General election: Labour’s Marie Tidball aims to ‘smash that glass ceiling’ as an MP in Sheffield

Marie Tidball, Labour Party’s candidate for Penistone and Stocksbridge, told the Local Democracy Reporting Service (LDRS) that she has been working hard to regain trust in the constituency – she never asked for anything for free.

This is not the first time Ms Tidball is standing to be an MP – in 2017, she stood in Oxford West and Abingdon where she finished third.

So she was asked why she should get in now and why in Penistone and Stocksbridge (rather than in Oxford where she spent all those years on the council).

Ms Tidball said: “Penistone and Stocksbridge is my home, the place I grew up, it’s very special to me.

“My mum and dad always told me to go out in the world and get some skills to help other people. The surgeries I had growing up here at Sheffield Children’s Hospital enabled me to walk and follow my ambitions but it was my amazing state education in Penistone that helped me catch up and go on to do a law degree and a doctorate at the University of Oxford.

“During that time I did a lot of work advocating for older people, disabled people and children facing education and health inequalities.

“I wanted to use those skills to stand in the area where I grew up with the people I grew up with.”

She said she had a lot of experience in politics – as a councillor in Oxford she was a senior cabinet member – and she would utilise this as the first person in over 100 years to have grown up here and to go on and become its member of parliament.

Ms Tidball described the stories she heard being out and about on the doorstep as “poignant” as she was told some are not able to afford beds for their children or wives and husbands have to spend a long time in hospitals while “because of the Tory bus cuts they have had to spend hundreds of pounds on taxis on top of the cost of living”.

She added she has seen NHS workers in tears on the doorstep “because of the state of the NHS”.

Ms Tidball said: “I want to use my advocacy skills and background in politics to be a really strong voice both here and in Westminster.”

She added only one per cent of the MPs in parliament have a disability and she was aiming to “smash that glass ceiling”.

Ms Tidball added: “You don’t work as hard as I work, and I have worked for two years (as Labour’s candidate), if you want the easy life – nothing in my life has ever been easy and it’s a battleground seat, the road to Downing Street runs through our constituency.”

She said her campaign was about “regaining the trust” and she wanted to earn that trust.

“It’s also a massive sacrifice – anyone who is standing as a candidate for two years while also having a full-time job entirely remotely pretty much and having a young family but that’s what service is and I really believe that”, Ms Tidball added.

MPs love to say they will be able to stand up for their constituents in parliament.

So Ms Tidball was asked how she would be able to influence – say – Keir Starmer and the cabinet on important issues concerning the people in Penistone and Stocksbridge.

She said she believed in “collective action” within the Labour Party and as such she was working with activists, councillors and people she was speaking with to come up with ideas and solutions that would work for the area.

Ms Tidball said having been on the doorsteps for two years has enabled her to “feed things back to the party”.

She said, for example, what she has heard on housing – estates being built without extra school places or GP places – she raised with the national shadow team at last year’s party conference.

Keir Starmer then talked about his plan to create developments with more school places, GP places and better infrastructure.

“So they listen”, Ms Tidball added.

Ms Tidball is very open about her disability and when she was asked whether she was in any way restricted by it and whether she had any bad experience on the doorstep, she said “it’s been very positive”.

She said “very often” people don’t even notice it and she is the one who brings it up so they can talk about what improvements are necessary.

Ms Tidball added: “I know what ‘good’ looked like back then and what we need to do to ensure the health and wellbeing of children or young people growing up with the kind of disabilities like mine so they have the best possible chances in life.”

She said there were more than four million disabled people in poverty in the country at the moment because “nothing has been done about it”.

She said: “Labour is saying we will do something about it, we will tackle the issues about access to work.”

What is the number one issue in Penistone and Stocksbridge, she was asked.

Ms Tidball said what Labour had to do was to deliver economic stability and that required growth.

She added: “What we’ve said, and this is particularly relevant in this constituency, was we were investing in up to £3 billion in green steel.

“I’ve been around the steelworks and I’ve been to the community union conference in the last two years because steel is a really important part of our communities here and it’s a really important part of our ability to grow and having a good industrial strategy and being able to manufacture things here in Britain.”

She also mentioned the importance of the connection of the communities in the constituency – public transport.

“We need good quality public transport and we said we would get more power to local areas with our Take Back Control Act and we would bring buses back to public control and that would be a massive difference to our area in South Yorkshire,” Ms Tidball said.

She mentioned how public transport used to be in such a good state but it was “shocking to see” how much South Yorkshire lost under the current government.

Another issue she raised was the promise of rejuvenating the high streets which was a “really big” priority of hers.

She said the plan was to cut business rates for small businesses which “will make a difference”.

After July 4, there is a possibility that the prime minister, all six Sheffield MPs, the South Yorkshire mayor, the leader of Sheffield City Council, Barnsley Metropolitan Borough Council, Rotherham Metropolitan Borough Council and the City of Doncaster Council are all going to be Labour politicians.

So who is going to hold accountable whom?

Ms Tidball said for 14 years elected Labour politicians “fought to run good public services” while the national government has been Conservative (with the Liberal Democrats between 2010 and 2015).

She said “in that period, Barnsley lost about £1.2bn in central government funding, Sheffield lost about £2.2bn”.

Ms Tidball said a Labour government would be able to work in tandem with Oliver Coppard (the South Yorkshire mayor), Sir Steve Houghton (the leader of Barnsley Council) and all the local leaders to improve services.

“The accountability is the people, I think they are going to be the people that are going to hold us to task”, she added.