- 02/07/2025
John Prescott's son David gave a speech to mark a teaching room at Ruskin College being named after his late father.
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00:00Good afternoon, everyone. Thank you for being here today, especially to my father's former government colleagues and long-standing friends, Joan Hamill and Joe Irvin, and my father's close parliamentary friends and ministerial colleagues, Alan Meehl, who also went to Ruskin, and Dick Caborn.
00:20And to Ruskin College, which is not now part of the University of West London, for honouring John's memory by deciding to dedicate this room in his name.
00:32So thank you to Peter John, to the Vice Principal, Graham Atherton, and to Marion Fitzgibbon, and all the staff here as well.
00:41Ruskin continues to offer accessible adult learning for everyone, whatever your age or educational background.
00:50A noble endeavour my father was always very proud of, and from which he benefited immensely.
00:58It's a real honour, and if I'm honest, an emotional one, for me to stand here and reflect on what Ruskin College meant to my dad, John Leslie Prescott.
01:09We cruelly lost him to Alzheimer's last year, but even in the last stages of John's life, when names and memories were fading,
01:19this place, this place, Ruskin, remained vivid to him.
01:24And that tells you everything.
01:27Now bear with me, as this is only my second public speech.
01:31As Jeremy Corbyn's former speechwriter, I'm meant to draft them, not deliver them.
01:35My first speech was delivering the family eulogy in Holminster, after Gordon Brown and before Tony Blair.
01:44I was nervous, but I took solace in the fact that I probably wasn't the first Prescott to find himself between Brown and Blair.
01:52When I was drafting the speech, I went into the loft and I found some cards.
02:01They were notes for his speech, handwritten, that he delivered to become Labour's parliamentary candidate for East Hall.
02:07And I quoted from them in my eulogy.
02:09But I also found this.
02:13It's a file of all his old Ruskin essays.
02:18John called his two years here the joys of my life.
02:23That's because for him, Ruskin wasn't just a college.
02:27It was a second chance after the first door had been slammed shut in his face by the grammar school system.
02:32Because let's be honest, John Prescott was never supposed to end up at Oxford.
02:38He was the kind of lad the education system left behind.
02:43As he said, failing the 11 plus felt like an indictment of who I was, of where I came from.
02:49I wasn't one of those bright kids.
02:51And that was a weight I carried on my shoulders all my life.
02:56That system told him and others like him that education wasn't for them.
03:01That they weren't meant for books or ideas or debates.
03:06They were meant for toiling in factories or ships galleys.
03:11And so at 15, he left school with no oil levels.
03:14He went to sea as a steward.
03:16Worked long shifts, serving passengers in his crisp white jacket as a so-called Hollywood waiter on the Cunard liners.
03:24But he didn't give up on education.
03:27In fact, it was the opposite.
03:28He took that educational setback and turned it into the fuel that powered his life.
03:34My father said, I might not have passed the 11 plus, but that didn't mean I was finished.
03:42It just meant I had to find my own way.
03:46So at sea, he studied.
03:48John said, after work, I wasn't out drinking and chasing the girls like some of the others.
03:52I was in my bunk alone with my catering textbooks.
03:57But the real education came when he saw injustice.
04:00Real, everyday, working class injustice.
04:03And refused to look away.
04:06On one voyage, the air conditioning in the quarters failed.
04:10The heat was unbearable.
04:12John recalled, I got a thermometer, took readings and went to see the captain.
04:16He accused me of fermenting mutiny.
04:18But the air conditioning got fixed.
04:22He started organising, meeting, challenging.
04:25And eventually those actions brought him into the NUS.
04:29That's the National Union of Seamen, not the National Union of Students, thankfully.
04:35But if you knew John, you knew he never did things by halves.
04:39He wanted to change the union itself.
04:41A union that was far too close to the ship owners.
04:44My father wanted to get rid of the deadwood, to make it truly represent working people.
04:50As he put it, I fancied I could do a much better, fairer job than the people currently running the union.
04:55But I kept getting suspended for union activity.
04:59It was the union, ironically, that first told him about Ruskin College.
