and for coming I see on the wall uh that
almost exactly one year ago the late
right honorable sir Gerald Koffman
officially opened this building so let
me take a moment to remember my very
long and close friendship with him which
lasted from the day that we met in the
rather gloomy apartment behind
Westminster Cathedral of the late Harold
Wilson the four times prime
minister this
was uh in
1985 and two years later I joined sir
Gerald in the House of Commons and I sat
with him there for almost 30 years we
traveled the length and breadth of this
country together speaking on issues that
were dear to both of our hearts
I could scarcely have had a closer
friend in Parliament than sir Gerald and
to see his name now on that PL uh makes
me feel a little bit sad because he's no
longer with us and we all of us I think
will miss him not least the people in
this
constituency uh that he served for
staggering 47
years and I was already feeling sad
anyway and although I'm going to I
promise you turn to local issues I hope
you will forgive me if I spend a few
moments talking about the overarching
atmosphere that we now uh convene
together under which has led to the
cancellation of open Street campaigning
and we ourselves will not be campaigning
on the streets
uh
today because of the mass m that took
place in London yesterday following as
it does on an even bigger Act of mass
murder in Manchester two weeks
ago which followed in turn the previous
month during this campaign there have
been
three terrorist atrocities in this
country that have killed almost 5050
people have hospitalized hundreds of
people terrorized thousands of people
traumatized people in a way from which
they may take a very long time to
recover if recover entirely they ever
do and so we can't have a meeting this
day without
reflecting on the
fact that it is now a
fact that we have mass murderers living
amongst
us you see these people did not
arrive from anywhere
else the mass murer in Manchester
murdered his own
neighbors he murdered the people with
whom he went to school
University people with whom he played
football people who had welcomed him and
his family in to this country when they
fled
persecution but none of that
counted when he decided to incinerate
himself and in a far ball of nails and
ball
bearings tear the life out of small
children in the manchest
arena this is a very serious problem for
us
that we have such murderers in our
midst if the killers had arrived from
somewhere
else they shipped in to attack
us the damage would have been equally
Grievous of course but the conclusions
would be
different and
the slogan
of pray for Manchester pray for
London of unity and solidarity and all
of these very fine ideas and words are
necessary but they're not
sufficient we have
to get a grip on the security situation
in this
country and we have not yet got a grip
of that
situation the
streets the
venues are not safe from from these
terrorist murderers someone who is ready
to exchange their lives for the lives of
as many others that they can take with
them is a very difficult enemy to fight
but fight them we must identify them we
must disrupt them we must infiltrate
them we
must because although the road to this
hell has been paved with many
things none of which I left unidentified
in the course of that
Journey the road which led us to this is
quite easily tracked and traced and I'm
one of those along with Jeremy
Corbin and some small number of others
in the British Parliament did track and
Trace at the
time but this is not the time
to concentrate on those
because whilst
avoiding
the things which led to this is
important crushing what is now is
equally
important because we can't accept that
our children should be mothered I have
four children under 10 I can't accept
I'm living in a country where they might
be slaughtered in such a way God forbid
and neither can any of you in regard to
your own children or your
grandchildren so get to grips with this
we simply must we have no choice about
that
tears which are natural will not solve
this just crying about what is
happening will not solve
it we need concrete measures
and men and
women who can seriously get a grip on
this security
situation I apologize to those who have
just come in might have expected me to
be speaking about the nighttime economy
and the problems in russom and I
shall but we cannot
ignore the circumstances in which this
meeting is taking place today
have been under fantastic
pressure of real time
cuts and yet after the police and the
firefighters who do we need next we need
people to be there on London Bridge or
at the Manchester
Arena attending
to the dying and the hideously
injured there's no getting away away
from this I'd be lying to you if I
didn't deal with
it we need more police we need more
firefighters we need better funded
health care and Health
Services and we need better border
control and Border guards I don't
know who the mass murderers last night
were Sky News are saying they were
pakistanis from East London and there
have been 12 arrests in barking we'll
have to wait to see their
names and whether they were born here or
whether they came here
but whichever and
whoever it's very
obvious that we have lost control of
this situation three terrorist attacks
in 3
months This Is
War I'm sorry to use that word but this
is war
the fact that other Wars helped fuel
this war is
obvious and I was one of the main
leaders of the movement against those
Wars but that doesn't absolve us of our
responsibility to defend our people in
this war here on our own so in our own
streets so we need more police we need
smarter police this child killer from
Fallowfield was
reported five times to the
authorities five
times including by a member of his own
family
including from the Imam in his own
mosque and yet
still he was able to travel freely back
and forward to Syria which is now to
rather which is now a nest of Isis and
alqaeda he was able to go there train as
a terrorist and come back back and
forward back and
forward even though five times he'd been
reported as someone on the road to the
kind of fanatic
extremism that exploded at the
Manchester Arena so we need more police
we need smarter police
we need
intelligence and we need more
intelligent
intelligence intelligence that doesn't
make matters worse but make makes
matters
better allows us to disrupt infiltrate
report on people who have murder in
their
heart
so never confuse me with a
liberal I've been saying that for DEC
decades I am not a liberal when it comes
to Law and Order when it comes to
terrorism I'd shoot these people down
dead
myself if I
could as the police admirably did in
just 8 minutes from the first emergency
call last night will be falling of the
last
terrorist but we have to get a grip of
this security
situation now the election is going
ahead on
Thursday as it
must because of course these attacks are
timed to undermine the election
undermine the Democracy Steven that you
spoke of in the
beginning to try and get us
to suspend our
democracy suspend our way of life
