A general election will take place in 2024 and with that political parties are gearing up to try and convince voters that they’re either still what you need, or better than the status quo.
While the battle in the Conservative stronghold of Mid-Beds rages on across the local authority border, a few shots have been fired across the bow of Labour MP Mohammad Yasin’s small majority by the Conservative’s Prospective Parliamentary Candidate (PPC) Pinder Chauhan.
Read: Northamptonshire councillor chosen as Bedford and Kempston Conservative Parliamentary candidate
Even though a general election has not yet been called, Pinder has already started campaigning.
You may have already seen her leaflets through your door or spoken to her on your doorstep, and read her letters in the Bedford Independent.
She also seems to have been instrumental in getting Mayor Tom Wootton to change his mind over that river festival fiasco in August.
Read: River Festival u-turn leaves unanswered questions despite Mayor’s promise “I am transparent”
Raring to get stuck in so much, she even called this reporter on a Sunday morning a few weeks ago, while he was trying to watch the last few minutes of the Women’s World Cup final, to say the River Festival was back on.
Apparently, the only time he was watching football on TV and hardly anyone else he knows was.
So who is Pinder, and is she likely to do more damage than her predecessor’s ‘blink and you’ll miss it’ campaign against Mohammad Yasin in 2019?
Read: Conservative PPC says, “I want Bedford to be England’s leading county town”
“Since January, I’ve wanted to give my all from the beginning because I want to get to know the constituency even more,” said Pinder, after being asked if she’s been busy.
It’s clear she wants to make a statement straight away about working hard for Bedford & Kempston, despite not being from the area herself. Although she does take great pride in telling me Bedford is more than just a town she visits from time to time.
And there is probably good reason for that.
Local links
When the Bedford Independent broke the news that someone who is currently serving as a Northampton councillor was picked to be the Conservative PPC, readers were quick to suggest not being from this area wasn’t going to do Pinder any favours.
Read: Northamptonshire councillor chosen as Bedford and Kempston Conservative Parliamentary candidate
Smiling with fond memories, however, she talks of her aunt, her father’s sister, who lives here and who she spent a lot of time with as a child, including going to the river festival “lots of times”.
Which is possibly one of the reasons she felt compelled to step in to prevent it being scaled back.
“I’ve got a lot of memories and friends here, I’m linked to some of the community groups on London Road so we’d do litter picks, plant trees, and I was involved in the Olympic torch route through Bedford and helped organise a street festival for that too.
“I feel really embedded in Bedford and I’m now here four to five days a week.”
Pinder also pointed out that Patrick Hall was from Birmingham, Richard Fuller was living in New York when selected, and Mohammad Yasin moved to Bedford when he was 21.
Homeless at 15
Pinder is no stranger to politics. She was elected as a Northamptonshire County Councillor in 2017 and re-elected in 2021.
She is the Chairman of South Northamptonshire Conservatives Association for Andrea Leadsom, and she is the Regional Chairman for the East Midlands Conservative Women’s Organisation.
An impressive career, so far, but Pinder says she’s never been one to just sit back and let things happen.
She says her parents have always instilled a strong work ethic into her and her siblings, plus experiencing homelessness as a teenager has had a lasting impact on her desire to help others.
“My father had a business and the recession hit really hard and a business partner also let him down,” she says, “so, at 15, a day before my GCSEs, we were packing up with 24 hours to just take whatever we could and we move into a homeless shelter.
“I lived there for two years with my brother and my sister and me in one room and my mum and dad in a separate room. They had three or four jobs and so I had to look after my brother and sister.
“It was difficult but my mum and dad had a really strong work ethic and they strongly believed in education and they really worked themselves out of that situation.
“But they also made sure that we were grounded, that we had everything we needed in terms of family and they always said as long as you have your family, as long as we’re all together, everything’s good.”
With this in mind, Pinder has tackling homelessness high on her agenda, and it’s here you start to see that Pinder is not necessarily your typical Conservative candidate.
While there are die-hard values that seem to underpin any Conservative candidate, the lines between party, politics and person are more blurred now than ever before.
If the coup against Boris Johnson last year has proven anything, MPs are no longer afraid to claim ‘I may wear the same rosette but I don’t [always] have to stand by our leader’.
