Tory Rascal

Following last week’s interview with Tom Harris, I had a long chat with the blogging Tory MP Nadine Dorries about a range of topics including her background, her recent experience taking part in a documentary for Channel 4 on a deprived housing estate, her views on new media – and blocking people on Twitter – and her ordeal during the Derek Draper/Damian McBride scandal earlier this year.

This week’s segment covers Nadine’s views on social policy. Part 2 is also online, and covers her views on the Smeargate scandal, blogging and Twitter, and women in politics.

Tell me about your background before you got into politics. I’m particularly interested in your experience in Africa.

Well, I went out to Africa as a nurse, but it all got a bit mixed up and I ended up taking over a school rather than working in a hospital!  The young woman who ran the school had just tragically died of blackwater fever, and I just happened to have arrived at that moment.  That was a fascinating experience.

My life before Parliament was pretty varied.  Over the time that I’ve been working, since I left school, I’ve been a nurse for ten years, taught in Africa, ran my own business for ten years and then sold it, became a director of BUPA, and then became a Parliamentary candidate and went to work for Oliver Letwin.

What’s Oliver like to work with?

He’s an incredibly intense person and very clever.  Oliver and I could not be more opposite, but we got on like a house on fire.  I think we had a really great working relationship.

What makes you so opposite?

Whereas he’s formal, I’m informal; whereas he was formally educated, I was informally educated; whereas he’s posh, I’m not! We’re opposite in so many ways, but not in our views on politics.  I literally spent hours in Oliver’s company driving from one end of the country to the other, so we’ve had some very long and very detailed conversations.  We get along very well.

Thinking about policy, what is it that makes you a Conservative?

Ultimately, it comes down to freedom, believing in a small state and big people, and family values. Maturity, morals and a sense of community.  I think those words apply really well to the Conservative Party and conservative values, and they’re the values that I’m naturally imbued with.  I don’t think you decide, intellectually, to become a type of political ideologue – it’s just something that happens.  I think you’re born blue or red.

What made you decide to move into representative politics?

I grew up in Liverpool, and there it seems you’re either going to be interested in politics, football or religion.  When I got to the point when I sold my business and could do what I really wanted to do, rather than what I had to do, to earn money, I decided I’d love to get involved in politics – and so I did!  I remember very well deciding that I wanted to be an MP, and it never entered my head that I wouldn’t be.

What are the biggest issues facing your constituents?

At the moment they’re all economic.  I have children falling into the child poverty bracket every week.  People having their homes repossessed.

Outside those issues, the biggest one is development. I’m fighting developers on every front; from Milton Keynes expansion, to Junction 12 development, to people wanting to build all over our green-field areas.  There are a lot of people who see my constituency as a target for development because we’re close to London.

That said, how do you tackle housing shortages?

Well, we don’t have a shortage in Mid Bedfordshire. But what we do have is agricultural land.  We import 60 per cent of what we eat in this country, so from a food security perspective, that’s one bullet that I’m using to fight development.

Another issue I see is with flooding. If you want to concrete over this island, that’s fine – but we’re going to see more flooding, especially with the amount of development on flood plains. For environmental reasons, we need to stop and ask why people want to build over Mid Bedfordshire.  We have slow-moving water because we’re a flat area, so we are at risk of more flooding.  That said, we’ve not suffered too badly with it; but where there are new housing estates going up I see a lot of low-level flooding, which is becoming a real problem and a pain for the people who live there.

I also want to see Mid Bedfordshire made into an area for tourism.  There are so many really amazing places that we could promote for tourism. We have Woburn Safari Park, for example, and a Centre Parcs on the way.  I think we have a good case to make Mid Bedfordshire a tourist destination.

Whichever party is in power after the next election, what are the biggest things you’d like to see the new government do for your constituents?

I’d like to see a really serious commitment to urban regeneration.  We have Luton and Bedford either side of my constituency, and both are in a dire state.  Both have an appalling image – the world has a bad view of Luton and Bedford.  What I’d like my government to do – when we’re in power – is regenerate those areas.  Only by tackling the problems in Luton and Bedford can they improve and maintain Mid Bedfordshire.

