Watch Question Time tonight. Angela Rayner is on it. She is amazing.
For one thing, she is a great friend of the Durham Teaching Assistants in their struggle against a disgraceful excuse for a Labour council. I happen to know that the TAs are in the audience in Hartlepool tonight.
Angela is an astonishing figure.
The daughter of an illiterate single mother, she left school 20 years ago with nothing but the pregnancy that she was showing when she collected such GCSE results as she had.
But she has come up through the trade union movement, and look at her now.
Yet she still seeks to restore the Educational Maintenance Allowance, and maintenance grants for undergraduates from poorer and middle-income backgrounds.
A lot of University of Life people cannot see the point of advanced academic education; some of us who had it have been known to have our doubts from time to time, especially as middle age has crept up on us.
But Angela is entirely on side.
Now she needs to concentrate on establishing the principle that whatever privileges were enjoyed by students in Further and Higher Education ought also to be enjoyed by their peers who were apprentices or trainees, and vice versa.
With publicly owned enterprises, national and municipal, setting the vocational training standards for the private sector to match.
The next Deputy Leader and not a moment too soon. But I still wish you were in the Shadow Cabinet.
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