Fixing the broken link

Some 20 years ago Lara Norris left her home with her two young children for a women’s refuge. Now, after putting herself through university, raising her children as a lone parent and working for Home-Start, a charity for families with children under five, she is standing to win back Great Yarmouth for Labour.

Unite member Lara’s long experience as a community campaigner stands her in good stead as she seeks to overturn the 4,276 majority of Tory Brandon Lewis who was housing minister in the Tory-Lib Dem coalition government.

We can be sure that Lara knows more about housing than her opponent – the need for affordable housing is an issue she knows about from first hand experience.

She is absolutely opposed to David Cameron’s policy of extending the Thatcherite “right to buy” to families living in housing association properties.

“After I left the refuge I lived in a housing association house for 19 years and I was offered the opportunity to buy it at a big discount but I refused,” she recalls. “That place had given me and my children a home for all those years and I knew that someone else would need the same in the future.

“Later when I did move and I went back to collect some mail, I was really pleased to find that the people living there were a Home-Start family I had worked with.”

Lara had been working for Home-Start for five years when she was invited to a meeting about Tory cuts to services where Labour MP Peter Hain was speaking.

“I hadn’t heard of him then – I got up to attack all politicians for being out of touch, and said that what real people need is a roof over their heads, food in their stomach, jobs that pay enough, and decent hospitals and schools.

“At the end of the meeting Peter Hain came over and said to me, “Put your money where your mouth is” and handed me a Labour Party application form.

“That’s how it all began for me. My dad was in the print union and on my first day of work after leaving school he sent me back again because I hadn’t joined the union, so I was brought up in a trade union family but no one has ever been involved in politics before.”

Big issues

She names the three big issues in great Yarmouth as the cost of living, health services and jobs. “People are worried because their children can’t find work.

“There’s lots of people on zero hours contracts here and, being a seaside town, a lot of people can only get seasonal work.”

Lara and her team have been working hard for over two years so Lara is now well known in the constituency. “I can’t walk around Sainsbury’s anymore without people knowing who I am.”

The party has opened a drop-in centre where people can come and raise problems they face, and has been running a Just Jobs campaign to get better treatment for people at the Jobcentre and for local firms to advertise jobs first on boards placed around the town rather than online.

Lara is as adamant now about the need to involve ordinary people in politics as she was when she went to that Peter Hain meeting.

People’s panel

If elected, she has pledged to run a people’s panel so people working in areas such as education and the NHS, as well as the general public, can question her. She will also publish her expenses and her diary “so people can see that I am serving them, not myself”.

In addition, she is planning free four-week summer schools for 18-24 year olds on politics and the community which she will fund from her MP’s pay – and she will take on an apprentice each year and pay them living wage.

“I want to use my money so that young people get involved in the community and politics,” she says. “Politics is a million miles away from most people. The link is so broken that we have to fix it or else it will always be the rich and privileged who run the country.

“I want someone from Great Yarmouth to go on to be an MP rather than someone born into privilege.”