‘You can make things better if you just talk to people’

A FARMER’S son from the West Yorkshire village of Birkenshaw, Robert Light can trace his political “eureka” moment back to Margaret Thatcher’s response to the Argentinian invasion of the Falkland Islands in 1982. He was 18.

“That was the trigger – that principle of standing up for the islands against all odds,” he recalls. “There was no political history in my family, although both my parents leant towards the Conservatives. I wasn’t a firebrand. There was just the desire to make a difference and do things. I’m a progressive Conservative.”

Four years later he took his seat in the council chamber at Huddersfield Town Hall, the start of 30 years’ service to local politics which included a threeyear spell as leader of Kirklees Council. He stepped down from his council role on November 16, though he doesn’t rule out a return and believes he could still “make a difference” as council leader.

The intervening years have been tumultuous, turbulent and transformative. As Mr Light admits, there have been good times and bad, triumphs and failures. And as he anticipates a life outside politics he looks back to evolving from an “exceptionally shy” youngster to a respected public servant.

Between his late teens and early twenties, Mr Light joined the Young Conservatives in the new constituency of Batley & Spen. Within a year, he was branch chairman, later becoming Yorkshire regional chairman. And in 1987, aged just 22, he became a councillor for Birstall & Birkenshaw, meaning he was treated by some as a “young whipper-snapper”.

He recalls: “I had to earn my credibility. I did that through the work that I did but also by showing good judgement.”

He breaks down the threedecade span of his political life into chapters: the early years; the “golden year” of 1992 when the Tories won half the available seats on the council, leading to no overall control in 1994, which bucked the national trend as Conservatives locally were losing; and the “dark years” of 1995/96 when John Major’s government was extremely unpopular.

In 1995 Mr Light lost his seat and was re-elected in 2000. He dubs the period “my wilderness years”. Within six months of reelection, he was made Tory group leader.

Mr Light sufficiently impressed the big guns to be nominated as a parliamentary candidate. Between 1992 and 2005 he stood three times: in Doncaster North, Halifax, and Batley & Spen.

There are pangs of regret that he never made it to the House of Commons. “I think I would have been good. I would have liked the opportunity to have been a minister. If you want to influence things then one way to do that is to get into a position to make change.”

Instead he made his mark in Kirklees, becoming council leader in 2006. Over three years, the Conservative administration laid the groundwork for Huddersfield Leisure Centre and the new Kirklees College.

It also delivered the “radical initiative” of Kirklees Warm Zone, which offered free loft and cavity wall insulation to thousands of homes.

Of his tenure as council leader he says: “In those three years we achieved more than the council achieved in the previous 10 years and the following 10 years.

“The evidence is there in bricks and mortar,” he says. “We didn’t lay the bricks but we did the work to make it happen.”

Mr Light says the way forward, and to avoid overt politicking, is via dialogue. He reserves special praise for three stalwarts: former mayor John Holt along with council leaders Sir John Harman and Lawrence Conlon, who also led West Yorkshire fire authority.

He harks back to a budget debate in the mid-1990s when, to the surprise of Labour and the Conservatives, both parties found common ground.