Starmer’s latest confidence trick will not work in places like Ashfield. People see straight through his dishonesty; he has given up on the Red Wall as did the Tories previously. If he really wants to know what it’s like to be working class, then he should read on.
I grew up in the mining village of Huthwaite in Ashfield in the 1970s, a village of 3,000 people where just over 1,000 men worked at the village pit and the women worked at the local hosiery factory.
From as early as I can remember I recall listening to my dad’s alarm clock go off every morning at 5am. It was one of those brass-coloured clocks with the two bells on the top, something far too many young people have not heard these days.
Dad would get up along with hundreds of other men in the village and walk to the pit a few hundred yards away.
I would look through my bedroom window and wave goodbye to my dad each morning and he would wave back as he joined other men walking to the pit.
I knew my dad was going down the pit and I would look at the headstock wheels turning round and wondering whether my dad or my grandad was on the cage being lowered deep into the bowels of the earth.
I had no idea how hot, dirty and dangerous it was down there, but I was to find that out just a few years later. Two hours after my dad left for the pit my mum got us three kids up, made our breakfasts and sent us off to school, she then went to work at the local factory.
After returning from school, we would sit around the dinner table and listen to our parents talk about their working day. My dad would talk about his workmates down the pit, I knew all their surnames as many of them were the dads of my friends at school. It was the same with my mum talking about the women she worked with, again these were the mothers of our friends at school.
Fast forward a few years I would l hear my dad’s alarm clock go off and a minute later he would knock on my bedroom door and say, ‘get up it’s time for work’. I got up and went to the pit with my dad and spent all day working with him underground. Two hours later my two sisters got up and went to the factory with my mum to make clothes. Happy days.
Looking back at these hard but happy times I realise what a great education it was for me. My dad was my role model, he got up early, went to work 7 days a week down the pit to make sure we were fed, clothed and had a week’s holiday in Skegness once a year. That was our lot.
It taught us that nothing in life is free. You left school and went to work to provide for your family and if you wanted a holiday or any other luxuries you worked the weekends as well, it was as simple as that.
Let’s be honest, if you were on the dole then you were almost a social outcast, an embarrassment to your family and the community. Sadly, nowadays a life on benefits is just accepted as the norm for some people.
As a society we should adhere to the principles of the welfare state in 1940s Britain and that is we support the most vulnerable members of our society to be able to live in dignity from cradle to grave.
People who can work should work and not be a drain on the taxpayer. The working classes call a spade a spade – go in any working men’s club and ask people what they think of an able-bodied person that refuses to work and you will get the response ‘they are scroungers’.
Now that sort of language may offend the Labour Party, but it is commonplace in the real world.
The Labour Party need a history lesson, their party was built on the backs of workers not shirkers and the trouble is Sir Keir Starmer doesn’t know the difference.
Lee Anderson is the Reform UK MP for Ashfield.