Carlisle’s new Labour MP has used her maiden speech in the House of Commons to signal her commitment to completing the city’s flood defences.
Julie Minns made her maiden speech in the debate on Great British Energy last week, promising to campaign on the key challenges her constituency faces, citing in her opening comments the catastrophic floods that hit Carlisle in 2005 and 2015.
Setting out her priorities as MP, she pledged: “I shall campaign for the completion of our flood defences – defences that were promised but not delivered by the last government – the rebuilding of NHS dentistry across north Cumbria, and the growth of Carlisle’s night-time and visitor economies.”
It is convention that MPs making their first speech pay tribute to their predecessor and talk a little about their constituency.
Julie praised her immediate predecessor, John Stevenson, for his role in securing a new medical school for the University of Cumbria, and Eric Martlew – Carlisle’s last Labour MP – for his work to bring the university to Carlisle.
She shared “little-known facts” about Carlisle with MPs, that it was home to Britain’s first black police officer in the 1830s, that the city’s pubs and breweries were nationalised to curb drunkenness among munitions workers during World War I, and that the Beatles were thrown out of the Crown & Mitre Hotel in 1963 for being dressed too casually.
She also referenced Carlisle’s fondness for good craic and XL cheese crisps, its vibrant food manufacturing sector and historic buildings, singling out the Turkish Baths where she chairs the charity seeking their refurbishment and reopening.
And Julie spoke with pride at being Carlisle’s first female MP and the first Carlisle-born MP since 1918.
She added: “I could not be prouder to represent the city where I was born and raised. I owe a debt to Robert Ferguson school and Trinity school for helping a working-class child from Denton Holme become the first in her family to go to university. Without university, I would not have become involved in politics.”
She finished by quoting her great-grandfather, John Hodgson-Minns, who was an alderman and councillor for Carlisle in the early 20th century.
She said: “He said, ‘Our job as servants of our great border city is to leave it a little better than we found it’. That, Madam Deputy Speaker, is the task that I have set myself.”