but we will not do
that and so the election goes ahead on
Thursday as it
must although of course it will now be
quite a different election over the next
3 days dominated by these issues of
which I speak now but that doesn't mean
that the constituency
issues cannot be aired and
debated which was the original
reason why we convened this meeting why
Steven convened this meeting and
probably the original reason why you
decided to come to
it I'll be frank with you and I can't
avoid this political point because I'm
running in the election I'm asking you
for your
votes Manchester's great world class but
this constituency has been left behind
whether it's our
potholes or our poverty or our
uncollected rubbish all the absolutely
chaotic planning system planning
department that we have
here and all of you if you live on this
side of the curry mile at least
know because I've been Steven took me
along
Alleyways the like of which I haven't
seen in this country at least
before where the rats are running
free where the garbage
is Stupify andly
rotting and is
uncollected and people with businesses
with no planning permission at all for
those
businesses people who had houses and
made them into
businesses without any planning per at
all without any
regulation at
all so that if you phone up and say this
burger
joint is disposing of its garbage just
out the back window and it's now a
mountain in which rats are
multiplying the planning office must
say which business which B join we don't
have a burger joint there we've got no
record of a burger joint
there you need an MP that's going to
make sure that the law is
enforced that regulation is
enforced you don't need an MP who will
be on the side of the Burger
Joint think about
it you don't need an MP who's going to
be in the pockets of The Burger
Joint you need an MP who's going to
stand up for you the people who have to
live
here and I am that
man and other people are I'm not that
man and you know what I am saying
so we've got the worst roads in
Manchester
why half half of the highways committee
on Manchester City Council are made up
of counselors from this
constituency and they can't even fix
their own roads never mind anybody
else's in fact it's worse than that they
have fixed everybody else's but they
haven't fixed ours
why I tell you why because they didn't
need
to cuz they took you for
granted they thought they already had
you in their pocket we have a saying I'm
Scottish of Irish extraction we have a
saying it's the squeaking wheel that
gets the
grease if the wheel doesn't squeak why
would you give it any
grease and you never
squeaked you kept on reelecting them
over and over again even though they did
nothing for
you why would
they why wouldn't they spend the money
that should have been spent here
somewhere else well there was something
politically for them to gain or a bit of
horse
trading I name no
names you support me to be the Lord
mayor and I'll support your roads
getting fixed before our
I'll support your services being
improved before
ours if there's something in it for me
you scratch my back I'll scratch yours
but nobody is scratching your
back that's the truth of
it why is poverty in this
constituency one of the worst in the
entire
country I had to triple check these
because even though they came from the
Save the Children
fund don't get much higher than the save
the children
fund
44% of the children in this constituency
are officially living in capital c
capital P child poverty
44% almost one in two of the children
here are in child poverty even more
extraordinarily 74 4% of the families
here are officially classed as lwi
income
families in Manchester the second city
in England one of the richest countries
in the world almost 3/4 of our families
are low-income families and almost half
of our children are living in child
poverty
why and what have
your political
Representatives done about it not enough
obviously not enough in fact they don't
even talk about it one of the counselors
at a meeting we attended in leum just a
week or two ago said he was sick and
tired of
hearing about the
problems in Gorton Manchester Gorton
constituency which includes rush I said
you might be sick and tired of it but
you're not as sick and tired as the
people who are suffering it yeah they're
even more sick and tired of it than you
are the question is what are you doing
about it and the truth is they're doing
nothing about it and why because they
didn't have
to so this area needs a change to me
that's screamingly
obvious it needs a
change because as Einstein said doing
the same thing over and over again and
expecting a different result is a sign
of
Madness if you do the same thing over
and over again you'll always get the
same result and the same result is
failure these people have failed
you and now they've put
up
a who's a creature of their own
machine an appara check from their own
machine with no distinguishing
characteristics
whatsoever if you think he's going to
change things here in Russ well good
luck to you cuz I'm perfectly certain
that he will not I'm perfectly certain
that if you elect abalan absolutely
nothing will change
here but if you elect me everybody will
sit up and take
notice everybody will know about it
and if I'm fighting for you everybody
will know about it because if it doesn't
sound
immodest when I'm fighting for something
everybody knows about
it
everybody because I speak about it
powerfully in
Parliament I speak about it on news
night on channel 4 news on Question Time
Andy fancy iel can on question
time they wouldn't dream of inviting him
on and if they did nobody would
understand what he was saying that's the
truth of it and you know it it's a
brutal hard truth but it's the truth of
it when I'm fighting for something
everybody knows about it and if I'm
fighting for you everybody will know
about it now for good or
bad your word is dominated by the
nighttime
economy and there's not much you can do
about that and it does
bring money and employment and so on
into the
area and we don't want to damage that
but we won't have the people who live
here paying the price for other people's
profits in the nighttime
economy we won't have rubbish dunked by
the nighttime economy on you we won't
have roads unrepaired
in fact we want a premium for
living in the area of a nighttime
economy we want the city to pay us
compensation in
services for living in an area of the
nighttime economy after all it's the
city as a whole that
benefits when I walk along Curry mile as
I do how many people do I meet do you
meet from outside of Manchester who've
come into Manchester to spend their
money that's wonderful but the city
needs to compensate you for the
difficulties of living chick by jaw with
a nighttime economy that means your
services should be
better than the services other people
enjoy not worse but
better and you all know that in fact
they
worse you are
getting
proverbially the wrong end of the stick
here and that's not good enough nand the
MP I'll make sure that everything
changes thanks very much for
coming