Politics is not a sterile intellectual exercise where the best policy wins and people applaud the cerebral magnificence of the victor. It is a messy dirty business, where people’s lives are changed, hopefully for the better but far too often for the worse.
My parents divorced while I was a teenager and I spent time being brought up by a single parent. I got lucky. I was never cold, I never went hungry and I always had a roof over my head but I do remember making sure to keep 50p coins so that we had some for Mum’s electricity meter and I didn’t have a room of my own for a number of my teenage years. I slept in the living room under the stairs. As I say, I got lucky, I ended up with four parents and was the first person in my family to go to University.
People who lived near me and who I grew up and went to school with were not so lucky. I saw people who had their potential wasted because they got to school hungry, or with a cough caused by damp in their home or who moved from school to school as their parents moved from house to house. As a councillor in central Liverpool I saw the reality that hits people who cannot get a decent home, the damage to their families and the narrowing of their life choices.
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