This is my final Mail column before Christmas. Last Friday I attended a ceremony to commemorate the 97th anniversary of the bombardment of the Hartlepools.

It strikes me every year just how close this atrocity took place to Christmas. Families getting ready for work and school in 1914 were really no different to families in 2011. Kids will have to have been roused from their beds whilst at the same being very excited about Christmas in little over a week’s time. People will have been very conscious of the First World War – many husbands and sons may have joined up in the first flush of excitement, believing that the war “would be over by Christmas” – but the battles in France would have been a long way from Hartlepool. It is difficult, if not downright impossible, for us to comprehend how bewildering, but above all how frightening, a direct attack on our town would have felt. In the attack, 118 people, including 37 children, the youngest being poor Benjamin Lofthouse, from Belk Street and aged just seven months, died.

The ceremony to commemorate the bombardment of the Hartlepools is an important event for a variety of reasons. First and foremost, it affected Hartlepool and West Hartlepool deeply. The effects of the attack not only killed many of our townspeople, but left physical and mental strains on people and families for decades. The fact that Hartlepool was chosen by the enemy to direct the first attack on the British mainland for centuries gives an indication of the supreme importance of our town to the country’s manufacturing and industrial might. The German fleet was trying to destroy and dismantle the town’s docks, shipyards and steelworks to hinder the war effort. And the first shots of the Bombardment killed Private Theo Jones of the 18th Battalion of the Durham Light Infantry. Private Theo Jones was a West Hartlepool lad – his mother lived in Ashgrove Avenue – and he had the sad distinction of becoming the first British soldier to be killed on British soil for nearly 200 years.

The centenary of the bombardment is fast approaching. 2014 will be an important year for the country to remember the 100th anniversary of the start of the First World War, but given Hartlepool’s significant role in the Great War, I want the Bombardment commemoration of 2014 to be recognised nationally rather than just locally. This Monday, it was Defence Questions in the House of Commons, and I asked a question to the Minister in terms of what the Government will do to support this important event for the town. I am also trying to secure a debate in the House of Commons for 16 December 2014 to commemorate the centenary of the Bombardment in Parliament on the actual day. I think it would be appropriate and fitting for the Secretary of State for Defence to attend the morning ceremony in 2014. I hope the Government will agree to this, given the significance of the day to the history of our country, not just the town.

As this is the last column before Christmas, I hope that everybody in Hartlepool is able to enjoy the holiday season. Hopefully people will have been good over the course of the year and that Father Christmas recognises this in their Christmas stocking. I’m not sure I should be wistfully regretting this, but I am now at the age when I don’t actually mind having socks for presents: a man cannot have too many pairs of socks. If Father Christmas is reading the Hartlepool Mail just before he sets off for his big work day, I hope he can deliver a copy of The Inbetweeners film on DVD, which I haven’t seen. It’s been a difficult year for the town in one way or another, but I hope the people of Hartlepool can spend time with their friends, family and loved ones. Have a Merry Christmas.

I hope you’re more or less done for Christmas shopping by now. The speed at which Christmas has crept up on us has shocked me – it only seems five minutes ago that it was October; now we have less than two weeks to go before the big day.

My only real task for Christmas shopping is to buy for Mrs Wright. I think she wants perfume, as she has been dropping some general hints in this direction, but I think the lovely patterned ironing board cover I have my eye on for her will be that much of a surprise when she unwraps it. I got her one last year too, so she really won’t be expecting another this year.

The chances are that the way you shop for Christmas presents has changed significantly in just a few short years. The economic difficulties will mean that, for far too many people, Christmas will be something of a financial difficulty. The Government’s increase in VAT to 20 per cent earlier this year won’t help either. When people are faced with ever rising bills for food, petrol and energy costs, it can’t be considered a surprise that our retailers are struggling.

But there are also longer term trends in shopping that are evolving. An increasing number of people now shop on-line: it is estimated that, despite the economic problems, an astonishing £7.5 billion will be spent on line this Christmas. There are also big shopping malls, such as the Metro Centre, which have changed the way we shop forever. It isn’t just the Metro – I was speaking to a group of ladies in Hartlepool a couple of weeks ago, and was surprised to hear that they had gone shopping to Sheffield Meadowhall for the day. There has also been an explosion of big supermarkets, where increasingly you can buy everything, including the kitchen sink.

