Peter Kellner
:Cameron's EU Tactics Backfire
Deborah Jack
:End Homophobia to Reduce HIV
Philip Mansbridge
:G8 or Too Late: Obama, Cameron and G8 Heads Must Tackle Ivory Poaching Crisis Now
European Parliament Web Team
:Homophobia: One-In-Four LGBT People Victim of Violence or Threats in the Last Five Years
Neil Durkin
:A Week's Delay Should Suffice: Is the UK Still Dragging Its Feet on Guantánamo?
Spending an hour with Stella Creasy, the just-turned 35-year-old Labour MP for Walthamstow, is mentally exhausting, truth be told. She talks so fast it's almost like her lips are slightly out of sync with her words, as if she's out-talking the speed of sound.
Maybe she's not like this all the time, perhaps just in interviews, but in general she's not quite what you'd expect. Both the name and the constituency she represents wrongly suggest a brassiness which just isn't there. What you get is someone who's very pleasant and seems lower middle-class (although she has aristocratic ancestry). She's clearly a smart and highly-educated young politician, her manner a strange mix of humility tinged with just a teeny bit of righteousness. It's an odd combination, but not an unpleasant one.
As a fellow 1977 baby I'm just slightly younger than her. Because it's about to happen to me in a couple of weeks I ask her how it felt to turn 35. "Am I no longer young?" she asks me. Well, you're no longer ticking that 25-34 box on surveys and things, I say.
"Believe me, I'm aware of it. I was a youth worker before I got elected, when you've had a 15 year-old send you a picture of yourself that they've airbrushed, one of the kids I worked with, who's saying, 'use this in your leaflets, it will be better,' you are well aware that you are aging. You just feel depressed when you see The Stone Roses and The Smiths are reforming."
I take it from this that she used to be an indie kid? "Yes, I really am."
I tell her I can't imagine her, as an 18 year-old in 1995, sitting around smoking a spliff listening to Second Coming on CD. She chooses not to answer that one, instead saying: "I was an obsessive indie kid, my brother was an indie kid and I just used to listen to his stuff. One of the best things about becoming an MP was becoming Twitter friends with The Wedding Present, because I adore them, I spent New Year's Eve with them in Camden. It was brilliant.
"But that ages me because it's a certain kind of indie music. I found myself having an argument with someone the other day about The Horrors being very derivative of The Cure, and just thinking, nooo, that's your age. But it's true."
As it happens, Creasy looks quite a bit younger than her actual age in real life. It's only her campaign literature and pictures like the one on this page which make her seem older.
My interest in her was piqued last week when I started getting a series of press releases about her, from payday loan companies. They're all very annoyed that she's trying to get an amendment into the Financial Services Bill going through Parliament. It would give the new regulator, the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA), the powers to cap the total amount charged for each of these payday loans.
The industry has gone into PR overdrive since it became clear last week that Creasy's amendment would be voted on, sometime in the next couple of weeks. Is she aware that she's the subject of a letter-writing campaign?
"I hear these poor benighted firms say they're being bullied by me, but it's a bit like arguing with my grandfather, who at some stage would say to you, 'If you disagree with me, I can only beg you to think further,' and that's where I feel they've got to. They're run out of actual evidence or supporters, and so now they're just saying, 'You're just wrong,' and it's like, 'Guys, engage in the debate, help us get it right.'"
Yes, Creasy talks like any other person her age, with the occasional Friends-inspired Americanism. She's not overly confident of getting her amendment into the Bill, but is adamant she's at least on the right side of the argument.
"For the first time, there are Conservative MPs who are frankly frustrated because there is no alternative being proposed. I think that ministers understand there's a problem, and genuinely when I first went to them in 2010 they were bemused by what I was saying. Now they get there absolutely is a problem and they can see these loans aren't working and the way the market is operating is causing real problems for families.
"What they don't necessarily accept are the proposals for resolving it. The challenge is there are no alternative proposals on the table.
"The minister said they agreed that the new FCA should be able to cap their prices but they don't want to give them the power to do that. That's a kind of lawyers' fees bonanza. Unless the power is explicit, that's open to judicial review."
Creasy claims that the number of people using payday loan companies has risen fourfold in the past couple of years, with around four million people regularly getting one just now. "I think that will get bigger. The idea that families' incomes are going to even out, that's not going to happen. The cost of living is still rising.
"I've got sixteen of these companies in Walthamstow High Street alone now, because the recession's creating a vortex where pawnbrokers are doing payday loans as well because they're competing with the new ones coming from America. Britain has become the land of opportunity for these companies."
