Shadow health secretary tells how childhood memories have inspired him to fight for more help for families of alcoholics
Anushka Asthana and Denis Campbell
Friday 30 December 2016 02.00 ESTLast modified on Wednesday 20 September 2017 14.13 EDT
Childhood memories of growing up with an alcoholic father have prompted the shadow health secretary to call for greater recognition of the damage done by excessive drinking.
Jonathan Ashworth said there was a need for urgent action because the cost of alcohol-related harm was not just the £3.5bn NHS price-tag, but up to £7bn in lost productivity for the British economy.
During an interview with the Guardian, the Labour MP said he also wanted there to be much more focus on the needs of families affected by alcoholism, claiming the issue would be a priority for him and Labour in 2017.
Ashworth said he was surprised to find himself disclosing, for the first time to a national newspaper, the reason he felt so passionately about the issue.
“It’s quite personal for me, because my dad was an alcoholic,” he said, suddenly spilling out early memories of his father falling over drunkenly at the school gates and of returning home to a fridge stacked with cheap booze and no food.
Ashworth said he had never really considered his experience as something relevant in policy terms. “You didn’t think there was a problem, you just thought ‘that is the life I’ve got’,” he said.
Then he came across the work being carried out by his Labour colleague, Liam Byrne, whose childhood was affected in a similar way.
The MP’s all-party parliamentary group dedicated to the children of alcoholics has revealed that local authorities across the country tend to have no specific strategies to help young people affected in this way.
The group, which is publishing research on the issue in the new year, said that millions of children were “suffering in silence”.
Inspired by Byrne’s work, Ashworth felt he wanted to make the issue a priority in 2017. “I wanted to do something on alcoholism so that if nothing else I’ll have done something on that,” he said, before adding: “I know it’s cliched.”
As well as backing Byrne’s ideas he wants to support a phoneline run by the National Association for Children of Alcoholics to help make it a nationwide service. He also wants more specialised training for professionals to support children and for councils to be properly funded to be able to reach out to families affected by alcoholism through schools, via community nurses and in Sure Start children’s centres.
Ashworth talked about his own experience as an only child in a working-class part of north Manchester after his mother, who worked as a barmaid, and his father, a croupier in a Salford casino, divorced.
He spoke vividly about the days that he stayed with his father – whom he said he loved dearly.
“I remember him falling over when he picked me up at the school gates and we’d get home and there would be nothing in the fridge other than bottles of wine – he drank cheap horrible bottles of white wine … and cans of lager and Stone’s bitter,” said Ashworth.
“When I got to 11 or 12 then I was effectively looking after him on the weekends because he was drunk all weekend,” he said, pausing before adding: “And eventually he died.”
Ashworth recalled trying to persuade his father not to move to Thailand one Christmas. The MP said he knew in his heart it would end badly, but his father replied: “No, I’m going,” and he went.
“I never saw him again,” said the MP.
About a year later he received a call telling him to travel to the small apartment where his father had been staying. When he got there he found his bed surrounded by empty whisky bottles. “He was in Thailand for that last year drinking a bottle of whisky a day … I had to clear it up. That was my life. He was 60.”
Ashworth said his father, also called Jon, had not been offered formal help, although he himself had tried to raise the issue of his drinking as an adult. He said his dad thought he was OK because he didn’t touch alcohol during his working hours. “But as a child I didn’t see him at work,” he said.
Ashworth, who was politically active for the Labour party from the age of 15, through college and on into a job advising Gordon Brown, said the experience with his dad left him feeling “not damaged but determined”.
The MP for LeicesterSouth – who was promoted to shadow health secretary by Jeremy Corbyn after his second victory in a leadership contest – now feels he has an opportunity to take action.
As well as the work he outlined with charities and councils, he believes that part of the solution must also be a cultural drive to have alcoholism taken more seriously. Ashworth recalled how “people used to think it was funny – a right laugh” that his dad was a drinker.
He remembered his father in goal in the work football team and people pointing off the pitch and shouting: “Oh Jon Ash is in goal – just throw a crate of Stella in that direction and he’ll go after that.”
“And I was like ‘oh yeah that’s funny’, but actually that was my dad and for my teenage years I was looking after him. It just became a norm. I had to grow up very fast.”
But he is not just concerned about alcohol. “Public health has been cut back by the Tories but they are storing up huge problems,” he said. “Obesity is a huge problem that costs the NHS billions. The debate on obesity and diabetes hasn’t punched through.”
Ashworth said there were lessons to be learned from the bold action to ban smoking in public places, which had a massive impact. He called for much more direct action on poor diet.
“I think we have to be bold about what we say to the advertising industry – not just with kids programmes but families sitting down watching The X Factor. Think of the hundreds of thousands of calories being advertised this winter in the run-up to Christmas,” said Ashworth, arguing that fast food and supermarkets selling “tasty treats” were all over family viewing times.
“The government watered this down. There were going to be stricter restrictions on the industry, [David] Cameron was going to go for it and the story is that Theresa May got her red pen out and cut it out. I think we have got to be bold.”