Patrick Hurley – 2024 Speech on the Loyal Address and Maiden Speech

The maiden speech made by Patrick Hurley, the Labour MP for Southport, in the House of Commons on 17 July 2024.

Thank you, Mr Deputy Speaker, for calling me to make my first speech as part of this important debate.

First, may I thank the right hon. Member for Herne Bay and Sandwich (Sir Roger Gale) for his contribution? May I also pay tribute to all those who are making their first speeches today? I wish them well today and for the remainder of this Parliament, and I hope that we each manage to repay the trust that our new constituents have placed in us.

I am led to believe that certain conventions apply to Members’ first speeches. I wish to assure the House that I will abide by those conventions. Accordingly, I wish to pay sincere tribute to my predecessor, Damien Moore, who diligently served Southport for the past seven years, paving the way for a new Government to ensure that the town’s best days lie ahead. I wish him nothing but the best for the future.

I also wish to refer to another of my predecessors as the MP for Southport, somebody already mentioned in today’s debate. At the 1865 general election, William Gladstone was elected as one of the three Members for the South Lancashire county constituency, which took in both Southport and my original hometown of Prescot. As I am sure Members will appreciate, this fact helped me somewhat over the past 12 months or so in drawing a link between where I was born and where I now represent in this House.

I expect that I am not alone among new Members in having been rather overwhelmed over the past couple of weeks by the mountain of email correspondence that we have received from constituents and others since being elected.

I can, though, take some comfort in the fact that my inbox refers solely to the much smaller constituency of Southport, rather than to the whole of the South Lancashire constituency that William Gladstone represented. I can only imagine the additional stresses and strains on Members in Gladstone’s day if they, too, had had access to a Parliamentary email address.

As well as being part of the same old county constituency, both Prescot and Southport were also within the boundaries of the old hundred of West Derby. This fact was brought further to my attention when the Boundary Commission announced during the last Parliament that the new Southport constituency would, from now onwards, also contain Tarleton and Hesketh Bank, two beautiful villages on the south coast of the Ribble. As a result of this change, I researched at my local library whereabouts the boundary of the West Derby hundred was, hoping that I would be able to say that Tarleton and Hesketh Bank had, many years ago, also been under the same county division as Southport. Alas, this was not to be. After quite some hours of research, I realised that the information I was looking for had actually been staring me in the face all along. It appears that the boundary between the hundreds of West Derby and Leyland lay along—would you believe?—Boundary Lane, and that Boundary Lane is situated in a hamlet called Hundred End. It is a lesson, I think, in not ignoring the obvious when it is right there in front of you.

My predecessors in previous Parliaments have talked about how they have felt that Southport has sometimes been taken for granted or taken advantage of, and so have subsequently sought to discuss and elevate divisions between the towns of the local borough. I wish to assure my constituents that I will take a different approach. Instead, I will work to ensure that our country’s new Government will not look to cause divisions with our neighbours, whether they be other countries thousands of miles away or even other towns just a few thousand yards away. Instead, I will work with colleagues to ensure that the Government will look to unite our country in the task of national renewal, because the politics that I believe in is a politics of the common good—a politics where each of us looks out for the wellbeing of the other, rather than tries to do others down.

Many towns and villages in this country have seen better days than over the past few years. Southport is no different. Whereas other areas have had, for instance, much-needed housing not built, or much-needed transport links not implemented—two issues that I am pleased to see the new Government are planning to address—Southport’s problems have manifested themselves in the temporary closure of the town’s much-loved pier, and in the town centre, whose main streets need more than their fair share of love and attention. I promise to work with colleagues in this House and beyond to fix these issues.

The new Government’s priority on economic growth is entirely the right approach. Unless we get the trend rate of growth back to pre-2008 levels, our task in this Parliament of reducing poverty will be much harder. The Government have my full support in their approach. I wish it to be known that I will do my utmost to make sure that Southport’s best days lie ahead of it, that the decline of recent years will be arrested and that the town’s fortunes will be turned around, and that I will work with good people of good faith to bring that about, no matter what their party affiliation. With that, I would like to thank you, Mr Deputy Speaker, for allowing me the opportunity to make my first speech in this place. I thank the House for the manner in which the speech was received.