Article first published in The Guardian on 2 January 2011. This winter, 130 activists gathered to discuss superfast broadband in a village hall in Cumbria. They had come from 100 villages, by 100 paths. Ali had presumably travelled north along the shore of Ullswater, rounded Loadpot Hill and turned south down the Lowther valley, until […]
As I write, the sun is setting on 2010: a year of two severe winters. Many Cumbrians have struggled with the soaring costs of heating oil, with the roads and with the cold. Now, it is warmer outside my cottage than in: the sheep are no longer burrowing in snow, the last of the ice […]
When I ran last week from parliamentary meetings about the Cumbrian sewage system; to the Olympics; the Forestry Commission; army reforms; and rural planning guidelines, I found myself struggling to keep up with it all. Learning about new policy areas can be bewildering and dispiriting. Officials scatter jargon: yesterday, SME didn’t mean Small and Medium […]
Article first published in The Financial Times on 13 November 2010. Sir John Mandeville, the great medieval traveller, claimed to have visited almost every place in the world except the Garden of Eden: he describes China; he describes a country of “eternal darkness” which appears to be Afghanistan. “But of Paradise,” he writes, “I cannot […]
At seven o’clock the morning after the spending review, I was on Radio Cumbria with Jamie Reid, the Labour MP from Copeland. Jamie was angry. He predicted disaster. When I said that coalition had committed, unlike Labour, to increasing NHS spending, he snapped, ‘That’s not true. I don’t know how you can sleep at night.’ […]
First published in The Herald on 18 September 2010. Parliament has begun again: the Prime Minister brought us back for an extra two-week session. A number of my male colleagues have returned on crutches and in plaster casts. I have sat in debates on everything from the constitution (fixed term parliaments) to Equitable Life. I […]
I am writing this on the 0719. Coach A is empty. We haven’t yet reached Shap. The ash leaves are dark and there is rain over Knipe Crag, but the near grass is an electric green and the hidden sun brings out every wrinkle and glow in the limestone walls. I had thought that in describing […]
The oddest thing about coming to parliament for the first time is that you come straight from a campaign which has next to nothing to do with parliament. In my case, I had spent the previous months almost entirely in Cumbria: walking through villages and visiting cattle auctions and schools, dairy farms and affordable housing […]
Two weeks ago, on a mizzening Saturday morning in Mungrisdale – having just cut the ribbon of the Northern Fells Group’s new fell-runner community bus – I visited the house of an elderly woman living on a state pension, whose cottage lay at the end of an unpaved track. The charity’s founder, Dr Jim Cox, […]
