Hello and welcome to The Rundown, a podcast from Politics Home.

I'm your host, Alan Tolhurst.

We need to discuss the role class plays in our politics, and the reasons why there are so few

working class people who ever make it to Parliament.

It's Justine Greening, a former Conservative Cabinet Minister, as well as Nick Fletcher,

current Tory MP for Don Valley, and Albert Ward, a PhD candidate in politics at the University

of Oxford, and an expert on class in Parliament. So I'll start with you, Nick, you joined Parliament

in 2019. What's been your take, I suppose, since you've joined Parliament on kind of the class ceiling

in politics, as you've seen it.

Yeah, I mean, when you come down here, it's a different world completely.

You meet to so many different people and doing jobs that lots of us in maybe in the north have never even heard of.

I mean, think tanks and special advisors.

It's not really a topic of discussion in contracting, really, which is what I did prior to this.

So, yeah, there's definitely, there's definitely barriers there.

Yeah. But, I mean, my job as a member of Parliament who lives in the constituent, has always lived in, in Doncaster, is to break down those barriers.

And I spend a lot of my time going into schools

and talking to children and young people about entering politics and I think when they

see somebody like me was a local lad, went to the local comprehensive, finished school at

I was actually 15 when I finished school, I did an apprenticeship and I think when they can see someone like myself come down here

and end up being a member of Parliament, I think it shows that it can be done.

And I think it's our job, all members of Parliament,

to encourage as many people as possible to come into the world of politics.

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