David Young

David Young was Richard Crossman's constituency chairman in the Coventry East Labour Party from 1964 to 1968, when I was Crossman's Parliamentary Private Secretary. Crossman believed that Young was a loyal and decisive chairman and deserved to become a Member of Parliament, which indeed he did, in 1974, after trying for South Worcestershire in 1959, Banbury in 1966 and Bath in 1970.

In the general election of February 1974, his was an important Labour gain when he beat the Conservative Laurence Reed by 19,833 votes to 18,220, Tim Ackroyd gaining 8,728 for the Liberals and Geoffrey Booth 1,259 for the National Front. For the next quarter of a century, Young, by dint of solid constituency work, helping many people, clung on to his fiefdom by the proverbial skin of his teeth.

David Young was a Scot, born in Greenock in 1930 and educated at Greenock Academy, where he had the interest of a famous headmaster, James W. Chadwin. He was inspired to go into teaching by the quality of his own teachers. He went on to Glasgow University and St Paul's Teacher Training College, in Cheltenham, and became a history teacher. He joined the Labour Party in 1955 and contested the hopeless seats of South Worcestershire, Banbury and Bath. Neil Marten, who was the Conservative MP for Banbury at that time, held the highest regard for Young's decency and honesty of purpose.

When he arrived at the House of Commons at an age more advanced than he would have wished, Young provided solid service on local- government legislation as a result of his membership of Nuneaton Borough Council. Making his maiden speech on 1 May 1974, he expressed

concern at what has appeared to be the playing off of the comprehensive school against the grammar school. What is at stake is the question whether we are in favour of selection or against it. In

mixed districts such as my own, which have some very good grammar schools and in other parts some very good comprehensive schools, if we agree in principle that we cannot mix the two, how is a choice to be made? Are we to call our former secondary modern schools "comprehensive" and simply adopt the palliative of a change of name?

The Labour Party stands for a positive approach. I sometimes wonder how many of us would be in this chamber today if a form of selection had been applied to us similar to that which is applied to children in our education system.

Young visited the Falklands twice and was a protagonist of the interests of the islanders during the Falklands War of 1982. Sponsored by the Gulf Centre for Arab Studies in 1988, he visited Iraq and came back to warn us that vast amounts of arms exports from the West might be misused by the then young ruler of Iraq, Saddam Hussein. He was one of very few MPs in the 1980s to voice doubts about human rights in Iraq.

Truth to tell, Young was never the success in the House of Commons which was predicted for him in earlier years. It was a classic case of being elected too late. As Jean Corston put it to a meeting of the Parliamentary Labour Party yesterday: "When the occasion demanded it, David Young could be a very powerful orator indeed, but this secret weapon was infrequently deployed."

In 1983, as a result of parliamentary boundary changes, Young won the nomination to fight the new seat of Bolton South East by the narrowest of margins. After messy selection conferences, Young's relationship with the local party began to deteriorate and in 1994 he became the first sitting Labour MP to be deselected under OMOV (One Member One Vote). He retired from Parliament in 1997, to be succeeded by Brian Iddon.

In recent years, Young became increasingly disaffected from the party and wrote a bitter letter to the press, saying:

As the longest-serving MP Labour has ever had in Bolton, I got the go-ahead for what is now the Royal Bolton Hospital. But New Labour has effectively destroyed all I worked for over 23 years.

The hospital is deep in debt, bottom of the league of North-West hospitals, and 80-year-old patients are kept on trolleys in its corridors for 10 hours without meals. Parking is a nightmare. Patients, including pensioners, have to pay for any visit, no matter how short, and have to arrive half an hour before their appointment to try to get a parking space.

As a pensioner, I find New Labour, at national and local level, as ineffective as I find the management of this hospital. I know this from my experience of the sharp end. I saw my first wife die slowly after a stroke while New Labour is impervious to the costs involved.

I am sad that Young, who for so many years was a loyal Labour parliamentary henchman, should have been reduced to bitterness.

Tam Dalyell