It has been a rough old year for the world. Disasters have claimed the lives of tens of thousands of people and whole cities have been erased from the map; from the Boxing Day tsunami to the New Orleans hurricane to the Pakistan earthquake, the planet has taken a pounding.
The British public have responded magnificently to all these calamities and the Government has, rightly, also ploughed in huge sums in aid to help the affected areas rebuild and recover.
In Hemel Hempstead early last Sunday we had our own disaster. Miraculously nobody died. But the zero death toll should not lull anybody into thinking the scale of what occurred was insignificant. We are not talking about a little local difficulty. This is a national disaster on an epic scale.
Had the explosion at the Buncefield fuel depot occurred when the neighbouring Maylands industrial estate was teeming with it’s 30,000 workers or when families were up and about in their homes just a few hundred yards away, I am convinced the death toll would have been in the hundreds and the blast injuries from flying glass would have been on an almost unimaginable scale.
Our community suffered the biggest peacetime explosion and fire Europe has ever seen. Hundreds of houses sustained heavy damage. Scores of industrial buildings were either demolished or damaged beyond repair. The plume of smoke was so vast it showed up as a huge black blotch on satellite photos taken from outer space.
At considerable risk to their own lives, fire crews battled for days to get the fire under control. About 2,000 people were rendered homeless and 5,000 people from the industrial estate do not know whether they still have a job. Many are low-paid manual workers who do not even know if they will be paid before Christmas. We are giving out food parcels and Tesco is providing free clothes.
Yesterday I travelled to the House of Commons, hoping to raise these issues in Prime Minister’s Questions, or at least to hear Tony Blair pay tribute to the fire-fighters and the tremendous community spirit which has been shown in the face of such adversity.
But I was not called to speak and the Prime Minister did not mention it. There are no rock stars rolling up to see what they can do to help, either. A disaster in Middle Britain does not, it seems, register on the compassion scale of those who move in fashionable circles.
At this point I could raise the old adage that charity should begin at home. But the people of Hemel are not asking for charity. They would simply like some of their taxes back from ministers in a short-term financial-aid package commensurate with the scale of the devastation.
My local council needs to know it can help people in immediate need without risking bankruptcy. In the longer term, the insurance payouts will begin to reach us and I am proud of the loss adjusters who arrived in the area within hours and are doing their best to process claims quickly.
My constituency is one of the hardest-working in Britain. It has very low unemployment and many people commute to work in London during the week. The town if full of people who prefer to provide for their families themselves rather than live off the state.
But just because a community believes in self-reliance, it does not mean that help should not be forthcoming from the rest of the nation.
The Government does have a crucial role to play in providing upfront help. We are not talking millions of pounds, just enough money to deal with the immediate crisis. So far all Hemel Hempstead has heard about is bureaucratic funding formulas which appear to mean no money is currently available for such tasks.
Earlier this week I showed maps of the devastation to the Deputy Prime Minister, John Prescott, and he was visibly shocked by what they revealed.
I do not think Mr Prescott had realised the extent of the damage. Neither, I think, had he appreciated just how close to the depot are the housing estates which provide homes to many of my constituents.
To the chattering classes, Hemel Hempstead may be full of ordinary people doing ordinary jobs. Nobody has produced a wrist-band for us and I doubt they ever will. But the people of my constituency are part of the backbone of Britain.
They have shown extraordinary fortitude during the past few days. If what they have suffered had happened in your town, I have little doubt that your community would have responded in a similar fashion.
There is a lesson in that for us all. Cometh the hour, cometh the men and women. In Britain we have always been at our best in times of crisis. We should cherish that national spirit but also make sure we look out for each other when times are hard.
Of course, we will continue to be among the first to stand up and be counted when a disaster strikes on foreign shores. But never let our political leaders forget that the primary duty of a Government is to look after its own people. Published in Daily Express | 
