Salford campaigners want to see the back of Hazel Blears
JOURNALISTS on a community magazine are campaigning to oust shamed former cabinet minister Hazel Blears as their local MP. “We couldn’t resist it,” says Salford Star editor Stephen Kingston. “No-one’s been keen on her anyway, even before all this broke.”
The magazine locked horns with the one-time Secretary of State for Communities last year when it sent her an open letter asking for help after she published a White Paper, Communities in Control, which said: “a strong independent media is a vital part of any democracy”.
The Star, which was struggling financially, asked her to put them on to a government fund that offers support for community magazines. “She never even acknowledged the letter, even though we are her constituents,” Stephen Kingston says.
For lack of money, the Salford Star has had to drop its print edition and it now appears online only.
Says Stephen Kingston: “It might be unusual for the magazine to back this sort of campaign. We campaign for houses and schools etc., and we wouldn’t normally get involved with party political stuff, but the vast majority of people in Salford want her to go.”
He says the MPs’ expenses scandal left him flabbergasted. “I was shocked and it takes a lot to shock me. She spent £6,000 of public money on food. Salford is one of the poorest communities in Britain and perhaps Europe.
“She goes on about being from Salford, how the people are ‘her people’. It’s disgusting.”
The campaign is supported by fellow Salford journalist and former Coronation Street star Nigel Pivaro, who made a documentary for the BBC two years ago about regeneration in the Langworthy area of the city.
The programme showed that families were being given between £1,500 and £15,000 compensation to move out of their homes for a redevelopment scheme.
“The irony is that the £13,000 that Hazel Blears paid publicly to the revenue for capital gains that she made when she sold her house was about the average that families that owned their own properties were given to lose them altogether,” Nigel Pivaro says.
“If she’s looking for sympathy I don’t think she’ll be getting much from that quarter.”
Nigel Pivaro used to play Terry Duckworth in ITV’s Coronation Street — which is filmed in Salford. He quit acting in 2002 to study and became a journalist, winning a page one splash byline while doing work experience on the Manchester Evening News in 2006.
He says: “I had 20 years of glory and infamy on Corrie. I’m not in journalism for the fame, but for a sense of achievement.”
In June Hazel Blears survived an attempt by Salford Labour Party members to have her deselected as their Parliamentary candidate.