When Dover and the rest of East Kent was faced with the economic impact of the global recession and the worst international financial crisis in 60 years, we were not prepared to sit back and  let the recession take its course. The Government’s  priority was to protect homes, jobs and businesses and that’s exactly what we’ve done.

We’ve taken action to support people and the economy.  If we’d repeated the experience of the Tory recession in the 1990s, house repossessions and businesses failures would have been twice as high and well over a million more people would have lost their jobs.

You only have to look at the records to see the difference. For instance, when I was fighting the Dover & Deal seat in 1992 and John Major was Prime Minister unemployment here was soaring and by Christmas of that year we had 5,282 people on the dole.  Even though we’ve been battered by the global recession, the comparable figure for claimants this Christmas was over three thousand less and falling – still  too high of course but a great deal better than in the Tory years.

During those dark days we really were in crisis in East Kent and the former mining villages felt the pain worst of all.  I can remember  youth unemployment in Aylesham reaching obscenely high levels and for a period a quarter of their young people were without work which led to parents  telling their children that education was a waste of time down here because there just weren’t any jobs to go to when they left school.

Last week’s independently verified figures showed unemployment in our patch and in the whole of the UK  reducing and the economic indicators published this week shows that the UK economy has returned to modest growth again and therefore we have officially  come out of recession. But we need to be cautious, we mustn’t put too much reliance on one set of figures and we mustn’t put the recovery at risk by making deep cuts now.  The last thing our area needs is for this recovery to be wrecked due to premature action.

It’s clear that the General Election battle lines will be drawn each side of the divide between the two main parties on their differing strategies to nurture and sustain our economic recovery. We will be saying that Labour will secure the recovery and make sure hard working people benefit from the upturn.  We will halve the deficit in four years by cutting waste and low priority spending, boosting growth and bringing in fair taxes including our new 50p rate for those earning over £150,000 and we’ll be putting a levy on bankers bonuses.

The Tories say they would cut the deficit earlier by cutting support to the economy now but that would threaten the recovery, destroy jobs and be very painful for working people,  which puts me in mind of the philosophy they promoted when they were last in office – if it isn’t hurting it isn’t working.