Our pampered politicians know nothing about lives of the working-class

I recently had a conversation with one of my younger Herald colleagues. I was mulling over just how tougher life now is for their generation than mine. I grew up poor, but social mobility was a reality in my youth. By the time I was 25, I’d left my working-class roots far behind.

Poverty left an indelible mark on me, however. I recall vividly a period in the 1970s, aged about five, when I ate mashed potatoes and beans every single day as that was the only food in the house and all my parents could afford. I cannot look at mashed potatoes and beans on the same plate to this day.

But a combination of good schools, free university, and more luck, meant I’d a route out of my housing estate. Today, social mobility is basically dead. I grew up in an era when working-class voices defined culture in both literature and cinema. In the 2020s, if you’re not privately educated, your chances of breaking into the arts, media or politics are shot in the knee.

I’ve used my job, though, as a way of reminding myself how lucky I am. Much of my journalism - in newspapers, TV and radio - has focused on those living at the margins, the poorest in our society.

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I spend time with people struggling to pay their bills, and feed their kids, so I can tell their stories. I’m not just telling their stories to the public, though, I’m telling their stories to myself, so I remember where I came from and how damn lucky I am, and how lucky my kids are that they never had to experience a hungry belly or cold bed.

In life, I dodged a bullet and I’ll be conscious of that - and thankful for my escape - until I die.

I recently interviewed Dave Watson, head of the Jimmy Reid Foundation, Scotland’s influential left-wing think-tank. We discussed the neglect that the nation’s further education colleges have suffered. Watson believes this is down to the fact that colleges are filled with working-class kids, and our middle-class government ministers went to university and send their kids to university.

It struck me as horribly true. The lack of authentic working-class voices in British and Scottish politics explains many of our society’s most grotesque dysfunctions. That’s not to say there aren’t working-class politicians - there are - but they’re few and far between.

Politics is now distinctly middle-class. If you do not understand a group of people, how on earth can you govern for them? If you’ve never gone hungry, or watched your parents cry as they don’t know if they can pay the rent, then how can you feel as the working-class feel? If you do not understand what a pay-day loan is, then how can you understand the fear that lives inside the hearts of so many working-class people?

I dismiss the notion that the working class is no more. As Dave Watson of the Jimmy Reid Foundation said to me: is a call-centre tele-operator not as working-class as a factory employee in the 1970s? They’re wage slaves, their day is dictated by their boss, their conditions are miserable, their treatment mean, their pay inadequate. Is a zero-hours delivery driver or carer not as working-class as a miner?

But how does any politician - whose path in life is university, parliamentary assistant, safe seat - understand that type of existence?

They clearly don’t. If they did understand, then we’d have a society of good social housing and decent wages, we’d have politicians brave enough to champion full and fair employment. We’d have a benefits system which treats people with dignity and helps them into work, rather than terrorising them into cowed submission.

Instead our politicians create the evils which crucify the working-class. They give unfettered power to corporations, they tax the poor until the pips don’t just squeak but scream while letting the rich grow fatter.

Dave Watson (Image: Colin Mearns)

State schools and the NHS decline. Yet any politician can afford to send their kids to private school or go to a private hospital themselves. The buffer of wealth is a great amnesiac - it can make one very forgetful of the lives of others.

Now, I’m not advocating communist revolution. I’d just like some justice and fairness, some economic equality. We once called it social democracy. We should remember what it means.

The blame lies with political parties and their selection processes. It’s political parties which chose to run the cosseted and well-fed, those with no hinterland and no history of hardship.

Sometimes even the small, supposedly benign actions of politicians deeply irks me. I look at policies like minimum pricing of alcohol and wonder if politicians are blind to what they’re doing. A policy like that says this to the world: the middle-class can get as drunk as they want, but the working-class must suffer for even a little luxury.

Believe me, the best way to solve addiction isn’t by punishing the poor financially, it’s by dealing with the misery which drives alcoholism in the first place: poverty and crushed aspiration. Give people jobs and hope, not a slap for some middle-class scold.

It’s a sad truth, but I’ve come to learn that only those who have experienced poverty understand the causes of poverty. Pampered, middle-class politicians will never find an answer to inequality, because it’s never touched their lives.

Our society will remain cruel and Darwinian until political parties either begin to select people from the working-class to run for parliament, or the working-class once again gets organised - as it did more than a century ago - and creates a political vehicle which speaks for its interests.