Who represents the working class?

Joyce Sheppard was a member of Women Against Pit Closures during the 1984-5 miners’ strike. Her husband was a striking miner. Here she explains why she has given up on the Labour party.

After many decades of supporting the Labour Party, my patience has finally run out. I can no longer advocate voting for a political party that has so obviously turned its back on the working class. The cynicism in their assumption that ordinary people will have no alternative but to vote for them is misguided. This is particularly relevant in Doncaster, where we have three Labour MPs, including the party leader.

I was born in 1949 into a Labour-supporting family, so much so that Labour Party branch meetings were held in my grandmother’s front room. Pride of place was a photograph, from the 1930s, of my grandmother and her friends standing together in the Labour Party Women’s section. Both my mother and grandmother were great storytellers and it was under their guidance that I learned the evils of the Tories and why a socialist alternative was essential.

My mother, who had served in the Royal Air Force during the Second World War, hated Winston Churchill with a vengeance, for it was he who had sent in the troops to attack striking Welsh miners in the 1930s. I heard horror stories of what it was like for the poor working class prior to the establishment of the National Health Service. Hence her admiration for Aneurin Bevan and his wife Jenny Lee, two radical socialists within the Labour Party, with Bevan being the ‘Father of the NHS’. It was during this radical Labour government’s time in office that I was born.

My faith in the Labour Party was developed from this background and remained largely intact throughout the many subsequent changes of government. The 1960s saw Harold Wilson become prime minister and his ‘White Heat of Technology’ speech along with the introduction of comprehensive education and the Open University gave increased opportunities for the working class. Previously such opportunities had been denied due to the flawed and elitist grammar school system.

In the early 1970s Ted Heath was defeated and a new Labour government elected under Harold Wilson. However, when Jim Callaghan took over the premiership from Wilson we were subjected to a prices and incomes policy, called the Social Contract. However, this was referred to by many as the ‘Social Con-Trick’ because in many cases wages were held down while prices were still allowed to rise. As a woman in the 1970s I viewed the Labour minister Barbara Castle as a role model. However, her white paper ‘In Place of Strife’ caused me to reassess my opinion of her. Traditional Labour voters, including myself, felt let down by these policies but still clung to the naive hope that traditional Labour values would return in the future.

With the election of Margaret Thatcher in 1979 the working class were subjected to an unprecedented onslaught from a right wing, determined, well-organised Tory government. The results of their policies were the destruction of many of the traditional working class industries and as a consequence many working class communities.

During the Thatcherite period many looked to the Labour Party for support from the onslaught by mounting an effective opposition to Thatcher. Instead we saw the Labour Party move to the ‘right’ removing any internal ‘left wing’ opposition, the priority having shifted from representing its core voters to merely being elected. This was never more evident than during the miners’ strike of 1984-1985 when Neil Kinnock, leader of the Labour Party, refused to support the miners. Being married to a striking miner and an active member of ‘Women Against Pit Closures’, this was the ultimate betrayal. However, political activism, once ignited, is difficult to extinguish and so after the miners’ strike ended I joined the local Labour Party and was elected onto the Town Council. It wasn’t too long before I became disillusioned with the local Labour Party as they ‘purged’ the party of anyone with socialist ideals.

In 1997 after eighteen years of Tory rule I, like many, was ‘battle weary’ and relieved that finally we had a Labour government. However, the rise of ‘New Labour’ under Tony Blair destroyed any misguided idea that I had that ‘things can only get better’. New Labour had been taken over by ambitious career politicians who never speak of the working class, but rather prefer to consider us all to be ‘middle class’.

We now have ‘Red Ed’, the People’s Champion against austerity… ‘whoops’, the man who will, if elected, continue the Tory policies on austerity and cuts to the welfare state. It seems that Ed Miliband cares only for the ‘squeezed middle’ whoever they may be.

This is the end of the road for me and my journey with the Labour Party. It is no longer the party that represents working class people, we deserve something better and I will put my energies into fighting for a new left alternative party.