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SOPHY RIDGE: On the day that the Sunday Times Rich List is published, Labour has claimed that a deliberately rigged system is holding back communities outside London so I went to Doncaster to speak to a man who is very angry about it, the Shadow Cabinet Minister, Jon Trickett.

JON TRICKETT: I think the whole national conversation which goes on in the media is based on the London bubble and it doesn’t really reflect life outside of London and there’s a big problem there because if people are feeling unhappy or discontented, that their voice isn’t heard and they have no choice of what happens to them, then people become disgruntled, unhappy, uneasy and that is my feeling about the state of England today. Many communities feel dissatisfied with what’s happened to them and have lost control of what their lives are about. Now this is having a political impact and I’m quite sure that it’s good that you’ve come out of London and if more journalists did so that would be a great thing for all of us.

I represent 23 villages which were all from mining communities, we know that the mines died a long time ago and there is some degree of nostalgia but this is more about loss of purpose. When the mines were there people knew who they were, they were proud, they were creating the wealth of the country, there was a sense of purpose and direction which has gone and hasn’t been replaced and obviously there are problems with lack of prosperity, we need more regeneration but it’s more just a sense that England, our part of England, has lost its way and I wherever I go feel that so there is too much attention on the big cities, London and the other big cities. The market towns, the county districts, the rural areas, the villages that I represent, they all it seems to me feel as if something’s going wrong in England and we have to put it right by giving people voice and choice over their lives in the future and that’s why Labour is for more devolution by the way.

SR: Are you saying that some people are deliberately trying to keep others in poverty?

JON TRICKETT: I wouldn’t say poverty but I would say in middle England and in north-eastern England it does feel as though that’s happening. Let me just say that the figures are out in the Rich List, the thousand richest people in our country, well look, here’s the situation: the rest of us are all on austerity but the richest thousand people have increased their wealth since the crash by £400 billion, that’s the increase in wealth. The total wealth is £650 billion, now the rest of us are all struggling.

The truth is that most people, their incomes have gone down, I think the figures are out from the TUC, roughly it’s about £1400 a year on average less than we were earning back in 2008. Now where has this wealth come from for the richest thousand? It’s come from the cuts in the services and the loss of income from most of the people in Britain and it can’t be right that a system is being run for just a couple of thousand people. Now there was an argument that whilst these thousand people get rich that their money then spills down to everybody else, that isn’t happening, it simply isn’t happening.

I am not expressing any particular hostility to any person in Britain but look, if you work hard, if you play by the rules, you should be able to get on in life but it’s increasingly difficult for middle England and for the poorer people too. Now we’ve got to get a fairer system that doesn’t allow that to happen, so that some people benefit, a handful of people benefit at the expense of everybody else.

I think the system has been rigged by the Conservatives who are hand in glove, I think of the 20 richest people within the City 14 of them give money to the Conservative party.

SR: Rigging is a very loaded word, how is the system being rigged?

JON TRICKETT: I think the system is being rigged by increasingly attacking the way in which parliamentary democracy works. If you take for example Brexit, what the Conservatives are trying to do is repatriate powers from Brussels not to the people or into parliament but to the Executive and of course the government are particularly committed to a view of how Britain’s economy should work but it somehow suggests that a few rich people will make everybody else more affluent.

I think obviously as we said already, John McDonnell our Shadow Chancellor has said we’re going to change the way the economic system works so it works for everybody, we will be increasing taxes but only for a tiny group of people at the top and 95% of the population will see no increase in taxes. I think there is something else happening as well which we need to is beyond economics is to understand what middle Britain feels like, the small towns, the county towns, the market places, the rural areas, all those kind of places feel as though they’ve lost their sense of identity and therefore we want to distribute both power and the way politics works as well as to change the way that the economy works.

I think that we’ve spoken about many suggestions in relation to how we handle the economy, I’m interested in changing the way that politics works and I want to give more power to local people. I don’t want to see voluntary associations, campaign groups and charities being held back by the Lobbying Act, I want to see more power at the neighbourhood and even beyond the neighbourhood, with individuals over their lives.

I think we’ve talked about increasing public ownership in a range of areas. If you take water for example …

SR: But what about energy?

JON TRICKETT: On energy we’re looking carefully about how to handle the situation which we’re now in. As you know, we have said on the pricing of energy and so on, we’ve said for some time now that we think people have been ripped off. We are looking at a range of different options for the different sectors, it’s complicated because of the legal situation but we want to make sure that all the utilities work for people.

SR: Would doing this renationalisation programme outside of the EU make it easier?

JON TRICKETT: No, I think it makes it different. The EU specifically has a clause in there which says it will not take a view on the nature of ownership, whether it is publicly owned or not. I think the role of nationalisation by the way has a particularly feeling about it, top-down, centralised, bureaucratic – we are thinking about new ways of getting the public more engaged in those kind of services so we are looking at new forms of public ownership and I’m sure that that will be discussed in the coming year or two.

SR: Peers this week voted to try and stay in the single market, when that comes back to the House of Commons Labour is expected to abstain. Isn’t that a bit pathetic really to abstain when this is one of your big challenges, to have a say and to shape policy and you’re ducking the question?

JON TRICKETT: What I would say to you is I walk all over the country going campaigning and people are not demanding an answer to those kind of questions. What we want is to obtain a situation where we have the best possible arrangement in relation to Brexit. We are clear where we will be, we will have a customs union, if it’s left to us and we negotiate we expect to have a reasonable negotiating position which not what the Tories have because they have such hostility to the Commission that they find it difficult I think to negotiate and we will negotiate a hopefully tariff-free access into the single market, we will have a customs union but here’s the difference, we want to intervene in the economy, we want to have a new industrial strategy to rebuild the local and regional economies of our country and we will negotiate those arrangements as part of any new arrangement that comes into being following Brexit.

SR: If there was a referendum now would you vote to remain or leave?

JON TRICKETT: There isn’t a referendum now to answer that kind of question. Neither are we in government nor are we in a situation where there hasn’t been a referendum. There has been a referendum, there was a clear result, I’m giving you a clear answer, a very straight answer but I’m not going to get into a completely hypothetical situation. I don’t believe that there will be a second referendum, I don't think there ought to be a second referendum at the present time, I can’t see any reason why there ought to be one, the point is to get on and time’s running out. The Tories are in an awful mess … I’m giving you an answer, we’re not going to have a second referendum so that’s the situation that we’re in. Now I voted to remain, that was my position, I had reservations about certain aspects of the European Union and that is why Labour argued to reform and that would have been the best position to be in but that did not happen.

SR: Do you think that Jeremy Corbyn shares some of your scepticism?

JON TRICKETT: No, I haven’t said I’m sceptical, I said we were in favour of a reform and that was Jeremy’s position, there is no difference between the two of us. I wouldn’t describe myself as either sceptical or a true believer either, I’m a realistic politician trying to do the best for the community that I represent which has been left devastated by the pit closures and the failure of the government to do anything about it. Now in a post-Brexit situation, what is absolutely essential is that we have the powers of a government that is radical enough and bold enough to begin to do much more economic activism and industrial engagement to rebuild the economy of our country as a whole and to give power back to local people.

SR: Few would disagree that wealth and opportunity should be spread to different parts of the UK but diagnosing the problem is one thing, finding a solution is much harder. Jon Trickett there.