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Letter: Andy’s good example
GRAHAM Charlesworth (YEP, February 3) misses the point about the backgrounds of Labour’s ‘working class heroes’. That someone has a privileged background does not make them automatically incapable of understanding or working to improve the lot of the disadvantaged and the squeezed middle, just as it is true in reverse that someone with less privileged upbringing is not incapable of appealing to the conservative right.
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For example, were that the case, Clement Attlee (privately educated) and Margaret Thatcher (daughter of a grocer) would have ‘had’ to represent the party other than which they represented while they led the country!
In any case, I would suggest that people like Andy Burnham, who went to a Roman Catholic High School in St Helens before going to Oxford, represent exactly what the Labour Party should stand for –- aspiration and success through hard work and making the best of the talents he had, regardless of the background he was born into.
Daniel Gaunt, Beeston
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Saturday 26 May 2012
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D Gaunt
Wednesday, February 8, 2012 at 05:08 PMAs the author of the letter, I should acknowledge my own typo in putting 'Oxford' rather than 'Oxbridge' - Burnham went to Cambridge, not Oxford.
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