Ahead of the local elections, Hatfield East candidate Cathy Watson sets out her stall

I am Cathy Watson, a former member of the Labour Representation Committee and standing for Labour in Hatfield East, a fairly mixed area socially in Welwyn Hatfield, a constituency in Hertfordshire comprising a1920s Garden City and a post-war New Town. 

The Tories have been in power here, surprisingly, for over 20 years.  In addition to its original London overspill population, the area is now very diverse, in part due to the expansion of the University of Hertfordshire, formerly Hatfield Polytechnic.  The growth of the University has to some extent replaced British Aerospace as a major employer, though when BAe shut down in the 1990s this had a massively negative effect on the local economy and on local pride and identity.

We recently selected our Prospective Party Candidate, a local man, Andrew Lewin.  Local candidates seem to be doing well in the Party at the moment throughout the country.  However, not one but two previous PPCs were eliminated by the NEC at the initial stage, and they were very different characters.  Rumours abounded including that one was excluded because they had heckled Neil Kinnock at Party Conference when they were a teenager!

I think I have a good chance of winning this year, and the local Party of taking control of the Council.  This is not because people on the doorstep are very enthusiastic about the national Party or Keir Starmer, but because die-hard Tories will probably stay at home as they have had enough sleaze and incompetence. 

We have had very little lead on policy from either the national or regional Party so we rely on bread and butter issues like building more council houses and proving more timely repairs, improvement in public transport links especially to the QE2 hospital in Welwyn Garden City, planting more trees and zero tolerance of fly tipping and littering. 

Unsurprisingly local residents are intensely proud of the excellent planning legacy in both towns.  Whether this amount to ‘socialism in our time’, I would not like to comment.  We do our best but with such huge cuts in national government spending on local government we have to be realistic in the short term.

If you are a local socialist running for Labour in May’s local government elections, Labour Hub would love to hear about your campaign, the policies you want and the difference you hope to make.

Image: Welwyn Hatfield. Source: Ordnance Survey OpenData. Author: Nilfanion, created using Ordnance Survey data, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.