Angela Rayner says she is 'sick of the managed decline' as she meets voters
It’s about 9pm at a community centre in Hartlepool, and there’s a selfie queue building. The star? Angela Rayner, Labour’s deputy leader. And she’s a dab hand at taking them. She steps in when a retired teacher fumbles with her phone.
“I don’t do selfies but I will make an excuse,” the lady giggles. “Let me,” says Angela, perfectly at ease, although she’s been on her Dr Marten-shod feet since early doors. That morning, the 43-year-old MP travelled from her constituency home of Ashton-Under-Lyne to the North East, forgoing summer recess for Rayner On The Road, a special tour supported by the Mirror.
The aim is to meet – and, importantly, listen to – people living some 260 miles from the corridors of power about the issues impacting them. There’s plenty to hear at Tuesday’s rally in Hartlepool, about the cost of living, lack of mental health support, and dearth of opportunities for young people, as well as at Hartlepool Power Station, where Angela visited yesterday. The station employs 700 people whose future – despite a visit from Boris Johnson last year – isn’t clear past 2026.
Angela certainly cuts through. You watch her talk to people – whether in a backstreet hall or standing 105ft up, atop a live nuclear reactor producing electricity for one million homes – and she connects. Feet slightly apart, her body language as open as her admissions about her own life, her often blunt words appear from the heart.
Angela with campaign bus (Andy Commins / Daily Mirror)Student Jack Callaghan, 18, worried about the future of Hartlepool’s steel works, where his dad is employed, sums up general consensus. “She seems to understand what it’s like for people here,” he says. “She gets it.” That’s probably because Angela still lives a life surrounded by lives just like those of the people she’s meeting.
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She speaks openly about the extreme poverty in Stockport, Greater Manchester, where she grew up. But perhaps less is known about her life before she joined parliament in 2015. The majority of her friends and family today still juggle the same struggles. “My friends now call me a hybrid – I’m part of the establishment, but I’m also one of them from the council estate we grew up on,” she says.
Angela knows about grafting, yet failing to make ends meet. After she had her eldest son, Ryan, aged 16, she worked evenings as a home carer. “I would start at 4pm and end at 11pm,” she recalls. “My nana, who cleaned in the morning from 4am, then worked at Manchester airport in sandwich prep, then cleaned again on the way back, would have Ryan.
Angela with power plant staff Kate Welford and Ben Snaith (EDF Energy)“It was very physically demanding, and it was mentally demanding as well. I remember turning up to an older gentleman and as I walked through the door he was about to switch the light on and he had left the gas on all day. I had to manhandle him off the light switch. I was shaking. I was on a casual contract, not knowing how much money I was going to have. We had the Provident loan, or a crisis loan. I bought Ryan’s clothes in charity shops.”
But she insists that poverty has nothing on what people face today, without the welfare support she had. “I see the struggles of the cost of living with my friends,” she says. “I have a friend who’s a cleaner, one who’s a receptionist, a shop assistant. And my eldest son works in a bar, he struggles. He has a step-son and a daughter. His bills have gone up, he’s in private rented.
“I see how proud he is in terms of not wanting to ask for help. It’s just hard for them, getting the weekly groceries, getting the childcare, getting the landlord to fix stuff.” At the rally, Angela speaks passionately about the need to invest in people’s futures. “I’m sick of the managed decline generation, the generation told ‘you can’t have’,” she says. “We can’t have a pension, can’t afford the NHS or dentistry, can’t have a job for life or own a home. It doesn’t have to be like that.”
Jack Callaghan (Andy Commins / Daily Mirror)In industrial heartlands and coastal areas like this, Labour has pledged to introduce a new clean energy company incentive scheme, creating up to 65,000 new jobs in green energy. The power station could be central to this, if its life is extended.
Kate Welford, 30, has worked here since an apprenticeship aged 18. Unlike many her age, she owns a home. She tells Angela: “Without this job, I wouldn’t have been able to get on the housing ladder. I want to stay in the area, I want a job for life.” Angela explains: “There is that sense of pride here we used to have in industrial areas, like in Manchester. It would be shocking to lose this.”
Her own energy is infectious. She laughingly strikes a power pose on the reactor; tells a journalist in double glasses and goggles he looks like he’s been to a rave. Then, back to seriousness in a flash, she says forcefully: “The government is failing to invest. We have decades of experience in nuclear energy, we should be harnessing that. We are not going backwards to fossil fuels, we are going forward to renewables. We can export that technology around the world.”
Angela speaks on stage in Hartlepool (Andy Commins / Daily Mirror)Like the playlist of dance music and murder podcasts she showed me on her phone, her character combines fun with the ferocious. Ben Snaith, 29, an assistant team leader at the power plant, is smiling. Another connection made. “Angela seems lovely,” he says. “She’s from working roots. I feel we can trust her to do the best thing for us.”
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