The battle to be the next MP for Keighley and Ilkley is hotting up
Welcome to The Ilkley Journal roundup 🗞️
By Narinder Purba
Welcome to the latest roundup (number four, if you’re counting), which takes on more of a general election feel. Expect more of this over the next month, too, as we’re shifting our resources to cover the election in more detail.
Of course, where there’s a local story that’s worth covering, we’ll report it, but our focus is definitely going to be on everything that’s happening with the campaign to be the next MP of Keighley and Ilkley and nationally, too. More on this below.
NEWS IN BRIEF 🚨
Airedale Hospital’s armed forces advocate named as finalist individual Advocate of the Year award
Airedale NHS Foundation Trust’s armed forces advocate has been named as a finalist for the individual advocate of the year award at the British Ex-Forces in Business Awards.
Martin Flint Johnson, who was appointed to the new role at the trust in 2022, made it to the shortlist along with 11 other veterans and reservists for his work in supporting ex-forces personnel and veterans.
Kathryn Hooper, business manager at the hospital, said that it was great to see Martin’s work being recognised at a national level:
“I am very proud of him. Martin’s commitment to supporting the armed forces community is clear to see, his ability to draw on his own experiences as an army veteran makes the delivery of his role as armed forces advocate authentic and informed.
Martin, who served in the army with the Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers for 10 years, specialises in identifying and speaking to ex-armed forces or serving personnel who come into the hospital to see if they can benefit from additional support.
“While it is always nice to be nominated for an award, I know that supporting individuals and their families from the armed Forces community is what gives Martin the most satisfaction,” Kathryn added. “Well done Martin on this nomination.”
The winner of the individual advocate of the year award will be announced on 27 June at the British Ex-Forces in Business Awards gala ceremony.
Ilkley Clean River Group: what needs to be done to clean up rivers lakes and seas
The Ilkley Clean River Group has announced the date for a free event that will seek to put forward an approach to cleaning up the country’s rivers, lakes and seas for good.
Cleaning up our Rivers, Lakes & Seas – The Answers will take place on 22 September at Christchurch in Ilkley and structured around two sessions.
Session 1, featuring contributions from Jamie Woodward, professor of physical geography at the University of Manchester and Rick Battarbee, emeritus professor of geography at UCL, will explore the current state of what quality in rivers, seas and lakes and known solutions.
Session 2, which will be delivered by Becky Malby, visiting professor at the University of York and member of Ilkley Clean River Group, and Frances Cleaver, professor of political ecology at Lancaster University, is focused on the “story of Ilkley and the investment to secure water quality” in the town.
The group stated:
“This event goes beyond analysing the problems to setting out what needs to happen now to clean up our nation’s rivers, lakes and seas.
“We aim to keep pollution for profit firmly in the spotlight post the election, providing participants with the opportunity to find out how the country can address the state of our rivers, lakes and seas.”
It added that “the event is aimed at campaigners, national lobby organisations, regulators, water service providers and policy makers.
Earlier this year, Feargal Sharkey, the former punk rocker turned clean water campaigner, lauded the work done by the Ilkley Clean River Group during a visit to the town.
"I wanted to come up and just give … an enormous round of applause to the extraordinary people that are the Ilkley Clean River Group,” he said in March. "What took me by surprise and delight was their sheer brilliance and capability.”
THE LEAD 📰
There are no MPs. Only future MPs
The 2024 general election campaign is well and truly underway and, for good or ill, there is no real escaping it (although, at times you probably can – who, after all, other than real political aficionados, are happy to give up their Friday evening to watch representatives from the seven biggest political parties engage in a debate, especially after Sunak and Starmer’s head-to-head? The editor: me.).
There has been comedy. Stunt or no stunt, the Lib Dems’ leader Ed Davey falling into the water multiple times has made for light entertainment. There have been stumbles, like Labour’s mishandling of the investigation into Diane Abbot. And there have been big shocks. Did anyone really see Nigel Farage standing to be an MP … again?
But there you go. It’s 2024. And anything can happen over the next four weeks running up to polling day.
We’re going to be on hand to report on the latest happenings locally and nationally and try and make sense of it all – because it really does feel like one of the most momentous general elections we’ve had in a very long time. To kick things off, we’ve put together a simple Q&A to get you up to speed.
Keighley and Ilkley constituency … is that new?
Only in name – which is is a good thing. There has been, as the Boundary Commission for England noted in its 2023 review of parliamentary constituency boundaries in England, “strong support” for the name to be updated for a while now.
Robbie Moore, who was MP for Keighley up until the dissolution of Parliament on 30 May, had lobbied to get the name updated, saying that it would “better reflect our two principal towns”.
“With a population of around 15,000, Ilkley is the second most prominent town within the constituency,” he said last year. “Given that many people already refer to Ilkley in our constituency name, it is only right that both areas are recognised in this name change.”
Who’s running to be the next MP for Keighley and Ilkley?
So far four candidates have announced their intentions to be the next MP for Keighley and Ilkley. For the Conservatives, we have Moore, who was MP between 2019 and 2024. Labour, meanwhile, has put forward John Grogan, who was also MP for Keighley between 2017 and 2019.
Elsewhere, the Green Party has announced John Wood as their candidate, who may be feeling emboldened by Ros Green’s recent win in Ilkley (although he did, recently, end up in fourth place at last month’s local elections for Windhill and Wrose). And then, so far, we have Vaz Shabir, very much the wildcard, who is standing as an independent (he recently stood to be a councillor for Keighley Central where he came in second place).
