When people like what I do its wonderful,
when people don’t like what I do it can be,
it can be disheartening.
It's
I don’t like jugglers, but I have learnt how to be a fairly good one.
You
I’m a politician and I have my own political beliefs
and I have a political mantra.
The reality is that you have to balance that against the practical
the practical world in which you operate as a council leader.
I think I worked it out, we have got nine different parties represented on Bradford Council
and whilst I am more than happy to have the political confrontation,
sometimes, actually some compromise is the way forward.
So, you just got to keep all that going,
and the danger is you get weighed down by the minutiae
and take your eye off the long game that you need to be playing.
And what we’ve got to do is to engender that self-belief
which is there, but we’ve really got to bring it to the fore
and I think seeing things happen like City Park, like Westfield,
like the work that’s going on at the University
begins to make people feel that it’s not just rhetoric
and that actually it’s getting delivered.
City Park was a scheme that we inherited but took on,
if you like, the hard yards in terms of the building of it
and getting it started and finished against, I think,
what could be best described as a wave of scepticism by most people.
We were very clear of the reasons why we needed to do it,
because we know that good public realm will attract investment
which it has and the thing that pleases me incredibly
is the fact that the number of people who come up to me
and say "I thought City Park was a stupid idea but now it’s there we love it",
and it really is a major attraction to the city and also bringing in investment.
I had been a social worker, working in children homes in London
for a number of years and if I wanted to pursue that career
I needed to get a qualification - CQSW and degree
and looked at various courses, Bradford invited me for an interview,
it was a good course, I came to the city and just felt really at home here
almost from the day I came for interview so
I was lucky enough to be offered a place and came in the early eighties.
It was a four year course, I managed two years of it
before other activities got in the way.
I became President of the Students’ Union for 12 months
and then I became what was known as Area Convener for West Yorkshire
for the National Union of Students.
I did that for two years and when I was preparing to go back on my course
I discovered that I managed to break regulations and couldn’t get a grant,
it was at a time when we had grants, not loans,
or my fees paid to go back to university
so unfortunately that opportunity escaped me.
My involvement in the Students’ Union
gave me a lot of experience in public speaking
which has come in useful in my current role
but also about committee work, budgeting, running an organisation,
it was a good grounding above and beyond any academic.
I have been involved in politics since I could walk,
I come from a very political family,
my earliest memories are leafleting as a small child
with my older sister and brother in a pram with all
the leaflets piled on top of him, he’s never recovered.
But I think what coming to university did
is give me, if you like, a bit more confidence
in myself and also exposure to wider ideas.
Being in Bradford made me decide that I didn’t want to be anywhere else.
When I left university I could have gone anywhere,
I had no ties particularly anywhere,
could have got a job but I wanted to stay and commit myself to Bradford
and to this district as many ex-students have done.
I keep bumping into people who I was at university with
who are still here and still contributing to the local economy.