Batley and Spen has a high proportion of people working in manufacturing, and we can boast the full range of industries, including high-skilled, precision engineering. We manufacture all sorts, from beds to biscuits and from carpets to lathes. We also have some of the best fish and chips in the country and some of the best curries in the world.
Many businesses in Yorkshire want the security and stability of Britain's continued membership of the European Union, a cause I look forward to championing passionately in this place and elsewhere.
The government is slowly waking up to the scale of the personal tragedy of delayed autism diagnosis.
Our communities have been deeply enhanced by immigration, be it of Irish Catholics across the constituency or of Muslims from Gujarat in India or from Pakistan, principally from Kashmir.
Businesses in my constituency want help to address the skills mismatch at local level which leaves employers with staff shortages and young people without jobs. They want access to reliable sources of finance, including a network of local banks.
I was an aid worker for a decade and then worked in the voluntary sector in the U.K. on U.K. child poverty and with the NSPCC and Save the Children. But I had worked for ten years with Oxfam.
The spirit of non-conformity is as prevalent now in my part of west Yorkshire as it was in the time of my two immediate predecessors, Mike Wood and Elizabeth Peacock.
It is time to give city and county regions the powers and resources they need to promote growth, and I will happily work with all of those who are genuinely committed to building an economic powerhouse in the north.
Yorkshire folk are not fools: talk about devolving power to cities and regions, while simultaneously stripping them of the resources to deliver and subjecting northern councils such as Kirklees to the harshest of cuts, is not compatible with a worthy commitment to building a northern powerhouse to drive growth and prosperity.
I am Batley and Spen born and bred, and I could not be prouder of that. I am proud that I was made in Yorkshire, and I am proud of the things we make in Yorkshire. Britain should be proud of that, too.
I never really grew up being political or Labour. It was just a realisation that where you were born mattered. That how you spoke mattered... who you knew mattered.
Assad's brutality has nurtured extremism and been its main recruiting sergeant.
I live on a big old Dutch barge by Tower Hill on the Thames.
I spent the summers packing toothpaste at a factory, working where my dad worked, and everyone else had gone on a gap year!
