Jamie Driscoll
 Jamie Driscoll       | ||||||||||
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| Alma mater | Northumbria University | |||||||||
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Jamie Driscoll is a former Labour Party politician who currently serves as the metro mayor of the North of Tyne Combined Authority.
He says:
- "My politics are simple – I believe Britain should be run in the interests of the people who do the work. That includes those unable to work, and those retired from a lifetime of work. It’s not left-wing. It’s not right-wing. It’s common sense."[1]
Contents
Political career
Jamie Driscoll was elected to Newcastle City Council in 2018 to represent Monument ward. He was a member of the campaigning group Momentum. Driscoll is a member of Unite the Union (he joined Transport and General Workers' Union in 1986, before the merger with Amicus) and Tyne & Wear Anti-Fascist Association.
Mayor of North of Tyne
Jamie Driscoll stood for selection to be Labour's candidate in the 2019 North of Tyne mayoral election, defeating Newcastle council leader Nick Forbes in February 2019.[2] He ran as the more radical candidate after being supported by left-wing figures, including Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell, Noam Chomsky, Paul Mason, Clive Lewis and Laura Pidcock. He also had organisational support from Unite the Union, Momentum, RMT, Fire Brigades Union, TSSA and Aslef.
Driscoll ran on a platform with five primary pledges:
- Community Wealth Building
- Green Industrial Revolution
- Setting up Community Hubs
- Build Affordable Homes
- Meaningful Adult Education
On 6 May 2019, Jamie Driscoll became Mayor by winning the North of Tyne mayoral election with 56.1% of the vote, whereupon he called a climate emergency on the day he was elected. In August 2019, he told journalists that, despite the combined authority still needing to find its feet, he was pleased with the progress the authority had made in its first 100 days. Since then, he has invested in the economy to create over 5000 jobs, and safeguarded 3277 more, funded a non-coercive Working Homes programme to empower social housing residents with new skills, launched a Climate Change teachers programme partnering with the United Nations and put money into rural broadband infrastructure. He has also funded organisations like Kielder Observatory to get more children into STEM subjects, and funded a youth outreach project in collaboration with Newcastle United F.C.
North East Mayoral Combined Authority
Driscoll campaigned on his desire for all seven North East local authorities to come together to reform the original North East Combined Authority, made up of Northumberland County Council, Newcastle City Council, North Tyneside Council, Gateshead Council, South Tyneside Council, Sunderland City Council and Durham County Council. In December 2022, it was announced that Driscoll has succeeded in his ambition, spearheading the formation of the North East Mayoral Combined Authority.
Barred by Labour
In June 2023, Jamie Driscoll was barred from the selection process to determine a Labour Party candidate for Mayor of the North East. The decision was defended by Starmer-ally Baroness Chapman of Darlington as "simply guaranteeing the highest quality candidates". Unite the Union and its general secretary, Sharon Graham, criticised the decision to exclude Driscoll. Andy Burnham, and Steve Rotheram described the Labour Party as undemocratic, opaque and unfair. Aditya Chakraborttya wrote in The Guardian that Driscoll was a "victim of McCarthyism". He resigned from Labour and has since announced he will fight the 2024 North East mayoral election as an independent.[3]
Criticising Starmer's green rollback
In August 2023, Jamie Driscoll criticised Keir Starmer for watering down the Labour Party's environmental commitments, saying:
- “There is no contradiction between protecting us from the climate emergency, and prosperity. In fact, if you fail to protect us from the climate emergency, you’re going to lose all prosperity in the future.”
Labour’s leadership has blamed its failure to take Boris Johnson’s former constituency of Uxbridge and South Ruislip in the recent by-election on London mayor Sadiq Khan’s plan to expand the city’s ‘Ultra Low Emission Zone’ (ULEZ) into the area. But Driscoll said the party would have won the seat if it had stood by the scheme and campaigned against Tory cuts to bus services in the capital.
- “Labour would have won the Uxbridge by-election if they had said: ‘Yes, it (ULEZ) is a problem, because the Tories have cut public transport in London – if we had better buses here, which we will do, you’ll be better off,’” he said. “That would have won them it… A lot of people who voted Green because they were outraged by Labour’s abandonment of ULEZ probably would have voted Labour.”
Labour’s candidate in the by-election had publicly opposed the ULEZ expansion during the campaign; the Green candidate won 893 votes, more than the margin separating Labour from the Tories.
Jamie Driscoll also argued that politicians’ failure to take climate breakdown seriously contributed to falling trust in politics:
- “We’ve got a climate juggernaut hurtling towards us, and politicians are saying ‘some people in outer London didn’t like ULEZ so let’s just burn the planet because we need their votes’. Almost any rational person, which is the majority of the electorate, I still believe, would say: ‘It doesn’t add up any more.’”[4]
References
This page imported content from Wikipedia on 8 August 2023.Wikipedia is not affiliated with Wikispooks. Original page source here