That being said, when it comes to election time, there will be a manifesto and Pinder will need to defend policies at a national level, while also trying to weave into the conversation what she hopes to do for Bedford & Kempston, of which she says there is a long list.
She says her priorities of business, employment, education, and homelessness begin with children. “We need to have more joined up thinking between government and council departments.
“We need planning to talk to social services and social services to speak with those managing schools more easily, for example, so people don’t fall through the gaps.”
Something that may well have helped prevent the closure of schools and other public buildings built with RAAC, but just working with politicians isn’t the only thing Pinder has her eyes on.
“In my professional career I have been an HR business partner, I completed my degree in HR management and recently also finished my MBA in Senior Leadership and management,” she tells me.
“I also deal with global organisations, so when it comes to things like negotiating difficult contracts, or having conversations with the C-Suite level of organisations and problem solving, I can support the area while having those conversations.
“Because ultimately, when you are a Member of Parliament, you’re representing Bedford & Kempston in Parliament and you’re speaking to some really intelligent people and you need to have had that kind of experience on the ground.”
Business, employment, education, homelessness, are indeed subjects a local MP should indeed be getting stuck in with. However, Bedford is a unique space in many ways. We’ve an incredibly diverse population and a history that is often overlooked.
Are those the things that Pinder also believes need to be held up at a Government level?
“Bedford and Kempston need to be places where people want to come and stay,” said Pinder, “people want businesses to come and invest in our area and create more local jobs.
“To attract that investment, we need to have nice places in town where we can go and relax and and enjoy time with our families. We need a reason to go into the town centre and we need to make more of our local history and culture.
“When you go to Bath, when you go to York, you see all of their history and it’s vibrant, it’s alive, it’s there. You can walk the streets and you can feel it and see it.
“You don’t always see that here and so we we need to get more government funding to help with that.
“We need to make more of our university. We’re training students who are graduating and moving away. We need to try and keep their skills here.
“But, to do that, we need to create opportunities and encourage businesses to open here. If businesses aren’t coming here, if those jobs aren’t being created, we’re losing talent and skills and investment in our home.”
Conservative policy
When asked about immigration and recent oil and gas licences*, Pinder towed the party line, and she admits she has had to defend her colleagues.
“People have concerns, and we need to listen and address those. So, I’m having a lot of difficult conversations on the doorstep,” she says.
She also alludes to her former controversial colleague in Mid Beds, making a point of highlighting that Members of Parliament “should be attending and should be present”.
She’s asked if she feels the actions of MPs like Nadine Dorries have caused people to lose confidence in their MPs.
“Integrity is really important in politics. I think people should be personally accountable when they make those mistakes in politics.
“There are certain things you can’t defend and I wouldn’t defend anything that I didn’t feel was right,” she replies.
But can she win? While she may well be far-removed from the side of the Conservative Party many people love to hate, this is Bedford & Kempston and we’re not afraid to send messages at the expense of a local politician’s career.
Red vs blue battleground
Politically, Bedford & Kempston has been a red vs blue battleground since 1922, aside from a 14-year spell starting in 1983 when the constituency was part of North Bedfordshire.
It was reinstated in 1997 and Labour’s Patrick Hall was elected with a majority of 8,300 votes, He remained the MP for Bedford and Kempston for 13 more years until he was beaten by Conservative Richard Fuller.
Richard Fuller remained our MP for two terms, before handing the reigns over to Labour again. Mohammad Yasin has been our MP after gaining a tiny majority of 145 in the last general election in 2019.
Of course, there’s never any certainty but with a list of national issues that seems to grow weekly, Pinder will have a tough campaign on her hands, but she certainly seems up for it and win or lose she wants to make her mark.
“What matters for me is making an impact,” she says, “you could be a councillor one minute then unelected or you know you might be a member of Parliament one minute and then you’re not. But what matters is the impact that you’re able to make.”
The last couple of years in Bedford & Kempston have been relatively quiet from a national politics perspective. In some ways that’s been welcome, what with the rollercoaster of a ride we’ve seen at Bedford Borough Council.
But, that could be about to change and our Labour MP Mohammad Yasin might well have some work to do. Pinder certainly doesn’t look like the kind of person who will back down easily and the calm before the storm could be about to end.
*Interview took place prior to news around RAAC emerging.
