There are people who serve a town and people who belong to it. Tommy Beattie has always been the second kind.
For longer than most of us can properly account for, Tommy has carried Corby's interests as though they were his own, because, in every way that matters, they were. He led Corby Borough Council at a time when leadership meant standing for a town that the rest of the country had too often written off, and he did it without ever losing the instincts that brought him into the movement in the first place; that ordinary people deserve a voice, that institutions exist to serve communities and not the other way round and that politics, done properly, is just another form of solidarity.
For longer than most of us can properly account for, Tommy has carried Corby's interests as though they were his own, because, in every way that matters, they were. He led Corby Borough Council at a time when leadership meant standing for a town that the rest of the country had too often written off, and he did it without ever losing the instincts that brought him into the movement in the first place; that ordinary people deserve a voice, that institutions exist to serve communities and not the other way round and that politics, done properly, is just another form of solidarity.
A few weeks ago, North Northants Council made him an Alderman, a rare and fitting recognition, the kind given sparingly and only when a place wants to say, formally, we know what you did for us. Those of us who've sat alongside him for years didn't need the ceremony to know it. But it was right that Corby said it out loud.
Through all of that, council leadership, the long years of political life and now this honour, Tommy has also been our branch's delegate to Corby Constituency Labour Party. He has carried our voice into rooms where union concerns aren't always the loudest in the conversation and he has done it with the same steadiness he brings to everything, no grandstanding, no need to be the cleverest person in the room, just a quiet insistence that working people's interests stay on the table.
For me personally, Tommy has been something more particular still, a confidant on matters of trade union business when I needed one who actually understood the weight of what we carry. Not every councillor or politician grasp what it means to sit across from a member facing a disciplinary, or to fight a case that the system was never built to make easy. Tommy always did. He listened like someone who'd done the work himself, because he had.
Now he steps down as our delegate and there's no pretending his political boots will be easy to fill. They won't be. But that's the mark of someone who did the job properly for long enough that the next person inherits a standard, not just a vacancy.
So from all of us at the branch, thank you, Tommy, for the council years, for the Alderman's chain you've now rightly earned, for every meeting where you carried our concerns further than we could carry them ourselves and for being, through all of it, exactly the kind of friend and ally this movement is supposed to produce and so rarely does in such full measure.
Corby is better for you. So is the trade union movement. Enjoy your well-earned retirement brother.
Alan Irwin
Branch Secretary
GMB Northants
Through all of that, council leadership, the long years of political life and now this honour, Tommy has also been our branch's delegate to Corby Constituency Labour Party. He has carried our voice into rooms where union concerns aren't always the loudest in the conversation and he has done it with the same steadiness he brings to everything, no grandstanding, no need to be the cleverest person in the room, just a quiet insistence that working people's interests stay on the table.
For me personally, Tommy has been something more particular still, a confidant on matters of trade union business when I needed one who actually understood the weight of what we carry. Not every councillor or politician grasp what it means to sit across from a member facing a disciplinary, or to fight a case that the system was never built to make easy. Tommy always did. He listened like someone who'd done the work himself, because he had.
Now he steps down as our delegate and there's no pretending his political boots will be easy to fill. They won't be. But that's the mark of someone who did the job properly for long enough that the next person inherits a standard, not just a vacancy.
So from all of us at the branch, thank you, Tommy, for the council years, for the Alderman's chain you've now rightly earned, for every meeting where you carried our concerns further than we could carry them ourselves and for being, through all of it, exactly the kind of friend and ally this movement is supposed to produce and so rarely does in such full measure.
Corby is better for you. So is the trade union movement. Enjoy your well-earned retirement brother.
Alan Irwin
Branch Secretary
GMB Northants
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