Wages 'levelled down' under Tories, says Rayner on visit to key battleground
Angela Rayner is demanding a pay hike for Britain’s workers as she makes her first official visit in her new job.
Labour’s deputy leader became the Shadow Levelling-Up Secretary this week, replacing the demoted Lisa Nandy as party boss Keir Starmer reshuffled his top team ahead of the general election, widely expected next year. On Saturday she will visit Blackpool - a key battleground where Labour will need to oust both Tory MPs if Ms Starmer is to become Prime Minister.
In the Lancashire seaside resort, Rayner will say workers’ wages have been “levelled down” during 13 years of Conservative rule. She is expected to highlight figures showing 77% of local authorities have seen real wages for full time workers plummet since 2010. Visiting local businesses, the MP will say Britain will “never be levelled-up without decent pay”.
She said: “Our proud industrial and coastal communities were, in living memory, the places which powered the country. But after 13 years of neglect by the Tories, people in these places are seeing their wages drop while the cost of living soars. People need money back in their pockets, we need good jobs and wages - but under the Tories, wages are being levelled down.
“Good jobs and a decent home is the foundation of everyone’s lives. Labour has a comprehensive plan to create good jobs across the entire country and raise living standards for all.” On Friday she was already in her native north west, working in her Ashton-under-Lyne constituency, in Greater Manchester.
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Angela on board the battle bus (Julian Hamilton/Daily Mirror)Inside her office in Ashton Market Hall, satirical cartoons of a bumbling Boris Johnson and a black-and-white picture of suffragette leader Emmeline Pankhurt’s 1906 arrest dominate the walls. An illustrated paper plate playing on Judith Kerr’s ravenous fictional tiger is neatly mounted, inked with ‘The Tory who came to tea but voted to let kids go without’.
Her new shadow cabinet role is all-encompassing, wrapping in housing, communities and local government. It’s clearly close to her heart, revealing she’s had sleepless nights about constituents’ stories of struggling in the cost of living crisis. She was even recently moved to tears by the problems of one woman.
"She’s become very seriously unwell because of a situation in her housing and it had spiralled,” she recalls as we motor through her constituency in the Miror’s Rayner on the Road RV (MUST), which attracts smiles and glances as we pass by. “It affected her employment, it affected her health, it affected everything.
"And she was frightened because she felt she had nowhere else to turn, she’d been passed from one charity to the next and she’d fallen through all the gaps. That to me was heartbreaking because she’d tried to do her best, she was working. And one thing that went bad meant that everything came tumbling down.
"She felt like she had no hope left, and I want to give people hope again that that’s not going to happen to them. People up and down the country, especially in my constituency, have seen a decline in their industries. Lots have been in temporary accommodation for far too long. We need to make sure, across the whole of the UK, we’ve got enough social housing and can help people get onto the housing ladder.”
It was a busy day - Our first stop, as the white RV roared its way through Ashton town centre, was Great Academy School, where 1,380 pupils are still looking bright-eyed on their first week back. Speaking to a group of Year 11s, who have been picked as the school’s senior student leaders, Rayner told how she had never heard of politics at their age, let alone could have foreseen running for parliament when she first became a single mum aged 16.
We headed back to the constituency office for lunch and for the MP surgery, and then to Ashton Central Mosque for more private appointments with her electorate. On the way, Rayner reveals she’d never eaten an avocado until she was elected - “they’re just too expensive and go off too quickly” - and she and her team gently quarrel over the right name for a bread roll (“you can’t get a chippy barmcake down South, they give you a funny look”).
We head next to a project in Failsworth, where locals are campaigning for funding to turn a disused patch of ground into a community garden, with the idea being to set up a polytunnel, orchard and beehives to supply residents with fresh produce all year round. Angela pledges her two teenage sons’ help getting stuck in to clearing the ground of brambles and weeds.
Then finally it was Oxford Park Sport and Leisure Centre fora rally with local councillors. If Labour are chosen to run the country in the next election, Rayner believes time is of the essence. “I want us, within the first 100 days, to really hit the ground running on things like our housing programme,” she says.
“People can’t wait any longer - they can’t wait for us to get into government but I feel like we’ll already be behind because this government has run out of steam and they’re not calling a general election. So I want detailed plans so we don’t waste any time at all.” ‘Levelling-up’, the brief currently held by her Tory counterpart Michael Gove, is a woolly phrase, and Rayner isn’t a fan of the name.
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“It’s a broken promise; the Tories over the last 13 years have been very good at coming up with slogans - ‘Get Brexit Done’, ‘Levelling-up’, ‘Stop The Boats’ - but none of it’s been delivered,” she says. “Slogans are not what people want now, they want practical plans on how we’re going to make a difference.
"Realistic ones, and that’s what we’re going to deliver. We’re not going to over-promise but we are going to be hungry and energetic about making a real difference and showing people that you don’t have to accept managed decline.” The words of Rayner’s late nana remain drummed into her.
“She would say, ‘Always do your best’, and so I know every day I do my best… for me, if you’ve worked hard and you’ve tried your best, we’ll make sure you can get on and you won’t be in this situation where you feel completely helpless.”
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