Calling Jeremy Corbyn supporters indulgent, middle class and out-of-touch is an insult to working class people like me

I grew up in an ex-mining community in the Welsh valleys; many in my family were once miners. By the time I was born in 1993 the local economy had already been devastated by Thatcher. I was brought up by my single mother who struggled to make ends meet and took whatever work she could. My dad was abusive and usually unemployed so money never came from him. Instead, we relied on support from my grandmother, great-grandmother and the tight-knit community around us. Even with this support, my brother and I never had as much as the people around us, and it was hardly a well-off area.

I left primary school unable to spell or do basic arithmetic, and was immediately put in the bottom sets in my secondary school. Things turned around when I moved in with my grandparents. This new stability at home made all the difference and I was able to get the grades I needed to get into Edinburgh University. I was lucky: I received the maximum student funding, and secured a bursary on top of that.

I was always political. If you’re from the valleys it’s hard not to be. Like many around us my family were Labour supporters and my grandfather was chair of the local Labour Party. But I was never inspired by the mainstream parties. I could see that the Blair government was an improvement on the Tories before him but it wasn’t enough. The Tories devastated my community and my family, and after 13 years in government Labour failed to put it right. They made some improvements, of course, but they didn’t reverse the decline. And when the Tories came back into power in 2010 much of that good work was undone in a few short years.

My attitude to party politics changed with Jeremy Corbyn. For the first time in my life the ideas that I hold about society, about justice, about equality, were finally getting the attention they deserved. I don’t want business-as-usual more-of-the-same politics, I want to change society. I don’t want to live in a world where communities are thrown on the scrap-heap on the whims of ‘the market’. I want to fight for a world where people come before profit, and where the rights of working people to have a decent life come before the rights of billionaires to buy third and fourth yachts. That’s why I joined Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour.

And when I speak to people in Merthyr my thoughts are echoed right back at me. So many people have found hope where they thought there was none. My grandfather – the chair of his Labour Party before I was born – left the Labour Party under Blair and rejoined under Corbyn.

So I find it hard to reconcile the claims that Corbyn supporters are all middle class with my own experiences. Jeremy Corbyn’s ideas represent the best in the history of the Labour movement and working class politics. What exactly is middle class about demanding equality and challenging unaccountable elites?

I only joined the Labour Party in the last six months. This means that the decision of the National Executive Committee (NEC) yesterday will exclude me from voting in the upcoming leadership election; that is, unless I am willing to stump up £25 in the next few days on top of my membership fees. These are the same people who claim that Jeremy’s ideas are a middle class indulgence who are preventing people like me from voting in the leadership election. How can they justify this?

Corbyn’s opponents want to make this leadership election all about him. But it’s much bigger than one man – however decent and principled he is. This is about hope. Growing up in the valleys we were told to give up. I thought that my best chance for a positive future was to get out. But now, thanks to Jeremy Corbyn and the movement behind him, working class people have hope for a better world. After three decades of despair, we’re not going to give up on that lightly.