really a Tory. In fact, these days, she would probably be on our side, being attacked by Quentin Letts as one of Harriet's harpies.
I like to think that Thelma Cazalet and Dadabhai Naoroji would have voted with us to tackle bankers' bonuses, to look after our elderly, with social care for the most vulnerable, and to right international wrongs, compensating British citizens injured in terror attacks overseas, and banning cluster munitions. These are bold and optimistic plans in the Queen's Speech, and I welcome them. Above all, however, we must safeguard our world from climate change, yes, with support for new ways of tackling the problem such as carbon capture and storage, but the most serious work in the next six months that the Government can do will not be in Parliament but in Copenhagen. It will be a challenge to broker a deal-and we may not get what we hope for immediately-but our children will never forgive us if we do not fight for it. I am sure that the whole House will wish the Prime Minister a successful outcome to the summit this December. We must face these challenges with courage and optimism, and we will do so. I commend the Gracious Speech to the House.
