A Bourgeois, Almost A Kulak

Some middle-aged men have ex-wives. I have the Labour Party.

As a young activist told me only today, "You seem to have a love-hate relationship with Laura Pidcock." But in fact, I neither love her (beyond the Saviour's universal injunctions on the matter), nor do I hate her.

I wish her well. I will vote for her next time if she is the Labour candidate, a question on which I am the least of her worries. But I am nobody's cheerleader. And I am sick to the back teeth of the way in which she is held up as working-class by people who assume that that is what everyone with a Northern accent must be.

She is at least a second generation university graduate, she was at least the second generation of her family to manage to make a living as a charity worker, and she was at least a second generation member of Northumberland County Council.

20 years ago, I arrived at university assuming that I was a bourgeois, almost a kulak. But that one lasted about an hour, and certainly not until the morning after my first night there, although it remained, and remains, how I was automatically treated at home. I refuse to let anyone trade on the same thing in the opposite direction.