I put it to her that a few of the more well-known companies do advertise their rates pretty overtly - those eye-watering APRs running into hundeds or thousands of percentages? "Well find me a bus with one of their ads that's got the APR on it. I understand the debate that APRs are not necessarily the most easy way to understand the costs of these loans, but that is the law."
She insists that the Bill going through Parliament will be a rare opportunity to reform the system - "It's a perfect vehicle to act as quickly as possible and say, you know what guys? This has gotta change." - but as well as being the chief antagonist to payday loan companies, she's also shadow minister for crime prevention - "which is fantastic" - and her main job is conducting an "audit" of how the cuts are affecting people's personal safety. In this she takes a particular interest in women's safety.
"We've seen investment in rape crisis centres, great. But we've also seen cuts to domestic violence refuge centres. It's also crazy things you might not have first thought about, like street lighting. We're seeing councils across the country cutting off their street lighting. All the research shows that women are more likely to be fearful of the dark than men, so women's lives are much more affected by these changes than men's lives."
It's an area that I find Creasy somewhat difficult to pin down on, when I ask her whether there's been any actual evidence of attacks on women rising in areas where street-lights have been turned off?
"We've got lots of anecdotal evidence, but it's not just about attacks on women, road traffic accidents and crime itself and fear of crime, I mean there's a good reason why the police are quite worried about these changes. And different things are happening in different places. In some places every other light's being turned off, in others they're being turned off after a certain time of night."
Is Creasy's rapid-fire, quick-thinking style a means of avoiding making concrete pledges, or is it just her way? I do find it hard at times to get her to explore one issue at length before she skips to another, but must credit her with being honest about cuts. She doesn't seem ideologically opposed to them like many in her party, but seems to genuinely want to interrogate where they're being applied and how quickly.
"Everyone's talked about the scale of the cuts but it's the pace of the cuts that I see making a really, really negative impact. There's no sense of what our priorities are in this country. I don't know what the priorities are in this government."
Later on I ask her whether she'd want the next Labour government to reverse some cuts, like those to the forensic science service. "I think it goes further than that, it's about what are your priorities, one of your priorities has to be, what are the challenges that you're facing now? You can't predict how Britain is going to be in three years' time."
She also surprises me by clearly identifying some quite Blairite policies she disagreed with. "I was quite a critic of things like the New Deal, and Labour's renewal, because we had presumption about what community looked like, and we had a presumption about what participation looked like. We had quite a consumer complaints approach. And I do think it challenges some people on the left to think about really devolving power, and we being willing to empower people.
"Progressive politics is about empowering people. That different type of relationship has to come about across the movement, and it has to come across through public services."
Given all the problems the government's facing, does she think Labour should be preparing for a sudden, early general election? "Wiser people than me need to make that assessment. But I think we have to be clear that we're more than an opposition, we're an alternative. It's not about the cuts themselves, it's about a different set of priorities."
She claims - repeatedly and stridently - that her politics is influenced by a fascination about what motivates people, and what MPs should be doing to drive engagement. "Certainly one of the challenges I see, for the left, is that I look at the next 60 years and the things my generation has to deal with, you cannot deal with that just by legislation alone. The public have to be part of that, the public have to be part of making the choices of what you want to do."
I find that another difficulty - here's someone who can't tell me what the government's priorities should be in three years time, but who wants to look at those for the next half a century. There's nothing wrong with that, but I can't help feeling like all Labour politicians Creasy is going to have to find an answer to the first question, much more urgently than the second.
So when she sits in Prime Minister's Questions, does she find herself torn between this ethos of participation, and wanting Ed Miliband to land blows on David Cameron?
"There is a dichotomy. People have a frame through which they understand politics and PMQs is one of those things. Of course it's important people have a process where they can ask the prime minister a question, and that can be a mechanism for change. But you also need a way of involving people. The loansharking stuff came from me seeing an impact in my local community, but ultimately the people in Walthamstow need a better-regulated credit market, and that comes from national action."
And then, before I can ask another question she's off again on another massive tangent and it's difficult to butt in. "Waltham Forest is where the person who invented iPads and iPods is from, and I always tell that to the kids in Walthamstow, and I'm like, you're telling me that's it, that's our sum total for the next hundred years? There's kids there who are bright, creative and talented. People write them off because they live in Walthamstow."
Stella Creasy - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Stella Creasy: 'You can see a perfect storm coming'
Payday loans set for parliamentary vote
Payday lenders should be regulated
Liberal Democrats' unpaid internships criticised
'Give youth a say on halting gang violence'
Video: ethical investors have until Monday to help end legal loan sharking
Loading comments… 
Posted: 30/04/2012 07:41 Updated: 30/04/2012 10:51