I will never forget this line from the speech given by Jesse Jackson to the Democratic Convention of 1988, "They catch the early bus. They work every day. They raise other people's children. They work every day. They clean the streets. They work every day. They change the beds you slept in in these hotels last night and can't get a union contract. They work every day."
I was 18 when I left school. It was 1989, the height of what was supposedly the Thatcher boom years but like many of the Conservative boom years (which are few and far between). Just like the Bush / Blair boom built on the back of the banking industry, the 1980's benefited those who already had money. If you had nothing or little you were left behind.
There were few jobs available for a 18 year old with average A'Level results in a poor area of London. Shop work, moving boxes and cleaning crap 12 hours a day in a grocery store. With no minimum wage the pay was £1 per hour.
I decided to go to College to escape the jobs market. Even though my (now) University was on the other side of London, over 1.5 hours away by public transport my Council would not give me an away grant to cover the costs of staying there. So I started to work as a cleaner with my mum to help cover some bills.
My mum was a cleaner for as many years. I really do not know how she did it. She is retired now and for as long as I remember she was a cleaner. Now having grown up, I found out that before my mother divorced (when I was a very young boy) she had been a nurse.
My experience of it was horrible. Although it did help me understand why Conservatism well sold to those on low incomes sounds attractive.
I did cleaning for a helmet manufacturing company that operated locally. My mum helped me get the job. There were tables after tables of generally women workers who were in the main second incomers, their husbands had a good job, to them this was supplement money, needed because even then London was a ridiculously expensive place to live in. They were paid for the job little more than I was. Their job was to attach one bit to the skeleton of a helmet and pass it on to the next worker to do the next. To make it perfect for "military use" they had to snip a bit of plastic here and there.
I will never forget the way that they looked down on me for doing that job. Having just cleaned around them, they would then just throw the bits of snipped off plastic on the floor so I would have to clean around them again.
The 1980's encouraged people who had a little bit more money than someone else to look down on those with less. A comedy character created by Harry Enfield symbolised the prevailing culture. Just as it took ages for Republicans to realise they were being mocked by Colbert, the new breed of Thatcherite working class Conservatives considered "Loadsamoney" to be a hero.
That culture has continued for the last 30 years, I have mine, you have less so you are worth less. It is what underpins modern day Conservative thought.
If you are poor, you need to be punished because you obviously you have no work ethic.
That view of I am better than you allowed the right to undermine unions. Those working freelance in trades such as plumbing, plastering or electricians certainly boomed by going freelance. They had "loadsamoney" and they were proud of it. You had nothing because you were nothing.
Then came Blair. Who took that option away from the working class. Blair agreed to a large influx of much cheaper Eastern European workers which crashed the market for those in the trades.
There were after all too many working people getting "loadsamoney".
It is the inevitable consequence of free trade areas such as the European Union. Wages get driven down and after the working classes were encouraged to become contractors and buy their homes they had to do nothing else but swallow the lower pay.
Still the 1990s and the early part of this Century helped to disguise this. Despite falling or static incomes, the working classes who bought their homes in the 1980s felt rich. The rising values of their homes disguised the fall in their income. Now they no longer even have that.
Every last opportunity for the working class to get "loadsamoney" has gone. We did it to ourselves. We thought Unions were an unnecessary expense. We thought we did not need them and that we could all go freelance for that little bit MOAR. The working class will never see a capital boom through property again - that they can get involved in.
It all happened because working class people were encouraged to forget a simple lesson. Never look down on someone unless it is to pick them up.
We can change it. We can again rejoin unions. We can again understand that as individuals working through unions we can gain strength. Together as a movement we can be better than the sum of our parts. As an individual on your own - there are literally billions more who are now in a position to do your job.
You are the solution.