Journey beginnings (and one ending)

The Buckingham School held their Celebration Evening last night. I had the greatest of honours to hand out all the awards to their high achieving students. It was such a wonderful occasion to see all these young people and their parents/carers beaming with pleasure and pride. Whilst the job of teacher can be most challenging, it must also be so rewarding to help launch these young people on their journeys through life. And as Mayor, I was privileged to have a small smidgen of that joy last night too. It was also the end of a journey for me too...

Last night I donated the tenth and final copy of the book about Jo Cox that I have been giving to the libraries of my life for the last year and half. It was a most fitting place and time to end my quest. My speech is below which explains why I have been doing this.

But meanwhile, here are couple of pictures from last night including Mr Andrew McGinnes, the Headteacher, Mr Matthew Watkins, the Chair of Governors and Cllr Robin Stuchbury (former pupil at the school). All the students who won awards had the picture taken but please check out the school website for those pics. The programme is also below.

Handing over the book about Jo Cox.

The speech I gave:

It is wonderful to be here this evening to celebrate the achievements of so many young people at this school. One of the great pleasures I get as Town Mayor is to witness, delight in and appreciate all the energy, ambition, hopes and realised dreams of so many people in the town, of all ages. We are all so lucky to live in a wonderful place with some very special institutions including this glorious school of course. It is very easy to take all this for granted.

But please let us be very clear, none of this happens by accident. The successes of the young people we are glorying in tonight have come from tough and detailed work by them, supported by great and hard working teachers and with the immeasurable patience and guidance of their parents and carers. And all of this is done within a community that wants our young people to do well. I believe that we all want all young people to do well.

But we live in divisive times where people, young and old, can so easily become the victims of hate or anger. This can happen online or in real life. Sometimes to extremes. Tonight this community, our community, is celebrating the success of our young people. But let us not forget that we must never take our community for granted. We must always be renewing our hope, our love and our understanding of each other. That is what community means.

In this regard, I have come with a small gift this evening to donate to the school.

The story of my gift begins with the tragic murder of Jo Cox MP by a right wing terrorist during the EU referendum campaign. It was a moment that shocked and saddened me deeply, as it did most other people of course. Here was an MP working hard to listen to and help her constituents in Batley and Spen. She was on her way to a regular surgery on 16 June 2016 when a man stabbed and killed her. As the world reacted to this event, much about Jo became to be more widely understood.

In particular a paragraph from her maiden speech in the House of Commons delivered by her on 3 June 2015, just a year previous, became well known:

“Batley and Spen is a gathering of typically independent, no-nonsense and proud Yorkshire towns and villages. Our communities have been deeply enhanced by immigration, be it of Irish Catholics across the constituency or of Muslims from Gujarat in India or from Pakistan, principally from Kashmir. While we celebrate our diversity, what surprises me time and time again as I travel around the constituency is that we are far more united and have far more in common with each other than things that divide us.”

Just to repeat that last bit:

“we are far more united and have far more in common with each other than things that divide us.”

And so wind forward another year and the general election of 2017 was called. I placed a bet of £20 on how many seats the Conservative Party would win (within a 25 seat margin) at the odds of seven to one. And I was right and I won my stake and £140 back. So then I thought, what should I do with the money? I could have blown it all on a night out or given it to a charity. But I decided instead to purchase 11 copies of the book about Jo’s amazing life and tragic death. And I decided at the same time to donate ten of these books to the libraries of my life.

So here I am today, on the last stage of my journey. I began in the secondary school that I went to - a school called Purbrook Park just north of Portsmouth. I have been back to my University in Reading and also the Oxford school where my own children were educated. I have been to the other libraries of Buckingham and there is even one now lodged in the public library of Mouvaux, our twin town.

So I bring this book today for The Buckingham School library, as the Mayor of Buckingham. It is my earnest hope that it will be widely read by all the students here in the school now and in the future. And I hope that all will be inspired to work for the kind of world, the kind of community, that Jo was working for.

A world in which everyone recognises that we have always far more in common than anything we have that divides us.

A world in which there is less hate and more love.

A world where people experience interest and compassion, not othering and bullying

A world in which there is more delight in difference, where all forms of diversity are celebrated and enjoyed.

I have the greatest of pleasure in donating this book to this school’s library. And in so doing, I bring my small journey of ten book donations to a very satisfactory close. I can’t think of a better place for this tenth book to be.

And so on with the show: let’s all admire, celebrate and simply love all the talented young people we are honouring this evening!

Thanks to Robin for the pics.