From a list of around thirty applicants, members of the local Labour Party have selected their new candidate to fight to retain the Copeland constituency for Labour at the forthcoming General Election.
The current incumbent Dr Jack Cunningham MP who has held the local seat since 1970, had already notified his intentions to retire at the next election. In a secret ballot on Saturday 26th February, party members selected 31 year old Jamie Reed, from an all-male list of six, to fight the seat which includes the controversial Sellafield reprocessing complex. Failed candidates included a former researcher for Dr Cunningham, a Leeds councillor, an advisor to MP Keith Vaz, and a prospective parliamentary candidate for South Staffordshire in 2001.
Jamie Reed, the GMB and Amicus Union candidate, is currently employed as a press officer for British Nuclear Fuels at Sellafield. He is the grandson of the late Thompson Reed who led the General & Municipal Boilermakers (GMB) union. Observers have already spotted background similarities between the new candidate and the man he will replace. Like Jamie Reed, Dr Cunningham was 31 when he was first elected to the then Whitehaven Constituencey and his father also was a high-ranking official in the GMB Union.
With Sellafield dominating West Cumbrian politics, Labour Party members clearly believe it important to retain the avidly pro-nuclear stance fostered over the past 35 years by Dr Cunningham who regularly had to fend off criticism about not living in the constituency. Sponsored by Sellafield’s GMB Union, Dr Cunningham was elected in 1986 as President of the Friends of Sellafield Society – a now long-defunct organisation.
Chances of securing a more colourful candidate for Copeland evaporated when Labour decided to drop the only woman, a lawyer in the Inner Temple in London, from the shortlist. Christine Wheatley, who revealed to a local newspaper that she had spent some of her youth working as a licensed call girl in Paris, was dropped from the panel by Labour whose spokesperson said “she was no longer included on the panel because the Party had not been made aware of certain issues”.
At the June 2001 General Election, Dr Jack Cunningham retained Copeland for Labour with a reduced majority of 4964 votes (11,994 in 1997) from the Conservatives with the Liberal Democrats trailing in third place.
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