1 week Ago By Kit Sandeman
Did you know with a Digital subscription to Yorkshire Post, you can get access to all of our premium content, as well as benefiting from fewer ads, loyalty rewards and much more. During a career in screenwriting, primarily in children’s TV, her second of three children was born with complex needs. Advertisement Advertisement “At that point I sort of entered an underworld of families with children with special educational needs and disabilities (SEND), back in 1998.
"I just got involved with a small group of parents and we became a sort of support group. “It started off with a campaign in York where I was living to get automatic doors fitted at the local hospital. Advertisement Advertisement “One campaign grew into another campaign, one after the other.
“I just decided that I’d spent so many years kicking doors down at a grass-roots level to get things done for families with children with SEND, I thought wouldn’t it be absolutely marvellous not to be kicking doors down at the bottom but actually be at the top, looking at legislation, and seeing how we can improve things for families like mine.” She said impatience, a sense of urgency and “sheer bloody mindedness” had compelled her to seek election, but that when she first started getting involved in activism the idea of being an MP “never even occurred to me. Advertisement Advertisement “People like me don’t get to be MPs.
It was just completely unobtainable. “I’d been a member of Labour for many years, but my activism was the miners’ strike, anti-apartheid, that sort of thing. “It was only when my son was born that politics wasn’t about other people, it became personal.
“So I’m an accidental MP but I’m absolutely determined to be a good one.”.
