Helena Dollimore: A force to be Reckoned With
The next General Election is likely to be called within the next 12 months. With the main political parties having now selected their candidates to contest the marginal parliamentary constituency of Hastings and Rye, we continue our series of interviews with the Prospective Parliamentary Candidates (PPCs). This week, PAUL MCLAUGHLIN take a look at Labour’s Helena Dollimore.
Helena was born and bred in East Sussex. She attended Heathfield Community College, a state comprehensive school with 1,400 pupils. It was here where she first came to national attention after addressing the 2011 Labour Conference when she was a 17-year-old A-level student. The Daily Mirror reported at the time that she “captivated the Labour conference”, telling delegates that she and fellow students were having to deal with the “appalling” cuts being implemented by the then Coalition Government,which were having “a devastating impact” on children across the country.
She told the Liverpool conference that her sixth-form college was set to lose £1,000 per student in central government funding, resulting in teacher redundancies and bigger class sizes. One of those teachers made redundant, she said, was a chemistry teacher, and she had to self-teach the second year of her course as a result. Despite these challenges, Helena passed her exams and went to St Hilda’s College, Oxford.
The experience of Oxford had a profound impact. The privilege and expectation of some of the privately educated students contrasted sharply with her own comprehensive schooling. It was, she recalls, “an eyes wide open experience” and left her determined to close the gap which exists between the standards and expectations of state schools and those in the private sector. She fully endorses Labour’s plans to end the tax breaks that private schools enjoy and to use that money to “deliver better and rising standards in every school for every child.”
She went on to become Chair of the Oxford University Labour Club, the largest and oldest university Labour club in the country, whose former members include Barbara Castle and Shirley Williams and more recently the current Shadow Cabinet Member Bridget Philipson.
After leaving university, Helena took up a role with Save the Children, the international charity which aims to improve the lives of children worldwide. Her work took her from refugee camps in Bangladesh to the war zone in Yemen and she witnessed at first hand the need for all children, both in this country and abroad, to have “a quality education, healthcare, and opportunities”.
When the pandemic struck, Helena trained as a vaccinator with the St John Ambulance and volunteered at the Laycock Pharmacy in Ore. The experience made a lasting impression. Not only did she see at first hand just how overstretched and under-resourced the NHS was, but she also witnessed how pharmacists Shammi and Sapni responded to the Covid crisis by transforming their small chemist into a community hub to help and reassure the most vulnerable through the emergency.
It was perhaps inevitable that, when life returned to some form of normality after the pandemic, Helena would take her political activism to the next level. The opportunity presented itself in July 2022 when Labour opened its selection process to be the next PPC for Hastings and Rye and she put herself forward.
Somewhat controversially, the party’s National Executive Committee took control of the process and imposed a list of candidates for local party members to choose from. Readers of HIP (Issue 205) will recall that a letter with 80 signatories, not all of whom were party members, was published prior to the meeting protesting at the exclusion of Hastings Borough Councillor Maya Evans from the candidate list.
Despite the controversy, Helena Dollimore clearly impressed and won the selection contest decisively, taking almost 80% of the vote of party members. She has worked hard since to unite the party and has been at the forefront of several local campaigns in recent months which have raised her profile across the constituency.
In January she launched a campaign to fight plans by the East Sussex Fire Authority to downgrade local fire services across the town and surrounding villages, warning that the proposed cuts, particularly the downgrading of the Ridge Fire Station, would put the lives of local people and firefighters “at risk” and “must be stopped.”
More recently she obtained data using a Freedom of Information request to show that the wait for an ambulance in Hastings and Rye is the longest of any constituency in the whole of the South East, with patients forced to wait an average of 37 minutes for an ambulance for category 2 callouts, which include cases of suspected heart attacks and strokes. This is more than double the NHS target of 18 minutes and significantly worse than nearby Eastbourne (30 minutes), Brighton (27 minutes) and Ashford (25 minutes).
She has also played an active role in coordinating the local response to the recent problems in the Rye area, where many homes were left without water – in some cases for up to seven days. She berated Southern Water’s slow response to a problem, saying the company’s treatment of residents in Rye and the surrounding area was “more akin to 1823 than 2023.” She has also been at the forefront of campaigns to stop the dumping of raw sewage and has won the approval of Feargal Sharkey, the environmental campaigner.
Helena draws inspiration from her family, who live locally. They are living proof, she says, of the power of a Labour Government. Her father was one of the first NHS babies, being born in 1948 under Clement Attlee’s administration. He left school at 15 but benefitted from access to adult education introduced by Harold Wilson and went on to university, the first in his family to do so.
She herself points to the positive change the 1997 Labour Government made to her own life, with the investment in children’s services and the expansion of the university system, and looks forward to the next Labour Government and the “life changing opportunities” it plans to introduce.
Labour’s PPC has already made an impression on the Party leadership. Shadow Secretary of State for Health and Social Care Wes Streeting on a visit to Hastings last month described Helena Dollimore as one of his party’s “best parliamentary candidates in the entire country who will fight tooth and nail for her community. She will get their voice heard in Parliament and heard within the new Labour Government.”
The looming contest between Helena Dollimore and Sally-Ann Hart, the sitting Conservative MP, will be fascinating to observe. It will soon be up to the voters of Hastings and Rye to decide whether they prefer to stick with the Tory incumbent or elect the Labour candidate, whose energy and fresh perspective clearly make her an emerging force to be reckoned with.
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Interesting article. I wonder if I’m the only constituent currently wondering where Cllr. Dollimore stands on the very pressing issue of a cease fire in Gaza? Given her humanitarian work, and the fact that we’re hitting somewhere around 12,000 dead (as of 20th Nov) I’d be interested to know.
I agree with Guy Harris. S.A. Hart doesn’t do surgeries. Good idea! If Ms. Dollimore gets elected as our MP I hope she calls a public meeting on Gaza & The West Bank to tell us how she can help save the children in Israel.