Shadow health secretary says party needs to win support and should not portray Conservative supporters in negative light

The shadow health secretary has urged Labour to see Conservative voters as the party’s “friends and neighbours and relatives” rather than portraying those who are attracted to Theresa May’s offer as the enemy.

In an interview with the Guardian, Jonathan Ashworth hit back at the prime minister’s claim that the Tories are the party of the working classes, and said Labour had to urgently persuade people that was not the case.

“They are not the party of the working class when people are worse off by £1,400 a year and the economy is characterised by temporary work and zero-hour contracts,” he said.

“The Labour party is the party of the working class and this is why this election is so important for Labour. We have to be maintaining our support but also winning over support as well.”

He claimed that while there was no intention by Labour figures to portray Conservative voters in a negative light, the “febrile world of Twitter and social media can sometimes inadvertently convey that”.

Ashworth said his message was to stress: “Those who vote Conservatives aren’t our enemies. They are our friends and neighbours and relatives. We need to be convincing them to switch to Labour where we can.

“They are people who live in our communities – we need to be persuading them as well as ensuring that those who voted Labour in past elections are sticking with us again.”

The shadow health secretary also accused May of running an “arrogant campaign” in which she was “shut away from scrutiny” and taking voters for granted. Ashworth said he had never seen anything like it in his time working under both Tony Blair and Gordon Brown.

He said Labour had to persuade people that the election was not just about Britain’s relationship with Europe but also the “character of a country in which 4 million are on NHS waiting lists and primary schools are having their budgets cut back”.

But after the deputy Labour leader, Tom Watson, urged voters to avoid a “Thatcher style majority”, Ashworth admitted the polls were challenging and said that in those circumstances: “Labour MPs need to fight for every seat.”

The shadow cabinet minister also said he did not want to hear people claiming that “winning doesn’t matter”.

“Sometimes creeping into debate on social media [is the notion that] it is all about how you play the game and not winning the game in the end,” he said. “If we are not totally focused on winning, ultimately it is working class people we are betraying.”

And the shadow health secretary said a Labour government would put in place a strategy to support the children of alcoholics, after he revealed details of his own childhood.

Ashworth said he had “spoken out by accident” about the way his drunk father would fall over at the school gates when he was a child, and how he would return home to a fridge stacked high with cheap booze and no food.

But the decision led him to talk even more candidly in the House of Commons about his father, who died in Thailand after drinking a bottle of whisky a day, moving a Conservative minister to tears.

Now Ashworth is promising a “proper children of alcoholics strategy” that would offer support through the NHS, councils, and by boosting the number of health professionals working directly with families. “We want to use some of the investment to invest in health visitors and school nurses. I see them as key to this children of alcoholics agenda,” he said.

Before the launch of Labour’s manifesto on Tuesday, Ashworth also said Labour would hold an inquiry into the 1970s and 1980s scandal in which haemophiliacs were given contaminated blood.

And he confirmed details from Labour’s leaked manifesto about a substantial £6bn annual investment into the NHS, saying Labour’s shadow chancellor would set out tax measures to pay for it.