4th June 2010

Never Give In

The Dunkirk Spirit: Never Give In

Seventy years ago yesterday Winston Churchill told the House of Commons that “We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills.  We shall never surrender.”

Stirring stuff, now just as it was then.

What is remarkable is that this most famous speech followed not a victory but a colossal defeat.  But it was a heroic defeat, something we English prize almost more than anything else.

On Sunday at a special service on Orwell Quay I had the great honour of meeting two of the survivors from that terrible battle, Terry Miles and Bernard Sharp.  It was Mr Sharp’s ninety-first birthday; he had spent his twenty-first under heavy fire in Dunkirk.

Both men had been ferried back across the Channel in that flotilla of ships, large and small.  It was the great writer JB Priestly who first spoke of the role of the little ships.  He said there was something “characteristically English” about them – “so absurd and yet so grand and gallant that you hardly know whether to laugh or cry when you read about them”.  They had, he said, “made an excursion to Hell and came back glorious.”

Of course, it was not the ships that were the heroes of the battle but the men who crewed them, those – like Mr Miles and Mr Sharp – that they brought home, and those that did not survive.  But these boats symbolised the strength of our community as a nation, our ability to pull through no matter what was thrown at us.

That was the Dunkirk Spirit – and I hope we have a little of it left now.  Churchill, as ever, put it perfectly: “Never give in, never give in, never, never, never, never – in nothing, great or small, large or petty – never give in except to convictions of honour and good sense.”

Wonderful Waterfront

One of those little ships, Pudge, was moored alongside Orwell Quay.  I thought to myself how much the Waterfront had changed since spritsail barges like Pudge docked regularly here.  The Quay itself is now overlooked by new student accommodation for University Campus Suffolk, another addition to the many new buildings around the Wet Dock.

I love the way the Waterfront is now coming to life.  The bars and restaurants are full of people and a real local community is growing up, helped on by churches and voluntary groups.

But as we all know there is still a lot to do: the Waterfront is disconnected from the town centre and there are lots of buildings still uncompleted.

I have already started discussions about both these problems, which will take some time to resolve.

In the meantime, I want to applaud the news that there will be a major affordable housing scheme by Felaw Maltings.  It shows that for all the difficulties, the development of the Waterfront is still moving ahead, to the benefit of everyone in the town.

No Port Tax

Three weeks into the job and I have notched up my first victory.

Together with other candidates and MPs, I have been lobbying for back-taxing of our port to be scrapped.  Tax demands for hundreds of thousands of pounds threatened several companies – just one of which supported more than fifty jobs.  On Friday last week the Coalition Government cancelled the demands, lifting the threat of redundancies from many dozens of families.

Given the state of the public finances, winning battles with the Treasury is not going to be easy, so I am really pleased to secure this success early on.