This combination of economic difficulties and longer term changes in shopping habits have had an impact upon local shopping centres, including our own shopping centre of Middleton Grange. It was depressing to read earlier this year that Hartlepool had a higher than average number of vacant shop units. Given the struggle that the Hartlepool economy is facing, I’m depressed but not surprised. It will also be increasingly difficult for the shopping centre to be at full capacity when the town has three very big supermarkets, offering not only the widest possible range of goods but also free parking.

This is certainly not a problem that is confined to Hartlepool. I was in Darlington a couple of weeks ago, for the first time in a very long time, and was shocked to see many vacant units in that town’s shopping centre.

It is for this reason that the Government has commissioned Mary Portas to undertake a review of our local high streets. She presented Mary Queen of Shops on BBC, and is considered an expert on retail and shopping. Her report came out earlier this week, and made for interesting reading. I agree with her that local shopping centres and high streets should be at the heart of community, an area not merely for shopping, but for socialising, culture, health and creativity. She says in her report that: “The new high streets won’t just be about selling goods.”

She is right. The last Labour Government tried to encourage vacant units to be handed over to community and creative groups. Given Hartlepool’s strong community spirit, why can’t that happen more in our own shopping centre? Perhaps local businesses could be given a unit in the Middleton Grange to see how they get on? It would certainly be better than empty shop after empty shop.

You’ll never get back to a so-called golden age where high streets hark back to a traditional look of butcher, baker and candlestick maker. People’s lives and shopping habits have changed too much for that. But these places can reinvent themselves for the modern age and take on bold ideas to get people back shopping there again.

Many people in Britain will say that this country doesn’t make things anymore. Our past as the planet’s manufacturing hub, where Britain was really the workshop of the world, has been lost forever, as this country either closed its factories permanently or exported them over to China. We now only make our money in this country through services, and it is because of this that we’re in the mess we’re in.

As with most arguments, there’s some element of truth in this. Over the past thirty or forty years, successive governments have been far too keen on thinking that Britain’s economic future lay with the service industries as opposed to the more traditional manufacturing firms, and placed far too much emphasis on the prospects of services, rather than helping heavy industry endure the changes required to be competitive from the 1960s onwards. As a result, employment in the service industries grew hugely, usually at the expense of manufacturing employment.

Last week there was a debate in the House of Commons about the future of manufacturing in the UK. I think this a hugely important issue for the country, as well as for Hartlepool. I spoke in the debate in my new role as Shadow Minister for Competitiveness and Enterprise, and stressed the need to ensure that manufacturing has an important, even central, role in the British economy in the next few years.

We still make things in this country, much more than many people realise. We remain the seventh biggest manufacturing nation on earth. The value of goods we make and sell to the rest of the world have been on a steady increase since the Second World War, only falling during the big recessions of the 1980s and 1990s, and reached their peak of activity not in the Victorian era, but in 2007. We have in this country world-class industries that can compete with their counterparts anywhere on the planet. Sectors like aerospace, oil and gas, automotives and biotechnology are where we in Britain are leading the pack. Most people will not realise this, but we now build more cars in this country (about one million a year) and more car engines (about two million a year), than we have ever done in our history. We export about 75 per cent of them too, making a positive impact on our balance of trade figures. Nissan, just up the road, employing Hartlepool people and using Hartlepool businesses as part of their supply chain, is the most productive car manufacturing plant anywhere in Europe, producing more cars per worker than any other plant.

It is relatively easy for somebody like me, coming from Hartlepool, to pay tribute to our manufacturing tradition and look forward to the enormous potential that manufacturing still has for our economic future. I am very proud that Hartlepool, and the wider North East region, was at the very vanguard of the Industrial Revolution. Most of the time when it comes to manufacturing and industrial processes, it is the North East that was the first – the Stockton and Darlington Railway being the first public railway in the world, Stephenson’s Rocket, the most advanced steam engine of its day, was built in the Forth Street Works in Newcastle, the first house in the world to be lit by a lightbulb was in Gateshead.

However, I don’t want our manufacturing pride to be based on our past. I want us to be the best place anywhere in the world to do high value added manufacturing. In order to do this, we need an active and intelligent government policy, supporting and defending British manufacturers. I think sometimes British governments have not really batted for British companies, thinking it’s best to play the game fairly rather than win the match. I don’t tend to take that view: I want Britain, and British manufacturing, to win the competitive game. I think the job of government is to support and help nurture the industrial firms of the future, those who will provide jobs and wealth and sell goods across the world. It’s a cutthroat business in the modern world, but with decent and co-ordinated government support, British manufacturing can really thrive in the 21st century.