Rachel Gilmour: Work as a parliamentarian takes teamwork

 <i>(Image: Rachel Gilmour)</i>
(Image: Rachel Gilmour)
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Work as a parliamentarian is never a solo effort. Behind every campaign sits a wider team.

Paid staff, of course, but also volunteers, constituents and people who simply care enough to get involved.

Dr Ueli Zellweger, a friend and constituent of Swiss extraction who lives in the lovely village of Winsford, is a retired veterinary surgeon.

He has spent some of his time exposing the scale of flea treatment chemicals leaching into our waterways. He has not done this alone.

Stanley Johnson, father of Boris, and Sir Andrew Burns have worked with him.

Marshalling the evidence between them, they have equipped me with the facts I need to make the case in Westminster and turned a niche concern into one central government cannot ignore.

That is what teamwork looks like when it works.

My work with Richard Wilkins, Somerset County Council's cabinet member for transport, has also been a genuine partnership, built on a shared read of the evidence and what local people need.

Most people in public life, whatever their party, want the same outcome: to do right by the community they serve.

The same principle held this year on Bluetongue.

Conversations with vets and farmers across the constituency put me ahead of the curve.

That groundwork let me brief DEFRA before other MPs had raised the issue, and to bring it to the Rt Hon Alistair Carmichael MP, a friend, colleague and chair of the EFRA Committee.

Alistair took it straight to DEFRA and into the media rounds.

We are two MPs on opposite ends of the country with the same objective and a faster, louder case made.

It is a hackneyed line, but hackneyed because it is true: teamwork makes the dream work.

Its quieter cousin holds just as well: a problem shared is a problem halved.

Both point to the same lesson.

The work I do in Westminster and in the constituency only counts for something when it is shared, with constituents willing to do the legwork, with colleagues willing to make common cause, and with councils willing to pull in the same direction.

Where that happens, results follow.

Where personal or political considerations get in the way of the common good, everyone loses.

That, more than anything, is the case for teamwork.

Not as a platitude, but as the only method that actually works and offers a hopeful future for Tiverton & Minehead.

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