This is not England

My family is as English as they come. My family name of Kelsey is derived from two villages in Lincolnshire North Kelsey and South Kelsey. They have been there for  a long time. A Kelsey is noted as a member of the Rump Parliament of the 1600’s, his profession a button maker. My mother’s maiden name is Cornwell and has an equally long history, deriving from a hamlet it Oxfordshire. For generations both sides of the family worked as farmhands. I am as English as they come.

In the 1930’s my maternal Grandfather Charlie Cornwell and his sons took part in the Battle of Cable Street. The East End rose up against Mosley’s Fascist Blackshirts attempt to march on the Jewish Communities of the East End. 10, 000 police had been drafted in to make a path for the fascist march but they were defeated and the march was abandoned.

In the Second World War Charlie and his eldest son went to war to defeat the Nazi’s. Fred had been destined to become a church man. Instead he had celebrated his twentieth birthday fighting in the rearguard action that had allowed the British Expeditionary Force to escape Dunkirk. Fred was killed during the final assault on Tripoli. Every day of my childhood, whenever I was at my nan’s, a conversation would start ‘poor Fred’

Back home in London the family were forced to leave Hackney for the wilds of Essex due to the Blitz. They had little choice as there was no gas, no water, no electricity and no windows due to bomb damage. The street was so badly hit that it was pulled down and never rebuilt. Family legend has it my grandmother was deeply ashamed for years, believing that in leaving London for safety she had given in. 

My mothers last recollection of wartime London is as a ten year old on a dark November morning walking back from the public bomb shelter in Victoria park with her dad. She heard the sound of a low flying plane and looked up to see a Heinkel bomber passing overhead with its bomb bay doors open.

My father’s family came from Durham where they had worked as miners for generations. My paternal Grandfather saw the war coming and moved his family to Essex where he and his sons swapped the mines for working in the factories in the war building arms and ammunition.

All this is one generation ago to me. It can all come back.

So I was born in Essex to a working class family. My father worked as a building site labourer for most of his life and he was worked so hard and was paid so badly it took a terrible strain on his health and he died of a heart attack when he was 52.

My mother was a charlady. I grew up knowing exactly what poor white working class lives are like.

But I got lucky. The local school was decent enough. I got to Art School and had a grant to pay the way or I would not have gone. I got a degree and then after a few years working in industry I set up a design company with some friends. For thirty years I have traveled the world working with people from five of the seven continents and have employed people from all sorts of backgrounds.

I learnt that no matter what colour or creed you are, the world over ordinary working folk are the same. They work hard, love their family’s and try to make the lives of the next generation better than their own.

I know what it is like to be poor, I know what it is like to be working class and exploited. I also know that  the problems we have experienced in the UK have got nothing to do with immigration and everything to do with decades of ideological manipulation designed to keep us at one another throats.

Immigrants did not introduce austerity. Immigrants did not slash the funding of the NHS. Immigrants did not slash benefits for those put out of work. Immigrants did not cut taxes for the rich or increase the tax burden on the poor. Immigrants did not introduce zero hours contracts and create a decade of zero wage growth while allowing asset inflation for the wealthy. Immigrants didn’t spend tax payer money rescuing criminal banks and allowing them to shore up practices that have avoided any serious reform.

The past ten years has created a disaster,  a disaster with a truly ugly ideological core.

Ideologies exist for a reason. Ideologies create and maintain an inequality that rewards a handful of people at the expense of the rest of us. These ideologies have stolen the future for millions and it is time we all took a long hard look at what needs to be done to right this monstrous wrong.

Until we do, this is not England.