What are they pitching?
Grogan’s overarching theme echoes Labour’s one-word national message of change – a changed Labour party, a change from 14 years of Tories – arguing that the “Conservatives have let us down nationally and locally”. He says:
“It’s time for ordinary people. Nobody left behind, nobody held back.”
Moore, while the former incumbent and a true blue Conservative, is also talking about change, explaining that he’s “learnt that real change within our community starts not from the top down but from the ground up – with local people first”. He says:
“YOU and YOUR priorities matter to me. It is what I care about.”
Shabir, the relative unknown, is taking an entirely different position, focusing his messaging heavily on the ongoing Israel-Gaza war (although, from a glance of his recent social media posts, he’s starting to talk more about local politics). He says:
“This is a general election. A vote for Robbie Moore is a vote for Sunak. A vote for John Grogan is a vote for Starmer.”
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At the time of writing, we have very little information on Wood, except for the following:
“John will stand up for future generations and will convey the need for real hope and change at this election.”
What happened at the last general election in 2019 for Keighley and Ilkley?
Moore was elected as MP, with Grogan losing his seat after only two years. It was very close. The Conservatives got 25,298 votes (48.1%), while Labour secured 23,080 (43.9%). There were just 2,218 votes in it.
They were both also some distance away from Tom Franks, the Lib Dems candidate, who ended up in third place with 2,573 (4.9%). In fourth place at that election was the Brexit Party – it was officially rebranded as Reform UK in 2021 in case you’re wondering what happened to it – and in fifth place was The Yorkshire Party.
Moore’s win reflected the relative mood of the nation, that the idea of having Boris Johnson as prime minister – who promised to get Brexit done – and, in turn, five more years of Conservative government, was much more palatable than having Labour’s Jeremy Corbyn – who was pledging to bring about “real change” and a second Brexit referendum of sorts – as prime minister.
It was arguably a Brexit general election. As Georgina Sturge, a statistical researcher, noted in the House of Commons Library in 2020:
“Fifty eight seats switched to the Conservatives in the 2019 general election. Of these constituencies, 55 voted leave in the 2016 EU referendum.”
And the general election before that? It was in 2017?
It was. Taking place just two years after prime minister David Cameron secured a slim majority of 12 seats – having held the EU membership referendum in 2016 and lost (he wanted to remain), he subsequently resigned as PM and then quit as an MP only to return to mainstream politics at the end of last year as a lord and as foreign secretary – the general election was supposed to cement Theresa May’s leadership of the Conservative Party but left her weakened and Parliament hung.
In Keighley, Grogan managed to make up for his 2015 loss to the Conservatives’ Kris Hopkins by securing just 239 more votes than Hopkins time around (who had been the MP since 2010). It was part of a brief, often overlooked Labour bounce back that wasn’t to last (Corbyn won 40% of the votes).
THE ILKLEY JOURNAL VIEW 📢
Entertaining? Yes, sort of. Helpful? No, not really
In the end, the first proper debate of the election, between the only two candidates in the running to be prime minister, turned out to be more of a shouty, ad hominem pub argument that is palpably a good few beers in. Neither Keir Starmer nor Rishi Sunak came out of it particularly well, with the former underwhelming and overly cautious and the latter combative and characteristically tetchy.
There was no substance. There was no depth. And there was no detail. In contrast, there were plenty of soundbites, non-sequiturs, platitudes and heuristics. I will cut taxes. The plan is working. NHS waiting lists have gone up. We will smash the gangs ….
We’ve heard it all before and we’ll hear it all again over the course of the next month – answers to questions not asked, slogans rolled out time after time and catchy buzzwords repeated to death, all seemingly to cater to the instant, snappy and fleeting way communication is disseminated and consumed in this, the twenty-fourth year of the twenty-first century.
There were also disturbing falsehoods, like the Conservatives’ claim that Labour would hit British households with a £2,000 tax raid if elected. It has since come to light that the Tories were advised by James Bowler, the permanent secretary to the treasury, that their assessment of Labour’s tax plans, which is how they’ve come to that nebulous figure, “should not be presented as having been produced by the civil service”.
We didn’t learn anything new from the debate and we didn’t come out of it feeling inspired, better informed or optimistic about the future. What we got instead was entertainment, popcorn politics made for TV and social media. What we wanted – what we needed – was higher quality discourse characterised by depth, vision and big, actionable ideas about how to transform society in a way that benefits everyone and not at the expense of the planet.
CULTURE 🎤
Rehearsals for the Ilkley Musical Theatre Society’s winter production of West Side Story at Kings Hall & Winter Gardens are underway, with around 20 young people from around the surrounding area beginning to familiarise themselves with the iconic 20th-century musical.
The show is being directed by Mark Allan, who is also responsible for designing the stage with help from members of the society. Choreography is by Catherine Gregory. Mark said:
"Ilkley Musical Theatre Society is thrilled to bring the classic musical West Side Story to Ilkley audiences. It is great to see young people in 2024 enthused and excited to perform a show written well over 50 years ago.
“This musical is filled with themes that are as relevant today as they were back then, such as bigotry, love, anger and revenge.”
Formerly the Ilkley Amateur Operatic Society, the group rebranded as the Ilkley Musical Theatre Society in 2023 to better reflect how it sees itself going forward as it marked 100 years since being founded. The first show it performed was Babes in the Wood and the most recent was a production of Sunset Boulevard.
Tickets for the show, which takes place Wednesday 13 November to Sat 16 November are now available to purchase here.