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Angela Rayner, who had her first baby at 16, has launched a furious attack on Boris Johnson for his past comments criticising single mothers.
The senior Labour figure said his words were “disgusting”, reminded her of school bullies and were part of the Tories’ historic stigmatisation of the working class.
Johnson wrote in an article in the Spectator magazine before he was a politician in 1995 that single mothers were raising a generation of “ill-raised, ignorant, aggressive and illegitimate children”. He has claimed repeatedly the lines in that piece have been taken out of context.
Rayner, the shadow education secretary, said: “I think it’s absolutely disgusting. I remember people like that making those comments about me.
“I might be the shadow education secretary, but inside I’m that 16-year-old that didn’t think I was worth anything. And people like him make women who are already vulnerable feel that they’re the problem. They’re not the problem.”
Rayner, 39, who was a care worker and union representative, said Johnson’s attitude felt like the kind of bullying she experienced in the playground.
She said: “It’s the same. People in positions of power who think they’re a cut above the other people. I didn’t want to feel ashamed. I wanted to be the best mum I could be. I just wanted the means to be able to help myself.
“And, luckily for me, I had a Sure Start centre and I had adult education I could go back into. I had a council house waiting for me. All of those things have been dismantled now.”
Historic attitudes to single mothers shown by the Conservative party have been recirculated during the general election campaign and Rayner is not the only Labour politician to speak out.
Sarah Jones, the candidate for Croydon Central, had her first child at university when she was 19 in 1992. She said that watching the then Tory secretary of state for social security, Peter Lilley, address a party conference that year, where he claimed women were getting pregnant to jump the housing queue and “were benefit offenders”, was the reason she joined Labour.
Rayner, who is defending her seat in Ashton-under-Lyne, said she remembers the same message from the party as a young woman. She said: “I didn’t deserve to be stigmatised and I remember Tory ministers at the time saying people like me were getting pregnant to get council houses.
“That whole stigmatisation of working-class people is despicable. And it’s disgusting to make people feel that somehow they’re not worth it.”
Johnson was asked on Thursday in an interview on ITV’s This Morning if he understood his past comments were hurtful. He said: “Of course, of course,” adding: “But I don’t think this is the time to talk about articles that were written a very long time ago.”
He said the party was investing in childcare for mothers and Sure Start services.
Education reform has been a central plank of Labour’s manifesto for the general election, with pledges to create a National Education Service, to reopen Sure Start centres that have shut over the past decade, to cap class sizes at 30, and to provide free university tuition and access to adult education.
Rayner has also turned her sights on school uniforms, pledging to cap their overall price and bring back grants for families and carers to go towards their cost. She said she spent £450 on her own son’s uniform for classroom and PE lessons last September and many families cannot afford such huge costs.
Not having the right uniform affects children “massively”, she said during her visit to a school in the Tory marginal Walsall North, and sometimes leads to children not wanting to attend school.
Reflecting on her own childhood growing up in Stockport, she said: “It leads to bullying. It leads to feeling like you’re not as good as the next person. Children especially at secondary school know that their parents are in poverty.
“I remember I had to have steel toecaps because my nana said, ‘They’ll last’, and I remember being bullied because my shoes weren’t like anyone else’s. Everyone had Kickers.”
She said she was given her brother’s shirts, which were grey, not white, rarely had a coat and did her own hair from an extremely young age. “Every one called me scruffy, a scratter, that’s what they used to call me. I was known as that. Scratter was the nickname. [I had that] stigma of being the poor kid.”
She said plain jumpers and clothes in plain colours that families can buy from a cheaper supplier rather than an exclusive school supplier were crucial, as well as trying to take the focus out of a strict uniform policy being a benchmark of a school’s success and image.
She said under academisation, schools had become increasingly marketised with uniform taking a central role. “Uniforms are important, I accept that, it could be a force for good … but it’s now used as a tool to segregate children in poverty, is totally unacceptable and action has to be taken,” she said.
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