Moving on, you’ve just got back from taking part in a Channel 4 documentary on a council estate in South Acton.  Can you tell me anything about that?

Gosh. Well, it was hardcore; it was the most difficult thing I’ve ever done. I haven’t given any interviews about it, actually.  It was quite scary.

I haven’t actually thought about it that much since coming out of the estate, because it was such a shock.  I grew up on a council estate for the first 25 years of my life, but on my estate there were dads, and there were no knives or guns or drugs. That makes a huge difference.  This place had no dads, and it did have knives and guns and drugs. Knives aplenty.

What sort of situations did you find yourself in?

I was placed in challenging households.  In the first place, there were ten people living in a small, two-bedroom flat. I slept on the floor. When you wake with a camera in your face and they don’t leave you until you go to bed – and to be surrounded by the type of noise you can imagine with ten people in a small flat – and with all the challenging issues those people had, and to get just three hours of sleep a night and be questioned and challenged constantly by people and the crew… by the third day I was really, really worn down.  On the third morning I burst into tears because it was just so exhausting.

What sort of social issues were the people facing?

Good Lord.  What weren’t they facing?  I met an entire family which is going to be evicted from its home on 21 December.  I met a woman who is about to go into prison, and little children who are about to go into care. It was so challenging, the problems that I came face-to-face with.

However, while some of those people had really challenging problems, some of them had 42-inch TVs.  There were big nights out, there were beauty treatments… There were some things that just didn’t seem to add up.  I think, unfortunately, there were some people who were obviously milking black markets and getting additional, illegal money in from somewhere, somehow.  There were things I just couldn’t make add up.

The Conservatives are putting marriage at the heart of a lot of social policy.  Can marriage really sort out some of the huge social problems you saw on that estate?

Some of the girls there have several children by different fathers. Marriage just didn’t mean anything to them.  Now, it’s a cliché to say that children need families and families need fathers, but I really think that an estate of mums with 14-to-16-year-old boys who are just uncontrollable is awful. It’s terrible how that makes everything about life on the estate dysfunctional; dysfunctional families in a dysfunctional community. It’s so familiar to everyone, though, that they’ve found a way to live within it, even with the chaos and everything disintegrating into crime around them.

One morning it just dawned on me that what was actually needed there was a structure.  It needs the family unit.  It needs the values that come with a family, the values that I grew up with.  The estate was identical to the one that I grew up on, right down to the architecture – even the door fittings were the same.  The difference was that there were no strong families. Back home, the community was built by hard-working mums and dads keeping a family structure together. That gives cohesiveness to communities.  There was no cohesiveness on that housing estate.

Is this about the institution of marriage specifically?  What about cohabiting couples?

Cohabitation is seen as a loose and casual and flexible way of attempting to organise a family which simply wouldn’t work on this sort of estate.  It’s too easy to walk away from difficulties.  I don’t think cohabitation is really relevant to this estate, incidentally; what you’re talking about is a middle-class situation, essentially.

Okay – but is marriage relevant?  How will David Cameron’s proposals to recognise marriage within the tax system penetrate down to people who live entirely on benefits?

Well, that’s a big issue.  I don’t know the answer to that – it’s a really huge question, and there’s no simple silver bullet that you can fire into those estates to sort it out. I think it’s about giving back to marriage the sense of seriousness and commitment that it deserves and needs.

There’s a really big hurdle you need to get over in terms of communicating with people in those deprived areas, though.  Once you’ve developed a message that you want to send to those estates, how do you get it across?  Some of those people seemed almost to be cordoned off from the rest of society. Some of them live their entire lives within a very small area of their town. How can you get in touch with them?

What do you think about the argument that the Government’s policy of multiculturalism has exacerbated some of the problems faced by people in deprived communities?

