“I will give my all to this task.” Torsten uses first speech in Parliament to pledge bright future for Swansea.
Swansea’s newest MP has used his first speech in Parliament to pledge a prosperous future for the city.
Torsten Bell celebrated Swansea’s heritage and culture, affirming his “service to a community and to a cause” as he pledged to raise living standards in the city. The newly elected MP slammed years of Tory failure in Westminster that have left 1 in 5 Swansea children in absolute poverty, and wages which have not risen a penny since 2010. Torsten finished with a promise to constituents: “to give my all to this task.”
Read Torsten’s first speech in Parliament:
Today, Swansea West is not very... West at all. The northern and eastern half of the constituency was until recently ably represented by the Honorable, and more importantly formidable, Member for Neath and Swansea East. I will endeavour to emulate her passion and drive even if not her famously bold sartorial choices.
In her maiden speech she challenged Dylan Thomas’ famous description of Swansea as an “ugly, lovely” town, rightly noting that today it is “economically exciting, architecturally beautiful and culturally groundbreaking”. As someone new-ish to politics, I’m more concerned about another phrase attributed to Thomas, labelling Swansea the “graveyard of ambition”.
Fortunately, he never uttered such words. And the ambition of this great city is alive and well, as anyone who’s seen newly established Penlan U-10s train in driving rain can attest. But there’s an even more deeply held and widely shared ambition of our council, businesses and the myriad community groups that hold us together. An ambition for a Swansea in which greater prosperity is created and greater prosperity is shared.
I shall play my part in realising that ambition and doing justice to the honour of being elected for this great city in which both my parents started their inspiring careers of service. But it was a person, not a place, that took a punt on me as a young man the former member for Edinburgh South West, Alistair Darling. A right honourable friend in here but always a friend to me. As banks went bust, he taught me that politics is a vocation to live up to, not a game to be played. That the MPs’ role is to combine service to a community and service to a cause. There is no greater community than Swansea, and no greater cause than rebuilding its, and the United Kingdom’s, prosperity.
I am very much not the first Swansea Jack to lack a local accent. The city has welcomed so many. Early 18th century records show Jewish names beginning to crop up. And today, our mosques are crucial institutions, ones the whole community rallied round when violence and Islamaphobia were seen on the UK’s streets. Those fleeing the war in Ukraine have found Swansea a genuine City of Sanctuary. And while I may be the first Torsten to represent Swansea people with suspicious Scandinavian names are nothing new. Legend has it that a certain Viking provided the origin story of Swansea by settling on ‘Sweyns-ey’ – Sweyn’s island. More recently, 19th Century poet, Walter Savage Landor, recognised that the, frankly overrated, Bay of Naples had nothing on Swansea Bay.
Economists like to talk about comparative advantages. Well this is ours, glittering from the industrial might of Port Talbot to, more genteel, mumbles. And never mind Naples, there is a much more important comparison - with Cardiff. It is a contest long settled, by the writer Jan Morris, who, succinctly, concluded: “Swansea is much the nicer”.
It is. But it is not a utopia. 1 in 5 children live in absolute poverty, despite the brilliant work of charities like Faith in Families. Industrialist Sir John Morris, founder of Morris Town - today’s Morriston - lies under Saint Matthew’s church. A building that today is the base for Matthew’s House, a wonderful charity, doing work that should never be needed feeding hundreds of the most vulnerable residents in a city where 340 household become homeless every month.
Like many places that drove the industrial revolution and have lived with the aftermath of deindustrialisation, Swansea’s past offers much to be proud of. The schooners, built to sail around the Horn carrying the copper nitrate that made the city rich. The world’s first passenger train, instigated by an 1804 Act of this Parliament. It was pulled by horses, an experience perhaps not much slower than on today’s still, inexplicably unelectrified, mainline.
Then there are the mines, so carefully celebrated in the South Wales Miners’ Library, soon to move to a new home in the city centre. We celebrate all this and more.
But it is how we build a better economic future that my constituents are asking today. That is the question. The typical wage in Swansea is £536 a week. House of Commons Library research shows that it has not risen one pence since 2010. That is what economic failure on a colossal scale, seen across the UK, looks like. And while wages do not rise, insecurity has. A constituent recently opened her door to me distraught at having seen her weekly hours at a supermarket cut from 15 to 3 overnight. None of us could live with that financial uncertainty. No-one should. If mainstream politics cannot provide the very basics, decent homes, secure jobs, rising wages, many will turn away from voting, or to populists who seek to exploit these problems rather than solve them.
Defeating populism, also means rejecting fatalism. We know real progress can be delivered. The minimum wage has proved that. The employment bill published tomorrow will do so again. Investment can be prioritised, potholes filled, and homes built as they have been before. Who owns the best view in Swansea? No mansion, but the residents of Townhill an estate for working people, built between the wars on the precious land in the heights above the city centre. Today we debate, inexplicably delayed, basic standards for the millions of renters squeezed out of both home ownership and social housing. This bill raises those standards in England, building on the Welsh Government’s Renting Homes Act. And it bans landlords, in Wales or England, from discriminating against tenants who receive benefits or have children.
Today Swansea has the raw materials to build this shared prosperity. A city centre on the up, with many of our historic buildings being given a new lease of life – including the magnificent Albert Hall. Our two great universities, facing headwinds with the rest of the sector today but undoubtedly the backbone of our 21st Century prosperity. Port Talbot, with an industrial future not just a proud past. And new opportunities to be seized, from the South Wales Metro to a tidal lagoon.
Service to a community, and to a cause. To Swansea and to shared prosperity. To my constituents I promise to give my all in this task. And finally, to honourable members here, I bring perhaps even more welcome news: that is one fewer maiden speech to go.