Immigration is a legitimate concern, but it's not a good reason to leave the E.U.
Batley and Spen has a high proportion of people working in manufacturing, and we can boast the full range of industries, including high-skilled, precision engineering. We manufacture all sorts, from beds to biscuits and from carpets to lathes. We also have some of the best fish and chips in the country and some of the best curries in the world.
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.
In Afghanistan, I was talking to Afghan elders who were world-weary of a lack of sustained attention from their own government and from the international community to stop problems early.
Businesses in my constituency want help to address the skills mismatch at local level which leaves employers with staff shortages and young people without jobs. They want access to reliable sources of finance, including a network of local banks.
I fancy myself as a bit of a groover.
I was an aid worker for a decade and then worked in the voluntary sector in the U.K. on U.K. child poverty and with the NSPCC and Save the Children. But I had worked for ten years with Oxfam.
Going to Cambridge was a bit of a culture shock, I was a working class lass from Batley who hadn't been anywhere apart from the odd holiday on the Costa Del Sol.
Who can blame desperate parents for wanting to escape the horror that their families are experiencing?
It is simply not credible to tackle child poverty without acknowledging the worst issue - a lack of money.
Indeed, by refusing to tackle Assad's brutality, we may actively alienate more of the Sunni population, driving them towards ISIS.
I have long argued that ISIS and Assad are not separate problems to be chosen between, but are action and reaction, cause and symptom, chicken and egg: impossible to untangle no matter how much we might like to.
When the bombs rain down, the Syrian Civil Defense rush in.
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.
I never really grew up being political or Labour. It was just a realisation that where you were born mattered. That how you spoke mattered... who you knew mattered.
I went to Cambridge University and was the first in my family to graduate.
The spirit of non-conformity is as prevalent now in my part of west Yorkshire as it was in the time of my two immediate predecessors, Mike Wood and Elizabeth Peacock.
My family didn't really have newspapers at home or talk about politics - my family are not political. They were too busy getting on with it - working, looking after kids, trying to pay off the mortgage, all that stuff.
The government is slowly waking up to the scale of the personal tragedy of delayed autism diagnosis.
Yorkshire folk are not fools: talk about devolving power to cities and regions, while simultaneously stripping them of the resources to deliver and subjecting northern councils such as Kirklees to the harshest of cuts, is not compatible with a worthy commitment to building a northern powerhouse to drive growth and prosperity.