Labour’s approach to multiculturalism has ghettoised people.  It’s had the opposite effect of what was intended.  To give an example, there was a tower block full of white British and Eastern European people, and next to it there was a Somali mosque.  People in the tower felt a strong resentment to the people in the mosque, and vice versa. That was because the mosque used to be a Royal British Legion, but two years ago the Somali community arrived, bought it and turned it into a mosque.

People saw their local pub disappearing; it took the heart out of their community, and they resented that. There was a rift between the communities. My task was to get the people in the mosque talking to the people in the tower block.  I organised a halal barbeque.  I spent two days talking to people from those parts of the community, including Khalid, the leader of the Somali community.  The start of the barbeque nearly backfired on me, because at first no-one from the tower block came.  I thought it was going to be terrible – that it was going to look as though I was entrenching further racial divisions.

It became like a Muslim Challenge Anneka!  I was running up and down stairs in a hijab, knocking on doors, trying to notch up support for the barbeque. Eventually the people from the tower block started to come downstairs.  They all got talking, and it was wonderful.  The communities really seemed to gel.

So the solution to those sort of racial tensions has to include building dialogue?

Definitely. The problem is that everyone is living entirely within their own communities, and that is because the Government’s immigration policies have failed. Resentment has built up between the communities.  The really interesting thing, in terms of identity, was how second-generation Britons from the Afro-Carribbean community resented the Somalis who had just arrived. Some of them were every bit as racist towards the Somalis as some of the white British people were.  Labour’s policy has caused huge racial divisions.  Those problems can’t be solved without getting people to talk to one another.

Moving on to another social issue – abortion.  Tom Harris said in last week’s interview that he thought you risked politicising the issue and that he found your approach dangerous.

I’ve got no problem with politicising the issue.  It’s hugely important, and I have no problem with politicising it. I don’t understand people who do have a problem with it.  For forty years we’ve had a softly-softly approach to abortion, and it has achieved nothing.  I do realise, though, that I’m a loner on that front.

I took the middle ground over abortion, aiming for a 20-week limit.  Immediately the pro-lifers hated me, claiming I was pro-choice, and the pro-choice people thought I was pro-life. I had very little support from either side. The left continue to pigeon-hole me as a Sarah Palin character.

So to clarify, you are not totally opposed to abortion?

No, I’m not. I think it needs to be hugely limited. 24-week abortions are totally unacceptable because we know that the abortion technique at that point is completely barbaric. I had to go and see that process, and it was just horrible – I saw a baby in an ultrasound scan arching its back away from the needle into its heart. There is no reason for a civilised society to do that.

I do buy the argument that women have to have a choice, but I think that a woman does not have that choice when what is growing inside her feels pain and has sensory perception. At that point, that baby is a human being.  That’s my argument.

Now, look at the rest of Europe.  In France, the limit is 12 weeks.  Yet everyone manages to get their abortions, if they need them, in under 12 weeks, because they know they haven’t got the luxury of waiting. Women are smarter, they take their contraceptives, and they get abortions quickly if they really need them.

My ultimate goal would be to get the limit down to 12 weeks, but I realise that is never going to happen in my lifetime in Parliament, so my goal for now is to get it down to 20 weeks.

An alternative goal might be simply to reduce the number of women seeking abortions in the first place.  How would you do that?

Oh, I’m all for that.  I think we should have school nurses back who are empowered to assess and monitor teenage girls and provide contraception.  I’m all for girls who are sexually active to go on the pill from 16. I also think we need better education about the issues, to empower girls to take much more power over their lives – but that has to go for the boys, too, who get off scott free a lot of the time. I’ve sat through sex education lessons where my daughters, at 13 years old, were shown how to apply a condom.  Great – but why weren’t the boys being taught how to behave, about the consequences of getting a young girl pregnant?

I would like to see marriage highlighted in schools.  Family values are a good way to go; being a teenage single mother, living in a flat by yourself is not a good way to go.  There’s a huge amount to be done to bring family values back into society.  It’s a massive challenge.

Next week: Nadine talks about her ordeal during the Draper/McBride Scandal, and discusses her views on blogging, Twitter and why the left feel so antagonised by her.

Tory Rascal has gone home for Christmas.  Have a good one!!