Jonathan Ashworth: ‘We are at risk of a lost generation’

Jonathan Ashworth has started carrying a card in his shirt pocket. It’s the licence his father was given when he got a job in the 1970s at the Playboy casino in Manchester. ‘It’s silly, really. But it’s just a reminder that my dad was able to start a job as a croupier from a very poor working-class background in Salford and that completely changed his life,’ the shadow work and pensions secretary says when we meet in his Commons office. It was at the casino that his father met Ashworth’s mother – a Playboy bunny girl working as a waitress. ‘Every week, the Playboy bunny girls had to queue up and had to be weighed by the head of the bunny girls. Isn’t that awful?’

Scales aside, Ashworth, 44, says his childhood taught him early on of the importance of employment. ‘The point is: they were working-class. I’m from a working-class background but these jobs meant they could do so much in life.