On the eve: my local MP writes

 
Andy Slaughter is one in a thousand: a politician tirelessly serving his constituency in every sphere and well beyond the call of duty. He responds to e-mails; he's out there with people every week, and reporting back in an always informative and well expressed newsletter. He's wisely concentrated on photo-opportunities in the borough with our splendid Mayor Sadiq Khan. He resigned from the Labour front bench over issues with Corbyn, and was one of the MPs who voted against the triggering of Article 50.

His latest dispatch says it all - well, about everything except the Brexit process, which sadly and reprehensibly this short campaign has not addressed, and which I know Andy thinks is as pointless as and ruinous as I do, whatever the eventual terms. I reproduce his words here and urge anyone who cares for the NHS and human rights to vote wisely tomorrow. It's no longer about left and right, it's about fair versus unjust (maybe it always was). If Corbyn were only able to carry out a fraction of what he's promised, the country would still be the better for it.

Democracy unites us - in robust debate

This has been an extraordinary election campaign.  Called by a Prime Minister who promised she would govern until 2020.  Supposed to be only about Brexit but actually about everything from the NHS to the Dementia Tax.  And disrupted by two heinous acts of terror targeted at young children in Manchester and Londoners enjoying a Saturday night out.

This was going to be a non-event election. The cynicism of calling a vote just to help your Party increase its hold on power was turning people even further away from politics.

Now I hope everyone will vote - even if it is not for me! -  to demonstrate we decide things by voicing our views not by violence.  And that terrorism cannot disrupt the way we choose who governs.

Our city and the nation have come together to reject extremism and intolerance. Mayor Sadiq Khan summed up the strength of British values in a way Donald Trump will never understand [Slaughter campaigning with Khan before the Mayor's election pictured below]

But there is no contradiction in saying that all Parties can unite in upholding democratic values while conducting a robust debate.

Indeed this is what democracy is all about - calling out your opponents on the issues that matter.

I want Charing Cross to remain a major acute hospital, providing some of the best clinical care in the country, not be demolished and replaced by a primary care and treatment centre.

I want at least a third, preferably a half, of the thousands of new homes being built in Hammersmith & Fulham to be genuinely affordable to first-time buyers and long-term renters.

I want the UK to trade freely with the EU for the good of our economy and our social and cultural mix, not to shut ourselves off, looking for trade deals with dictatorships and unstable regimes.

I want our local schools to be fairly funded and for students to leave university without unmanageable debts.

I want pensioners to be warm and well provided for, not to be fleeced by a Dementia Tax.

And I believe our police and intelligence services, properly resourced, will keep us safe, and that scrapping our human rights laws will not.

That sounds to me like a reasonable programme for government.  A generation ago it would have just been thought of as common sense.

These are the policies Labour is putting forward.  But whether we get the chance to implement them or not, they represent the values that I will fight for if re-elected as MP for Hammersmith.

I hope I have your support on 8 June.

Andy

And maybe Mrs Mayhem should have her say, too, in the immortal re-ordering of genius Cassetteboy.

UPDATE on the day: well done, Andy - you increased your majority. And as for the general, assuming it was the students wot done it:

UPDATE (30/6) I confess I didn't even know that Andy was back on the front bench, albeit in a different role (housing), and I only do now because he's been sacked by Corbyn for supporting Chuka Umunna's proposed amendment to the Queen's Speech calling for Britain to remain within the customs union and single market. Of course he did. Top Mensch.

Georgia Brown, we love you

Caught an amazing archived documentary the other night. 'Who are the Cockneys now?' in the BBC's One Pair of Eyes series was not the most representative choice of titles, perhaps; this 1968 treasure follows fabulous voice of the 1960s and '70s Georgia Brown back to the East End where she grew up in a Jewish community that welcomed all others and worked together to do what they could during the war years. That grounding made her sad and angry that there wasn't much connection between the locals and the latest wave of immigrants when she went back, coinciding with the dockers' anti-immigration protests and Enoch Powell's 'rivers of blood' speech. She'd make a good Labour candidate if she were around today, on which more anon (sadly she died far too young at the age of 58, of complications following an operation, in 1992).

There was inevitable comparison between then and now, and a lovely sequence in which Georgia told us of how she started to question her religion at a synagogue Day of Atonement, but most of her concerns were with the present. She went to a Jewish youth club that staged spirited shows and met to remember the Holocaust once a year, and asked how many outsiders had joined. Only one or two - and while a couple of the young people she interviewed were in favour of assimilation, at least as many others weren't. She found a young harridan turning her mouth down at 'the Pakis'. And she talked to Bangladeshis before they were so named who got by but didn't really feel comfortable. I suppose they do so more now, but of course we have fresh tensions.

So not that much has changed, except of course in the poshing-up of Shoreditch and Spitalfields streets which looked amazingly decrepit and broken down in 1968. A block in which Cypriot immigrants lived, and Georgia's grandparents before them, didn't look fit for habitation. Far from incidentally, over a hundred residents in the tenement where she lived as a child lost their lives in a V2 bombing, many of them schoolmates - imagine the horror of living through that.

A lot of what Brown and another eloquent speaker, Wolf Mankowitz, had to say would be commonplace among liberals today, which is why she seemed so much of the moment, but took more guts back then. And of course there was humour in the fleeting appearances of former schoolfellow Lionel Bart, who drove her eastwards in his limousine. When she auditioned for Oliver! (I have the recording of the original London cast), he shouted in delight 'Lily Klot!' and she responded with 'Lionel Begleiter!'. I've ordered up a CD of our chanteuse in Kurt Weill, oddly twinned with Ethel Merman performing songs from Annie Get Your Gun.

In the meantime, surprise, surprise, the whole documentary turns up on YouTube. Watch it all, and wonder at the spirit.

The good work goes on in Hammersmith and Fulham. Here we truly do have a Labour MP, Andy Slaughter, who's lived in the borough all his life, who cares about the big local issues and puts out a superb newsletter every week - his website is here -  including photographs of him at every conceivable gathering.

I fancy that even if you weren't Labour inclined and you wanted someone who did everything to serve your local area, you'd vote for Andy. In contrast to the feeble manifestos of other parties which have dropped through our letterbox, the back of his spells it all out:

The choice in May could not be clearer. A Conservative Party that demolishes hospitals and affordable homes or a Labour MP and government that will stand up for everyone in Hammersmith whatever their background or income

Andy's been in the vanguard of leading the protests against the closure of the A&E department at Charing Cross Hospital, which for those of you who don't know is actually just down the road and saved J's life when he started haemorrhaging from a tonsillectomy. He's fighting to stop Shepherd's Bush Market being obliterated by development

and is dead against the proposed third runway at Heathrow.

So although I've had my problems with the Labour leadership at times, I have no doubt about who's best for Hammersmith and Fulham. See some of you at St Andrew's round the corner on polling day.