Tag Archives: liz jarvis

Maiden speech: Liz Jarvis, MP for Eastleigh

Liz Jarvis, the Lib Dem MP for Eastleigh, made her maiden speech on 5 September on a debate on the Great British Energy Bill. Enjoy.

The text is below:

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Our new MPs: Chris Coghlan, Olly Glover, Josh Babarinde, Liz Jarvis, Helen Maguire

Chris Coghlan MP:  Dorking and Horley

Chris stood to be Dorking and Horley’s Lib Dem MP because this is where he lives with his wife and three little girls, and where he grew up.

Chris spent a decade working in finance, in New York for Deloitte and a hedge fund in London, before pursuing a career in public service. He joined the Foreign Office’s counter-terrorism department, founded the international development charity Grow Movement, and served as an officer in the army reserve. In 2020 Chris was called up by the army and embedded as a military advisor with Iraqi forces fighting ISIS.

Chris’s top priorities for Dorking and Horley are urgent action to cut the cost of living, more NHS dentists and stopping sewage dumping in our rivers.

Chris says “I love this area, but I realise how very different things are from when I was young. Our NHS is on its knees. It’s a disgrace that the top reason for children being admitted to hospitals is tooth decay because they can’t make an appointment with a dentist.

We have a Conservative government that’s allowed our rivers to be polluted with record levels of raw sewage. A government that has condemned local taxpayers to pay spiralling mortgages and rent in a cost-of-living crisis.”

Twitter: @_chris_coghlan

Olly Glover MP: Didcot and Wantage

Olly Glover lives in Milton. He has spent all his working life on the railways, having held a range of senior operational management positions in Network Rail and train operating companies. These have involved leading large teams of train drivers, responsibility for major control centres, working in partnership with trade unions, and hands-on roles managing disruption, on the tracks and on station concourses. Olly now works as a consultant, using his knowledge to help railway companies in the UK and abroad to improve their operations.

Olly is a parish councillor in his village, a town councillor in Didcot, and volunteers as a visitor to people living with motor neurone disease.

Through his work and volunteering, Olly has a long record of serving the public and understanding people’s needs and frustrations.

Olly’s priorities for the constituency are campaigning for the NHS facilities that the area’s growing population need, continuing his work pressing for a new railway station in Grove, and supporting the Lib Dem plan to end sewage dumping and reform the water industry.

Twitter: @ollygloerld

Josh Babarinde MP: Eastbourne

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Liz Jarvis on her experience of unemployment as a single parent

An article with the headline “I lost my job in the last recession. I know how difficult it will be for single parents this time” is compulsory reading, especially when written by a journalist who is also a Lib Dem member.

Liz Jarvis gives a very personal account of the impact of the recession on her and her family:

Every time more job losses are announced during this crisis I think of all the people behind the headlines, the lives affected, and the knock-on effect for local communities. I lost my job in the last recession and all opportunities seemed to vanish overnight. As a single parent of one, my little family’s financial situation quickly became very precarious indeed. For six months I struggled to find any regular paid work at all, and I was at risk of losing the roof over our heads.

The speed at which all this escalated was terrifying. As the bills mounted up I started to dread every text message, every phone call, every letter. The credit crunch had already bitten. I sold what I could and sometimes skipped meals so my son could eat. We had been on our own since he was 18 months old and being able to provide for him was massively important to me.

Like those excluded from government support during this crisis and the “forgotten freelancers”, because I had been on a contract I wasn’t entitled to much in the way of benefits, and had never been in the position to save for a deluge of rainy days, I applied for countless jobs and temp positions without receiving any reply. Christmas saw me scouring recruitment sites.

And she goes on to consider the current crisis and its impact, especially on women:

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Liz Jarvis on gaining the confidence to stand as a parliamentary candidate

This weekend, a group of Lib Dem women will gather in a hotel in Milton Keynes for a weekend which, for some if not all of them, could be life-changing.

The third Future Women MPs weekend in the last year or so takes place. I remember going on a weekend like that back in the 90s and I made friends for life as well as learned valuable skills.

Caroline Voaden, now an MEP, went on one of these events last year along with a load of young Scottish women.

As this takes place, Liz Jarvis, a London writer who joined us last year after a lifetime of supporting Labour, has written for The Parliament Project about her experience in the party and how a Parliament Project initiative helped her develop the confidence to stand:

Through Lib Dem Women I found a mentor from the party’s Campaign for Gender Balance; she was incredibly encouraging and gave me lots of invaluable support and advice for what I needed to do to achieve my goal of becoming an approved parliamentary candidate. She also helped me see that my imagined barriers to standing – my age, the fact I haven’t been a career politician – could actually be turned into positives. I also discovered the Parliament Project via Twitter, and was thrilled when I was accepted on to the 12 week online Peer Support Circles at the start of January.

The sessions were every fortnight, which was manageable, and I loved ‘meeting’ the other women and sharing our political journeys, as well as the assignments we were given, which were fun and challenging. Each session felt as though we were making progress and exchanging ideas and experiences was incredibly rewarding.

And it’s helped her on her journey in the Lib Dems:

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Liz Jarvis explains why she joined Lib Dems from Labour

I’ve been talking to Liz Jarvis, who joined the Lib Dems from Labour in the Summer a bit on Twitter. Remarkably, out of 700,000 people, we found each other to have a brief conversation at the People’s Vote march in October. She’s written for the Independent Voices website about why she joined us.

She was pretty involved in the Labour Party as a student and voted Labour throughout her adult life. When the Liberal Democrats went into coalition with the Tories, any positive feelings she had towards our party evaporated and she continued to vote Labour. But along came Jeremy Corbyn:

I might have remained “soft” Labour but for the perfect storm of Jeremy Corbyn and Brexit. The latter is quite simply anathema to me, not just because I’m the granddaughter of immigrants, but because I believe so strongly in freedom of movement, and that the evidence backs up the overwhelming truth that we are better off in the EU than we can possibly be out of it.

The Momentum-propelled adulation of Jeremy Corbyn left me cold. I was also increasingly uneasy about the accusations of anti-Semitism in the Labour Party, and for the first time in my voting life I started to feel politically homeless.

Last summer I explained how I was feeling to a friend who had joined the Lib Dems, and he asked me why I was still supporting Labour. After a heated debate, the conclusion was tribalism. I had been clinging on to my political heritage and the promise of what might have been, had Blair not led Britain to war in Iraq, had Corbyn not become leader, had David Miliband stuck around or Ed not eaten that bacon sandwich.

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