If Angela Rayner was a 16-year-old today, she believes her life prospects would be very different.
The deputy Labour leader fears those growing up in poverty don’t have the same opportunities she
did after leaving school without qualifications and becoming a teenage mum.
She credits key policies of the Tony Blair and Gordon Brown governments for giving her a fresh start in life.
Speaking exclusively to the Sunday Mail, the Ashton-under-Lyne MP said people are desperately in need of that same sort of political change to improve their lives.
She said: “Angela Rayner today has got far fewer opportunities than I had. When I was at that age, I could have very easily taken a different path.
“I was a free school meals kid. More and more children are absolutely in poverty and they’re not having meals every day now.
“My parents weren’t working parents but they had a giro every fortnight that provided food so we didn’t have to go to a food bank.
"It was really tough but we had a council house and we had heating that wasn’t about to be cut off.”
Rayner, 43, who became a mum aged 16, said she learned how to be a parent from Sure Start, a programme for parents set up in 1998 under Blair. She got her first qualifications when she went to work in the care sector.
She said tax credits introduced under Brown gave her a chance to work and get off benefits.
She believes in Scotland the compounded chaos of both the Tories in Westminster and the SNP at Holyrood has left people suffering and joked that the “cabinet in Westminster should be full of Scottish mums – they’d sort it all out in no time”.
She insists her party is not ashamed of holding those responsible for the state of the economy and NHS to account.
It comes after Labour launched a series of ads on social media, including one which claimed Prime Minister Rishi Sunak did not think paedophiles should go to jail, which drew staunch criticism from across the political spectrum.
Asked if the SNP could expect to see such tactics used against them, she said: “We will hold governments to their record. The SNP government have been in for a very long time. They’ve had over a decade, just like the Tories, to improve and they haven’t.
“They’re responsible for education, for health and we’ll hold them to their record and make no apologies about that.”
She also agreed when asked if First Minister Humza Yousaf should suspend anyone being questioned as a suspect in the police probe into SNP finances following the arrests of former chief executive Peter Murrell and treasurer Colin Beattie.
Both were questioned for 11 hours before being released without charge pending further investigation.
Rayner said: “If you’re a teacher and are accused of something, you’re suspended pending the outcome of an investigation.
"Most working people would see it as one rule for them and one rule for everybody else.
“If you’re at work and you’re arrested because someone has been taking money out of the till, whether you’ve done it or not, I’m pretty certain your employer ain’t gonna be allowing you in the workplace until that investigation has been carried out.
"There has to be a standard here where we, at the very least, expect public servants to behave and to comply with what ordinary workers face in this country.
“People will just switch off and get very angry about it and quite rightly so because they know, if it was them in the situation with their employer, they would be out on the ear.”
She said the current problems with the SNP are as bad as the Conservatives have faced over Partygate and crony contracts.
She added: “People feel so bitterly let down when they do that, when they see huge amounts of money like the Tories have spent on crony contracts… The problem the SNP has got now needs to be dealt with as quickly as possible. They’re not taking action to prove to the public they’re taking it seriously.
“They hold a huge amount of power about public services and people have to have confidence that they have the highest standards of politicians at the top.
“It’s not any less of a responsibility than any one of the Cabinet members in the Conservative Party.
“The Scottish people deserve the utmost from the SNP, especially when they have been high and mighty about what’s happened in Westminster and use that politically to say, ‘This is why we don’t want to be part of the United Kingdom because they are all terrible’.
“Now they’ve got a problem and it’s not acceptable to just try to long-grass it and say, ‘Nothing to see here’.
“They’re actually in government here and that is a huge risk if they can’t get their own house in order.”
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