Teenage pregnancy can sometimes help turn young women’s lives around, the shadow education secretary has said.

Angela Rayner, who left school at 16, pregnant and with no qualifications, criticised politicians for thinking of teenage mothers as “just failures” with “nothing in their lives”.

She stressed she was not advocating teenage pregnancy, but said it “saved” her from going down another path on the Greater Manchester council estate where she grew up because she wanted to prove she was not “the scumbag” people thought.

Ms Rayner said she was “shouting at the screen” during a recent parliamentary debate on teenage pregnancy, because MPs were only seeing it as “terrible”.

Speaking at a Times Red Box fringe event at Labour’s party conference in Brighton, she said: “Even though getting pregnant at 16 and having no qualifications is not the best start for anybody, you’ve got to understand that where my life was, it actually saved me from where I potentially could have been.

“Because I had a little person that I had to look after and I wanted to prove to everybody that I wasn’t the scumbag that they thought I was going to be, and I could be a good mum, and that somebody was finally going to love me as much as I deserved to be loved.

“And that’s what pregnancy was for me, it saved me.

“I’m not suggesting that we should advocate it, but to suggest that these young women are just failures and that they’ve got nothing left in their lives, I was really quite cross that actually they couldn’t understand the complex reasons and some of the advantages we can have in terms of changing people’s lives around.

“And it did for me, and my children are in a much better position than I ever had, and my mum could only have dreamt of having a daughter that got to where I am today.

“That’s social mobility.”

Ms Rayner also attacked both Tory and Labour governments for ignoring the north of England, suggesting politicians think of northerners as “inbred” and not worth hearing.

(Image: Manchester Evening News)

The Ashton-under-Lyne MP called for economic investment for “left behind” communities, arguing that the lack of opportunities in the North led to the Brexit vote.

“Some of the mess we’ve got ourselves in, in terms of, you know, we’re leaving Europe and people are feeling pretty uncertain about the future, the reason for that is because successive governments have ignored people in the North,” she said.

“They think that we’re sort of a bit Luddite, and dare I say it, inbred.

“They genuinely think we’re all a bit weird with three eyes and that we’re downwind from Sellafield so we clearly haven’t got an opinion that’s worth listening to and that somehow, that we just don’t understand what’s good for us.

“Well we understand that for decades we’ve felt left behind and we’ve not had the structural investment in our communities - not a new hospital, because we’ve all got diabetes and we’re overweight.

“That’s not what we’re talking about, we actually want our children to not have to go to London if they manage to get a decent education and leave, we want our young people with amazing minds to do things in our constituencies.”

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