05:05He recalled, they wanted me out of their hair.
05:08One man told me about a union scholarship I could apply for.
05:11Two years away studying.
05:12Great, they thought.
05:14We'll get him out of the way.
05:16To apply, he had to write a 2,000 word essay.
05:19The Future of the Unions.
05:21He drafted it whilst at sea, staying up most nights until 3am.
05:25Then he showed it to a professor at the seafarers college.
05:28His reply?
05:30From what I can read of it, you haven't got a chance in hell.
05:34John was furious.
05:35But that was Dad.
05:37He didn't sulk.
05:38He just rewrote it.
05:40He went to a Workers' Educational Association course to get a feel for what lectures and studying were really like.
05:47He worked that essay over it months with help from neighbours like Mrs. Robinson.
05:51Not that Mrs. Robinson.
05:53Who neatly typed it up.
05:55He submitted it.
05:57And to his surprise, he was accepted and awarded a union scholarship.
06:01But as with much of his life, his path to Ruskin wasn't plain sailing.
06:08As a union conference, he took the microphone and tore into the leadership.
06:12He criticised the General Secretary, Bill Hogarth, for failing to stand up to the ship owners.
06:17When Hogarth came off the platform and who heard who this bloody man was, he made sure the scholarship was pulled.
06:25So he had a place at Ruskin, no money, and a young family to support.
06:31He turned to the Conservative-run Cheshire County Council.
06:36They rejected his grant application, too, because he'd written that he'd wanted to go to college to become a union official.
06:42His old schoolteacher, Les George, told him, John, try again, but say you want to be a schoolteacher.
06:52This time he got the funding.
06:54But by then, Ruskin had filled the place.
06:57So John decided to go back to sea.
06:59He signed up for another voyage on the vessel, the Andes, and went down to Southampton.
07:04When he boarded, the senior catering officer said, come here, Prescott, you're not joining the ship, you're bloody trouble.
07:13So he never made the voyage.
07:16But days later, on the 11th of September, 1963, he received a telegram saying a place had opened up at Ruskin.
07:24If it had been out at sea, he would have missed it.
07:27My father then made his new voyage of discovery just in time.
07:30At the age of 25, married with a child, he became a student at Oxford.
07:36My mother knew what it meant to him and was happy to become the breadwinner and bring up my brother, Jonathan, alone 150 miles away in Chester.
07:44It was here at Ruskin.
07:47My father saw a new class divide.
07:50He said, we turned up in our best suits, me and the lads from the seafaring and mining unions,
07:55while the white collar union students turned up in revolutionary green and Che Guevara berets.
08:00Now, he'd never written a proper academic essay before.
08:06His first assignment was a doozy.
08:09Power corrupts, absolute power corrupts, absolutely.
08:13Discuss.
08:15John sat there, staring at a blank page.
08:18He said, I just thought, what the hell have I let myself in for?
08:22One bus driver, who seemed really confident, left the hall, packed his bags the same day and never returned.
08:32My dad was close to doing the same.
08:35Until he started talking to the other students down the corridor.
08:38My father said, we'd all been big fish in our little pools, but now we felt lost.
08:45It was reassuring to realise we were all in the same boat.
08:48But he completed the essay.
08:53And here it is.
08:59Included the remarks on the back, which I'll show you later.
09:03But still, he struggled, especially with writing.
09:08At the end of that first year, he walked out on a mock exam on statistics.
09:12Because he was studying politics and economics here.
09:15They handed me a slide rule.
09:16I didn't even know what it was.
09:17I left without writing a word.
09:19He returned to his room to find a note, scribbled on the back of a brown envelope, from his inspirational tutor, Raphael Samuel.
09:28John, why not take the paper away?
09:32Do it in your own time over the weekend.
09:34The main thing is the practice of writing.
09:37That note stayed with him all his life.
09:41Raphael Samuel was more than a tutor.
09:43He was the first person to really see what my dad could potentially achieve.
09:49Raphael said, his handwriting was hard to read, his grammar shaky, but he always had something urgent to say.
09:55He was also ready to take risks.
