RLB

My mum and dad were political. We always discussed about politics in our house, I was encouraged to read The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists when I was young, and I learned the realities of life quickly. My dad was a union man and I was born in 1979, the year that our economy was completely overhauled under Margaret Thatcher. My dad used to say that in Manchester in the sixties and seventies, you’d walk out of one job and into another — and they’d always be well paid. That changed after 1979.

When I was about 8 or 9-years-old the docks where my dad worked in Barton closed. He got a job at Shell and we had to move to a village not far from Ellesmere Port. He felt like he won the lottery the day he got that job, he told me, because it was a well-paid job with a really strong unionised workforce. He was lucky because when Barton shut he was asked if he wanted to move — if he hadn’t agreed to it, he wouldn’t have had a job and we would have really struggled as a family.

But even at Shell the drive was on to whittle down the wages of older colleagues who were part of the union. Decent terms and conditions were being replaced by part-time, casual work. For my dad, as a union rep, it was very upsetting. He never used to tell me about how bad things were but when he came home from a shift I would sit at the top of the stairs and listen.

One particular time, after we’d moved, he came home from work and burst into tears. As the union rep, he knew there were redundancy consultations going on and individual employees were being brought in to see management. One by one, he had to sit there and watch his colleagues walking out with a bin liner, in bits because they had lost their jobs. He was waiting for the management to come and tell him next. He struggled quite badly after that.

Later, I started my first Saturday job in a pawn shop. That’s when I saw people coming in and pawning in their treasured possessions. My family had been to a pawn shop too, which we kept secret because we were proud and would never have wanted anybody to know. I became quite angry at the age of 16 that we had one of the richest economies in the world, yet we had people selling their things just to get food to get through the next week. My politics evolved after that.

My parents had pushed me, they didn’t want me to suffer the same insecurity that they had. The only way they could see out was education. My mum, I remember, one day said: ‘Rebecca, you can be a doctor or a lawyer’. They were the only two jobs that she knew about, really, that were steady because my mum and dad didn’t have an education.

I was the first to go to university. After that I decided to work and study part-time to become a lawyer. I did well and was proud of what I’d achieved. But I also realised a lot of people I knew were just as clever as me but weren’t as successful. It wasn’t because they hadn’t worked hard. They had — they just didn’t get the chance.