Anneliese Midgley’s upbringing on the streets of Cantril Farm made her who she is. Now, as the Member of Parliament for the area, she wants others to be able to succeed like she has.
Anneliese Midgley, MP for Knowsley, in front of the flat block in Stockbridge Village where her nan used to live
“Times were really tough, but we had a big sense of community.”
Anneliese Midgley, the Member of Parliament for Knowsley, is looking towards the small terraced house that she grew up in. The house is one of many crammed into a housing estate in Danette Hey, in the area now known as Stockbridge Village in Knowsley.
Up until 1983, the area was known as Cantril Farm. It was a council estate built in the mid-60s in order to rehouse around 15,000 people from the slum clearances of parts of Liverpool, pushing people into new residential areas beyond the city borders.
For a young Anneliese, Cantril Farm was a place where people didn’t have much, but they had each other.
“Our communities had been uprooted, my family were moved from Liverpool and Everton to here,” she explains while walking around the streets where she used to live. “Things were tough but everyone was in the same boat, we didn’t have much other than each other.
“There weren’t really any shops or anything, so there used to be vans that came to sell stuff to the estate. There was a meat van, a fish van, a van selling old cloths. The candy floss van was very popular.”
Just a two-minute walk from the house where she lived with her mum and dad is a towering flat block where Anneliese’s grandmother lived. She fondly recalls spending lots of time here with wider family.
“At the time I thought it was a huge flat and really well constructed,” she says gesturing at the now dilapidated building. “Obviously it needs a lot of love now.”
Her parents struggled when she was young, but a crucial factor in the family being able to progress was her father’s job at the nearby Ford factory. “My dad having that good, unionised job was what changed things for us,” she recalls. “It gave us security and a solid foundation and meant we could eventually save to buy out own house.”
Her dad died three years ago, but her mother is still alive and it is her career that would go on to inspire a young Anneliese. “Mum worked a number of different jobs, but when she was in her 40s she went back to study to be a social worker,” she explains.
“She gave me the belief that you can do anything at any time in your life and there are no boundaries. I found it really inspiring that she did that. She is very proud that I am the MP now, she’s over the moon.”
So what is it like for a girl from Canny Farm to now be the MP for this area following her election win just over a year ago?
Anneliese Midgley in front of her former family home in Stockbridge Village
“It’s really nice when I go door knocking around here because sometimes parents pull me inside and say to their kids ‘she grew up here and now she’s the MP,” she says with a smile. “I want the kids here, the little girls especially, to have that belief in themselves that they can do and be anything they want.
“Hopefully I am able to tell them that there isn’t anything they can’t do, because people like me weren’t supposed to be in positions like this – but here I am.”
It is undoubtedly these streets that made the current MP for Knowsley political. She recalls her dad being on strike, damning talk of Thatcher around the dinner table and the feeling of a community helping each other in difficult times.
“These streets were just political,” she adds. “We didn’t have much but we pulled together.”
When it comes to broadening her horizons, however, there is a moment she can pinpoint, when her family visited the newly opened Tate Liverpool art gallery in the city centre.
“I was about 12 and the Tate had just opened and was free. We went to an exhibition about European art between the two world wars and it fully blew my mind,” she recounts.
“After that I just immersed myself in 20th Century art movements like Bauhaus and Surrealism. I started spending all my pocket money on books about it and when I was 17 I ran away to Paris because I wanted to be Andre Breton or Tristan Tzara. This stuff was all very political and had a big impact on me.”
Listen to the Northern Agenda podcast
After returning from Paris, Anneliese began exploring one of her other great loves – music. She and friend Daniel Hunt of Liverpool band Lady Tron launched the now iconic Liverpool club night Liquidation – which saw young Scousers come out in their hoards every week to venues Kirklands and later Le Bateau to dance the night away to the indie sounds that will forever be associated with the 1990s.
“Oasis used to come to our club night,” adds the MP with a smile. Her association with the music scene of the 90s stepped up a level when Anneliese married Bob Stanley of Saint Etienne. The two are since divorced but remain good friends. Bob even allowed Anneliese to use the enduring “Only Love Can Break Your Heart” on her election video for last year’s Knowsley election campaign.
After these formative, creative experiences – Anneliese moved on to a career working for unions, a world in which she truly found her niche.
“I had become involved in trade unionism and then started working for the unions and that is where I truly found my home,” she explains. “I’m a very practical person and that whole thing of the industrial and political worlds merging was a world I felt very comfortable in.”
It is her work with the unions – eventually rising to senior positions in both UNITE and the TUC – that moulded the kind of politician she wants to be. “My politics is the politics of the shop floor, the school gate and the supermarket,” she says proudly, adding: “The unions are my second family – they brought me from my council estate to the parliamentary estate.”
It is therefore unsurprising that she counts amongst her proudest achievements the pivotal role she played in pushing forward Labour’s Employment Rights Bill during a previous role advising then leader of the opposition and now Prime Minister Keir Starmer. She says the fact she also worked for his predecessor in that role as a sign of her political pragmatism.
“I think people sometimes misunderstand me and my politics,” she says. “They say oh you worked for Jeremy Corbyn and Ken Livingstone so you must be on the left, but I am about people, the people of Knowsley are why I am in this game and I never would have gone for any other seat than this one. Being a backbencher and representing these people, my people, is all I want to do.
Anneliese Midgley with the Harold Wilson statue in Huyton Village
One of those constituents she has already supported is Chery Korbel, the mother of murdered nine-year-old Olivia Pratt-Korbel, in her pursuit of a new law to force cowardly offenders – like Thomas Cashman – to face the families of those they have wronged in court.
“I want to get the voices of my constituents into the House of Commons and that’s why I read Cheryl’s victim impact statement in the chamber. I think it is really important to humanise these things and make what we do in Parliament relevant to the people we represent.”
But there is no doubt that this has been a tough first year in power for Labour and its MPs. Keir Starmer’s government has been dogged by its controversial decisions to cut winter fuel payments to pensioners and benefits for disabled people.
On the former, the Knowsley MP reacted by launching a campaign to get hundreds of local people to sign up for pension credit payments that they were missing out on. On the latter – she admits things became very difficult.
“We looked at the figures (on benefit cuts) and we knew it was going to be devastating for a place like Knowsley,” she explains. “While I totally agree on the need for welfare reform but these were cuts disguised as reform.
“When we looked at how it would affect Knowsley, it was not something I could just sit back and be like ‘all right, ok.’ The backbenchers were talking about it every day for month, but I don’t think that was getting through, how serious this was.
“I don’t think they (the leadership) understood the strong feelings. We weren’t getting any movement so we had to take the extraordinary step of putting down a reasoned amendment.”
That reasoned amendment was signed by more than 120 Labour MPs and forced the Starmer administration into an enormous climbdown over its planned benefits bill.
Anneliese admits it was a bruising episode for a government still just a year into its term, but says the furore over benefits or winter fuel shouldn’t hide the good things that Labour have done in power.
“This government has already delivered so much,” she explains. “From expanding free school meals, to breakfast clubs, employment rights, renters rights and uplifting the minumum wage. I do think some of that has been drowned out.”
“But we do need to give people more hope,” she adds. “We need to do more to pull people out of poverty, as a Labour government we will rightly be judged on that.”