09:58He even slipped a poem into an economics essay once.
10:02But John being John, he couldn't stop getting into arguments.
10:06After a heated political discussion and a tutorial, a student called him a member of the Lumpen Proletariat.
10:14It took my father three months to realise that this was an insult.
10:19He'd later laugh about it, but it stung.
10:24Because for all his fire and fight, he still feared he didn't belong here.
10:28But those two years began to change him at Ruskin.
10:31Not by making him someone else, but by showing him he didn't need to be.
10:35As he wrote, I didn't want to feel inferior anymore when I came up against grammar or public school educated people.
10:44Of course, I soon realised they weren't actually cleverer than me.
10:48They just spoke better.
10:50He studied hard.
10:52He argued passionately.
10:53And slowly he found his way.
10:55Years later, he discovered his tutors wrote glowing reports about him.
11:00A hard-working student of sound intelligence.
11:04Earnest and committed.
11:06Pathologically sensitive to criticism.
11:09But potentially above average in perception.
11:14It was also Raphael who spotted a loophole that John could continue to be a trade union official at the National Union Seaman if he stayed in full-time education.
11:24So Raphael recommended John move to Hull to study economics at the university.
11:31In fact, he didn't even go through clearing.
11:33Raphael knew the politics around there.
11:35And Hull University was a very left-wing university, as was Ruskin.
11:41And the rest is history.
11:43Ruskin was the making of him.
11:44Helping a former ship steward embark on a journey from the docks to Downing Street.
11:49John later said,
11:50Ruskin helped me shake the bullets.
11:52I would fire my political career.
11:55And he never stopped firing them.
11:57Against inequality.
11:59Against injustice.
12:00Against those who said people like him weren't fit to govern.
12:04He became an MP.
12:05Cabinet Minister.
12:07Deputy Prime Minister.
12:08But he never forgot the two years he spent here.
12:11In 1996, John returned to Ruskin to speak in defence of comprehensive education.
12:17And why studying here was the making of him.
12:19He said in that speech,
12:20It is based not on theory, but on my practical experience.
12:25Warts and all.
12:25As an 11-plus failure.
12:27As a correspondence course freak with the Workers' Educational Association.
12:32And as a mature student here at Ruskin, the joy of my life.
12:37Sadly, Raphael died a year before seeing his former pupil become Deputy Prime Minister.
12:42But Raphael and Ruskin didn't just give my father an education.
12:47They gave him belief.
12:49They saw something in him that others, including sometimes himself, didn't.
12:55They saw potential.
12:58So today, 60 years after John Prescott left this college,
13:02I want to say, on behalf of myself and my family,
13:06Thank you, Ruskin.
13:08Thank you for opening that door on my father's mind.
13:12Thank you to the tutors who challenged him and lifted him.
13:17And thank you to the working class students who have continued to walk through these doors
13:21and make the place what it is.
13:23So it's fitting, as we dedicate this room to him,
13:28that I return his Ruskin essays to the place where he wrote them.
13:33Hopefully to inspire the next generation of students
13:36to shake their bullets against the social injustices we still face today.
13:41In the last page of his autobiography, John wrote,
13:45So many of the traditional industries have gone,
13:48with their factories, mines, docks and mills,
13:51and so have the huge unions that once produced all-powerful leaders.
13:56But it will be a loss when people like me totally disappear from the cabinet.
14:00Parliament should reflect society.
14:03There should always be a place for people with what I call basic common sense
14:07and courage.
14:09They can come from any walk of life and at any time in their life.
14:19Most of all, I can't see a place in the future for the awkward buggers.
14:23Where are they going to come from?
14:27I'll tell you, Dad.
14:29These awkward buggers will continue to come from Ruskin
14:32and they will shape their bullets here in the John Prescott room.
14:38I'll end this speech with the last paragraph my father wrote
14:42in that first Ruskin essay on whether power corrupts.
14:48I'd like to finish this essay with a quotation,
14:51as my essay has been devoted to one.
14:54The pursuit of knowledge is a moral obligation.
14:58The end of knowledge is power.
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