Gateshead comes out of the shadows
The transformation of Newcastle and Gateshead in recent years has left the area with a host of stunning new works of art and architecture: the Sage Gateshead music centre, the Millennium Bridge across the Tyne, the Baltic contemporary arts centre and, most notably, the Angel of the North.
The people who live in the Gateshead East and Washington West constituency cannot, sadly, lay claim to any of these gems – nor even the Gateshead quayside redevelopment – as they all lie outside its borders, although the Angel of the North’s position just south of the constituency means the residents do get a better view of it than anyone else.
However, there is no evidence that having to make do with Gateshead Stadium for a local landmark has upset the locals enough to cause, well, an upset and break Labour’s traditional stronghold on the area.
Gateshead East and Washington West is an oddly shaped constituency: long and narrow, it stretches down from the Tyne’s south bank through the suburbs of Gateshead before swerving east to take in part of Washington, a new town now largely subsumed into Sunderland.
Staunchly Labour, it is filled with row upon row of nineteenth-century terraced houses, many of whose inhabitants are manual labourers. The docks, the mines and the other heavy industries no longer provide much work, but in their place are a couple of large trading estates, and factories such as the Nissan plant in Washington, while the service industry is now a major employer. Although many families are not well-off – levels of financial hardship are much higher than the national average, according to the Census – unemployment is low.
This is the background to Labour’s hold over the seat, which in 2001 saw the sitting MP, Joyce Quin, retain her seat with a 17,900 majority. She took 53 per cent of the vote, making it one of the party’s 20 safest seats.
However, Quin is stepping down, and in her place Labour has selected Sharon Hodgson, a Unison official who has spent nearly her whole life in Gateshead. Her opponents will be the Liberal Democrats’ Frank Hindle, a local councillor since 1991, and UKIP’s Jim Batty, a former long-serving Labour councillor.
The Conservatives are fighting the Gateshead and Newcastle seats under a City Seats initiative in which a team of candidates work across the whole area, and therefore have no candidate dedicated to Gateshead East and Washington West.
Hodgson has been working in London for the last four years as an election agent and union official, but before that was “born and bred” in Gateshead. Speaking in a soft Geordie accent, she says a fairly tough childhood in a one-parent family means she knows what it is like for people living in the area.
“When I walk around the streets there’s just so many memories … meeting me husband, having me children in the QE [hospital], you know, everything.”
After her parents divorced, she says, “We went on to benefits until I went out to work.
“I’ve lived in some of the most deprived areas. When I say to people some of the areas that I’ve lived in . the look [they give me], you know – but those experiences made me what I am today.”
Twenty years ago, very few people had heard of Gateshead, but the Liberal Democrats’ Hindle says it is undergoing a “renaissance” thanks to large-scale inward investment and iconic building projects such as the Baltic Centre.
He too has spent most of his life in the area, and in 1991 was the first Liberal Democrat councillor in Gateshead. A computing lecturer at Northumbria University, he has seen the transformation that has taken place in his home town: “It’s always been a vibrant area, but that’s more obvious now … it certainly has revitalised what was a very run down area.”
Hodgson, who remembers people being fooled into thinking her accent must mean she was from Scotland, says: “It was a very under-privileged area, a traditional working-class area, lots of deprivation.
“Gateshead then was not the Gateshead we’re seeing now.”
She admits some people feel Labour has not done enough to support manufacturing jobs, but insists that employment in the area has vastly improved in the past eight years.
“Everyone I know who wants to work has got a job. Even the long-term unemployment isn’t there . my brothers just couldn’t get jobs for love nor money when they were first out looking – in the Thatcher years – and now they’re both skilled [workers].”
She adds: “So even though we haven’t got the manufacturing, we haven’t got the massive problem with unemployment – people are just doing other things.”
That economic success will be a key part of Hodgson’s message to the electorate, just as Hindle will be emphasising his party’s ‘ten good reasons to vote Liberal Democrat’ – among them pledges to abolish tuition fees and “never again” invade Iraq.
On that last issue, he says: “There is a lot of disaffection with the Labour Party – from Iraq principally – and a lack of trust. People have stopped trusting Tony Blair .we have lots of people telling us they won’t vote for Labour ever again.”
UKIP’s Jim Batty, meanwhile, will be campaigning on the dangers that Europe presents to Britain’s sovereignty. A former truck driver in Europe, he says he has seen first-hand the “unfairness” of EU regulations such as the Common Agricultural Policy.
A long-serving local councillor and Labour deputy mayor, Batty was accused in 2004 of making racist remarks about asylum-seekers – a charge he emphatically denies – and suspended from the party. However, he has now resigned, after what he calls “43 years of loyalty”, and started up the first Tyneside branch of UKIP.
He aims to raise UKIP’s profile – branches in Alnwick and Berwick-on-Tweed are in the pipeline – and says he will build on his career as a local councillor in which he helped “hundreds and hundreds” of people and became known to thousands more.
One important local issue is transport, especially in Washington West, where the absence of an underground line means residents have to make several bus and train trips just to get into the city centre.
Rising house prices have left first-time buyers struggling in Gateshead just as they do in other parts of the country, and investment in affordable housing is also a concern. Hindle says there are hundreds of millions of pounds available to be invested in social housing, but the arm’s-length management organisation that looks after it needs to get a two-star rating before it can get that funding. Gateshead’s ALMO failed last year, and although it is hopeful of getting two stars this time round, Hindle is doubtful: “Repairs that a good landlord should do haven’t been done,” he says.
Otherwise, residents worry about anti-social behaviour: graffiti, vandalism, and gangs of young people who give the area “a feeling of being perhaps worse than it actually is”, as Hodgson puts it.
A keen Newcastle supporter, she was disgusted by the recent fight between teammates Kieron Dyer and Lee Bowyer; she says their behaviour inevitably has an influence on the young people who idolise them, and that they should have been punished accordingly.
“The people who are using them as a role model, the people who are looking up to them, are kids in schools, and so it should have been a similar punishment to what would have happened inside a school – what you would expect to happen. Maybe Souness should have went to a local headteacher and said, ‘What would you have done?'”
Batty agrees that anti-social behaviour is a major problem: “Anti-social behaviour needs to be addressed very, very seriously here
