We'll miss your passion for the city

Local residents in Millfield, New England and the Bluebell Estate in Peterborough will have a strange sensation when they turn up to cast their votes at the polling station on the first Thursday in May this year.
Stewart Jackson MP's Westminster Life column in the Peterborough Telegraph - peterboroughtoday.co.ukStewart Jackson MP's Westminster Life column in the Peterborough Telegraph - peterboroughtoday.co.uk
Stewart Jackson MP's Westminster Life column in the Peterborough Telegraph - peterboroughtoday.co.uk

For the first time in 62 years, the ballot paper will not bear the name Charles Swift.

As revealed in last week’s paper, England’s longest serving local councillor will be hanging up his boots and retiring from the city council, after a distinguished career in the public life of our city, a leading light of the Peterborough Development Corporation, an ambassador for Peterborough, Leader of the council and a past Mayor. I doubt he will be letting go, relaxing, letting the grass grow under his feet but I do hope he gets more time with his tremendously supportive family and dedicated and loyal wife Brenda, his bicycle and his beloved chickens.

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Charles is in many ways the last of a lost generation of public spirited, community-focused champions of their friends and neighbours – no longer men and women from Perkins Engines and the railways, loyal Labour supporters, trades unionists and self-taught folk who earned their living in manual trades passed down through generations – but a new community of sometimes vulnerable elderly folk, Pakistani diaspora families and recently younger Eastern Europeans, from differing backgrounds and speaking many tongues, with many problems including poverty, poor housing, crime and family breakdown.

But Charles has continued to serve them all with a smile, with diligence and love for a community he came to as a teenager in the 1940s from Yorkshire: A proud Christian, a Salvationist, a stalwart school governor at Fulbridge Academy and a man who has delivered a Christmas card to every household in the North ward each year for six decades.

I met him almost sixteen years ago before my losing Parliamentary campaign in 2001. He offered me wise advice, was gracious and kind to both myself and my wife Sarah and he struck me as someone who might well have been a fearsome Socialist in his youth but was always prepared to put partisan differences aside if he thought that like him, you had your heart in the right place and cared about his ward and Peterborough as a whole and he would give you a hearing.

He’s not always been right – he fought tooth and nail against the transfer of municipal housing to Cross Keys Homes, which has largely been a good thing – but his opposition, as ever, was a principled one.

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I’m sorry if this column reads like an obituary. Charles Swift is a one off: He has touched people’s lives in so many ways and can be proud of a long career and many achievements.

Thank you Charles. The people of the North ward have been very lucky to have you fighting their corner but we’ll all miss your good sense, dedication and passion for Peterborough.