When We Should Be United

With my emphasis added, Kevin Maguire writes:

Dennis Skinner has just sent an angry letter turning down a £7,000 pay rise.

The famous Labour Left-winger is livid that Parliament’s expenses watchdog spoke publicly about a proposed 10% rise to £74,000 just as workers battered by austerity gathered for the TUC in Liverpool this week.

“It was an intended insult to the Trade Union Conference and designed to get a reaction,” says Skinner, fuming.

“I told them under no circumstances do I want this pay increase until such time as they unfreeze the pay of working-class people and restore free collective bargaining.

And that,” he adds, “won’t be for a long while.”

The sentiments expressed in that letter are just one reason why the British public loves Dennis Skinner. He’s the real deal in an era damned by too many plastic politicians, a man with the kind of honesty and integrity that gives people hope, a man with much to boast about who has a pathological dislike of bragging.

“I don’t know of any other way,” he says sheepishly.

For some time I’ve been urging a reluctant Skinner, now 82, to write a book about his remarkable life. Well now he has.

His reminiscences are called Sailing Close To The Wind and we are serialising them in the Daily Mirror over the next few days before publication next week.

Talking to Skinner is a better education than a university politics degree and much more fun.

Shrewder and more intelligent than many a Prime Minister, had he been born into a middle-class family he might have become a professor or a top QC.

Or even an actor or a singer.

But he was born into poverty, the third of nine children whose dad was a Derbyshire miner blacklisted by pit owners after the 1926 General Strike. His mum cleaned and washed for wealthier families.

He passed his 11-plus at 10 then broke his mother’s heart by going down the pit at 16 instead of to university.

He’s hewn from “good working-class mining stock”, as he cheekily said in his Who’s Who entry, and voters adore him for never forgetting where he came from.

As a schoolboy he read the news as he delivered it on his paper round, then he worked as a pitman for 22 years before the National Union of Mineworkers persuaded him to stand for Parliament in 1970 to defeat a TV Labour luvvie being lined up for the safe seat of Bolsover.

He has always followed his dad’s advice to treat Parliament as a workplace and he’s never supped so much as half a shandy at Westminster’s subsidised watering holes.

“You can be a working-class socialist MP in Britain,” Skinner tells me. “It’s not difficult to come in early in the morning.

"I have never, ever thought about going into the bars. I don’t feel deprived that I go into the Strangers’ cafeteria instead of the bar or dining room.

“But I have never asked anybody to follow me, ever. I’ve never stuck myself on a pedestal, saying, ‘What are you going to do?’ Never.

“I have never felt deprived of anything and I don’t suffer as much stress as I did in the pit.”

The book is likely to be a huge success with its tales of industrial and political clashes, run-ins with Margaret Thatcher and snubs to the Royals.

But when I met the Beast of Bolsover (a nickname conferred by a Labour MP) in the House of Commons this week, he had Scottish nationalism on his mind.

“I can’t understand some of the trade unionists falling for flag-waving in Scotland,” he says. “It’s meaningless. We’re citizens of the world.”

Years ago he voted against devolution, predicting it would encourage Scottish Nationalism.

“I didn’t think I would be long enough in Parliament to see this but it’s happening, sadly,” he tells me.

As in so many other areas, his views are shaped by past experience.

“I can’t remember anybody in the Scottish NUM saying to me they had a different agenda,” he says.

“The problems in Scotland were the same as the problems in Derbyshire, Durham, Yorkshire, South Wales and Kent. Nationalists divide working people when we should be united.”

Skinner remains a strong union man in an era when too many Labour MPs distance themselves from organised labour. Few have been on more picket lines or demonstrations.

He’s also a brilliant orator who knows how to rouse a crowd – he was mobbed like a rock star at this year’s Durham Miners’ Gala.

He advised Ed Miliband on how to improve his public speaking, as he did Tony Blair. So how does he think this Labour leader is doing?

“Sadly, people judge him on Prime ­Minister’s Questions which is not the only measurement that should be made,” he says guardedly.

Then he adds: “He spoke with me at Doncaster in his constituency. It was a working-class audience of 300 people – men, women and kids.

"Some of them were miners at Hatfield Colliery and it’s a pity that wasn’t televised because people would have seen a different Ed Miliband.”

Sadly, his loyalty to the leader was not reciprocated when Miliband’s office twisted arms to get Skinner voted off Labour’s ruling National Executive Committee.

But asked what Miliband should do to win over the sceptics, he answers simply: “He needs to get out and about more.”

Skinner gives a boost to Labour every time he tears into the Tory posh boys in the House of Commons.

“Too many of them look like a pit manager or a mill owner in the old days,” he says.

“It all comes down to class. Workers have seen the value of their earnings fall for five years because the Conservatives inflict pain on the people they feel should be paying for austerity while the executives at the top are back partying.”

David Cameron has been frightened of Skinner since a public backlash forced him to apologise for calling the Labour veteran a dinosaur.

“Every time Cameron stands up he looks increasingly like the man from TV that he once was,” he says with real scorn.

“He lives on carefully prepared soundbites and he’s lacking in substance, wafting in the wind. I doubt he’s got a principled bone in his body.

"One day he’s more right-wing than Nigel Farage then the next day, when he cuddles up to Clegg, he’s Mr Cellophane... you can see right through him.” (Mr Cellophane is a character from Chicago – musicals are one of Skinner’s passions outside politics.)

He is scathing about Ukip’s Farage, even though they both want a Europe referendum.

“I voted against every European Treaty,” he says. “Unlike Nigel Farage, who gets £200,000 in pay and expenses, I have never been on the gravy train. I find it very odd he and his mates take this money and there is no evidence they do anything useful in Brussels and Strasbourg.

“I’ve never waved a Union Jack in my life. My opposition has nothing to do with nationalism.

"The European Union is like admitting that being a member of the British Parliament isn’t sufficient.

"But there should be a referendum and we should be saying to the electorate, ‘You are competent and capable of coming to a decision.’ ”

Still full of surprises, Skinner reveals he refused a plea by Labour PM Jim Callaghan to double up as a Labour MP and MEP.

And he has a fatherly pride in three grown-up children with his late wife and his partner Lois, an American socialist.

Alongside appeals for help from working people, his postbag also brings letters from vicars and comfortable Middle England.

People respect that at 82 he still speaks his mind and believes every word.

“I try not to be a hypocrite,” he tells me, then swiftly adds, “But I know nobody’s perfect... including me.”